by Kristin Yarris, Associate Professor, Department of Global Studies

With the support of a Center for the Study of Women in Society faculty grant, I was able to make a productive research trip to Alaska in the summer of 2019 to work on my project, “Mid-Century American Psychiatry and State Formation: A Post-Colonial Analysis of Morningside Hospital and the Alaska Mental Health Act.” The project uses an historical case study of the Morningside Hospital, an inpatient psychiatric facility that operated in Portland, Oregon during the first half of the 20th century, to examine the connections between the development of American Psychiatry and of the U.S. nation-state. The connection to Alaska comes because, for decades while Alaska was a Territory with insufficient public mental health resources, people were sent to Morningside from Alaska to receive psychiatric intervention. Morningside itself was operated by a private, family-run company, using public, Department of the Interior federal resources. Using a post-colonial and feminist frame, my project examines the ways in which land, displacement, and the imaginary of Alaska as the first non-contiguous U.S. state intersect with the ways that American Psychiatry was establishing its professional authority in the 1950s. As Morningside comes under increasing public and political scrutiny, both due to accusations of fiscal mismanagement and of poor patient care, Congressional leaders from Oregon begin to push for an Alaska Mental Health Act (AMHA), which ultimately passes, granting vast swaths of Alaska territory to the soon-to-be 49th state for the purposes of financing mental health care services.  

During my summer research trip, I examined materials held in the University of Alaska archives at both Anchorage and Fairbanks campuses, exploring historical records related to debates over Morningside hospital and over the passage of the AMHA. Importantly, CSWS funding enabled me to support two undergraduates, Gabriella Farland and Rachel McGill, who traveled with me to Alaska and gained valuable first-hand research experience with archival documents and in-person interviews. Both Rachel and Gabby completed BA theses under my supervision related to the Morningside project for their degrees in International Studies and Global Health. There are few funding sources at UO that support undergraduate field research, and I am truly grateful to CSWS for recognizing the value of faculty-sponsored undergraduate research.  

One particularly fruitful aspect of this field research trip was the opportunity to conduct interviews with a number of key stakeholders in both Anchorage and Fairbanks, individuals connected to the development of the psychiatric profession and the mental health system in Alaska. A particularly productive interview in Anchorage with Dr. Mary Langdon, a Psychiatrist who has had a private practice in Anchorage for decades, led to some very interesting leads related to my research project. Mary Langdon is the daughter of Ray Langdon, MD—who was an attending psychiatrist at Morningside Hospital during the late 1950s. I had come across Ray Langdon’s name frequently in the archival materials about Morningside I’ve consulted in UO Libraries and Special Collections, and was enthusiastic about meeting his daughter. After his years of service at Morningside, Ray Langdon was recruited in 1959 to become the first Director of the Mental Health Authority of the new State of Alaska. Mary Langdon described growing up as a child on the grounds of Morningside before moving to Anchorage with her family after her father got this job.  

Mary Langdon gave me several stacks of her father’s papers, which I reviewed while I was in Anchorage, and have subsequently helped have archived at the University of Alaska-Anchorage library repository. The papers contain correspondence related to the 1950s congressional hearings that sought to oversee Morningside Hospital, including letters between Ray Langdon, his wife Thelma Langdon, and Portland-area Congresswoman Edith Green who was leading the charge to close Morningside. This aspect of the hospital’s history was new to me and leads me to ask new questions about the closure of Morningside and its implications for the development of a public mental health system in Alaska. I also learned from the papers Mary Langdon shared with me that, after moving to Alaska, Ray Langdon became a leading figure in the community mental health movement in the U.S.—setting up a community clinic in Anchorage where other progressive psychiatrists in the 1960s engaged with alternative modalities of care, such as art and drama therapies, and, later, methadone treatment for heroin users (Langdon’s clinic was among the first in the nation to practice this harm-reduction approach). 

One of our interviewees in Fairbanks runs a public health consulting firm and previously worked on a public website history project related to Morningside Hospital called the “Lost Alaskans” project. In collaboration with Native Alaskan communities, this project made available a vast repository of patient records from Morningside Hospital through a publicly funded website project that seeks to connect families to their ancestors’ stories. The opportunity to meet with all these stakeholders strengthened my research project, not just through the information they shared with me during our interviews, but also through the relationships that I established with them, which will be key as I continue to work on the book manuscript I am writing with my colleague Dr. Mary Wood (UO English) based on this research. 

In sum, the CSWS faculty research grant provided me with crucial funding for summer fieldwork, which helped me access primary source archival documents and conduct interviews with key informants. This fieldwork helped lay the groundwork for me to develop and submit two proposals for external funding in the fall of 2019.  I am greatly appreciative of the CSWS’s support of interdisciplinary, feminist research, and particularly the support of faculty-mentored undergraduate research.   

—Kristin Yarris is an associate professor of global studies and director of the Global Health Program.