“Not Just a Dumping Ground”: Disability, Psychiatry, and Children’s Rights in Georgia, 1964–77

In 1976 a three-judge court in Georgia ruled that the state’s large psychiatric hospital at Milledgeville should not be used as a ‘dumping ground’ for the state’s marginalized young people who had no real psychiatric diagnosis. This case, J.L. V Parham, revealed a long history of unconstitutional practices around the commitment and confinement of young people to Southern institutions, especially for those with intellectual disability. The decision in this case built on previous cases mandating minimum standards and the right to treatment in the least restrictive environment, but the rights of the child were complicated by state laws that prioritized the rights of parents.

This paper explores these court cases and other documents such as Annual Reports, Civil Rights compliance units, and State Efficiency Commissions, to analyze the ways that children have been treated in the state psychiatric institutions of Georgia, and to consider the significance of this history for current disparities in treatment and care.

Psychiatric hospitals in Georgia housed thousands of children who had been committed without due process and often as a result of other social factors such as racism, poverty, homelessness or parental neglect. Many had intellectual disabilities rather than mental illness but state expenditures on facilities for these children was so minimal they had nowhere else to go. The Civil Rights Act initially sought to address inequities in treatment based on race, but its implementation exposed the processes for admission and treatment of young people more broadly. Court cases in the 1970s revealed the long running social, cultural and political problems that led to the excessive confinement of children, which has had devastating consequences for the poor, people with intellectual disabilities, and for African Americans in the South.