Mary Ellen Mark, Ward 81

This photo from Mary Ellen Mark shows a women sitting in a chair holding her legs up against her chest. She is pressing her lips tightly together. The lip pressing combined her way of holding her legs suggests that she is tense and perhaps feeling a bit frightened or on edge. To her right there is a picture sitting on a desk. The picture shows two people, perhaps family members of hers or friends. At first glance the women in this picture appears a bit unusual looking just due to her way of sitting and her facial expressions. However, I think this picture, particularly to women in this picture, does a good job of conveying to a viewer how frightening it can be to enter a psych ward. There is a lot of stigma about mental hospitals and people with severe mental illness in general and I think pictures like this that show individual people in mental hospitals do a good job of showing viewers that people who enter mental hospitals are human (and may be scared and nervous about being there) and don’t deserve to be stigmatized by people thinking they are crazy.

Mark, Mary-Ellen. Ward 81, Oregon State Hospital , Salem, Oregon, 1976. Retrieved from: http://www.maryellenmark.com/books/titles/ward_81/300B-013-16A_ward81_520.html