On an early morning last July, I surveyed the green expanse of Milwaukee’s County Grounds in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin. Since the 1850s, this land has housed institutions to warehouse poor, disabled, and discarded members of society. My mother, Gail Harris, was one of them.
In fact, I was visiting my hometown to research a book I’m writing about her decades as a patient in the city’s public mental health system. Now known as County Grounds Park, the land is being maintained by a crew of volunteers who are determined to preserve its ecological diversity and history. One volunteer offered to take me on a private tour. He told me about a legal case that resulted in the demolition of North Division, the sprawling asylum that had stood for a century.
“Lessard?” I blurted out in response.
“You know your stuff,” he replied. But back then, I’d only heard the name Alberta Lessard. I knew practically nothing about her famous case, or her story. After the tour, I pored over the newspaper archives to learn everything I could about her.
In 1971, former West Allis school teacher Alberta Lessard, fearing someone was at her door, lowered herself out of the second-story window of her apartment building, landing safely on the ground below. Someone who saw her called the cops. Lessard insisted she hadn’t been trying to kill herself, but the cops didn’t believe her, and she was shipped off to North Division. Unbeknownst to her, a doctor was recommending to the judge that she be committed there for life.
Leah Harris
The author’s mother, Gail Harris, shortly before her death at age forty-six.
While forcibly drugged in the hospital, Lessard called Milwaukee Legal Services for help. Attorneys Bob Blondis and Tom Dixon took on her case, launching Lessard v. Schmidt, a class action lawsuit on behalf of all persons civilly committed in Wisconsin.
In October 1972, a federal court panel found Wisconsin’s civil commitment laws unconstitutional, as they failed to provide those alleged to be mentally ill with the proper procedural safeguards. The Lessard decision held that people facing civil commitment should have the same due process rights as those facing criminal incarceration. As a result, the state would have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they were an imminent danger to themselves or others. Lessard sparked a revolution in mental health law and policy, as other states followed Wisconsin’s lead and revised their mental health laws to reflect the federal court’s decision.
Despite the reforms bearing her name, Lessard got caught in Milwaukee’s revolving door of psychiatric incarceration, arrests, and homelessness. My mother, a generation younger but a contemporary of Lessard’s, shared nearly the same fate.
By the late 1970s, North Division was replaced by the County Mental Health Complex, which my mother called “County” for short. When First Lady Rosalynn Carter visited in 1980, it was considered a state-of-the-art facility. After Meg Kissinger’s 2013 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel series “Chronic Crisis” exposed County’s pattern of horrific, systemic human rights abuses, it took nearly ten years for Milwaukee’s Behavioral Health Division (BHD) to shut it down.
After my tour of the grounds, I drove around the parking lot of the Mental Health Complex. A large sign outside the entrance announced the facility’s permanent closure in September 2022. BHD’s redesign of its public mental health system appears complete.
I wanted to feel a sense of relief. County, such a source of pain and distress to my mother, to Lessard, and to scores of other people who’d been trapped there, would finally be demolished. In some ways, it is the end of an era; there are no plans for any new psychiatric facilities on this parcel of land in Wauwatosa.
A new mental health hospital, Granite Hills Hospital, located in Lessard’s former home of West Allis, will take in those who would have been sent to County. Run by the notorious for-profit chain Universal Health Services Inc., it’s part of a decades-long trend of privatization of state hospitals. As the ink dried on the UHS contract with the city in 2019, the company paid out $127 million to settle allegations of Medicare and Medicaid fraud, one of thirty such allegations they were facing at the time.
And a new Mental Health Emergency Center was opened in 53205, one of Milwaukee’s ten most socially vulnerable zip codes, to replace County’s Psychiatric Crisis Services. The shiny new building boasts a segregated entrance for involuntary patients brought in by law enforcement. This sends a chill down my spine, given how frequently encounters between cops and disabled people of color end in trauma and tragedy.
Lessard v. Schmidt sparked a revolution in mental health law and policy, as other states followed Wisconsin’s lead.
We want to think of mental health facilities as safe, compassionate places to get help in a crisis. Yes, there are caring workers doing their best to support patients under less than ideal circumstances. But unless you’ve been a patient in one of these places, it can be difficult to grasp just how carceral and punitive they often are.
Involuntary treatment is typically experienced as traumatic, especially when combined with invasive practices like seclusion, restraint, and forced medication. Involuntary hospitalization runs counter to effective therapeutic relationships with providers, and can cause people to refuse care in the future.
Paternalistic assumptions that disabled people lack the capacity to make their own treatment decisions—and therefore must be forced into care—have been disproven. Wisconsin leads the nation in involuntary commitment, although collaborative alternatives to force exist, such as supported decision-making and psychiatric advance directives. The United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities views involuntary treatment as a human rights violation.
While my mother and Lessard were both white, racial disparities in psychiatric care are glaring. Black and brown people are more likely than their white counterparts to face forced inpatient and outpatient commitments. They also are more likely to receive carceral and coercive interventions while under psychiatric care, and to be denied access to voluntary community support.
Compounding the crisis in Wisconsin and across the United States is an ongoing shortage of qualified mental health professionals. Granite Hills, open for less than a year, is already getting terrible reviews online—such as “Just don’t”—from workers who allege that it is understaffed and unsafe.
A growing chorus of voices, led by the disability justice and abolitionist movements, are calling for public health-based policy changes to break long-standing cycles of racial injustice, and to support human needs for community and care. Central to their demands is housing justice.
Leah Harris
Granite Hills Hospital in West Allis, Wisconsin, now takes the patients who would have been sent to the Milwaukee County Mental Health Complex, which closed in 2022.
“Housing First,” Milwaukee’s supportive housing policy, has reduced houselessness by 92 percent since its inception in 2015; there are hopes that this success can be replicated throughout Wisconsin. But for those who don’t qualify, “the affordable housing situation in Milwaukee is deplorable,” Robert Penner of the Milwaukee Autonomous Tenants Union tells The Progressive, noting that the eviction rate increased by 51 percent in the first ten days of December.
“It’s time to dispel the myth of affordable housing and move toward the complete decommodification of housing,” Penner adds. “No more landlords or parasite companies that profit off people’s miserable living situations.”
Giving people money with no strings attached in the form of guaranteed income is another proven way to address systemic poverty, and also happens to be an effective mental health intervention; Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson said last year that the city can’t afford it. Yet, there are millions available for traumatizing and ineffective carceral approaches.
Staring at the sign announcing County’s closure, I worry that my hometown’s behavioral health system redesign will simply repeat the errors of the past. Time will tell.
After winning her class action suit, Alberta Lessard continued to fight, making headlines more than 100 times. She was charged with trying to “steal” her own records after she was refused access. As a show of civil disobedience, she kicked in the glass door of the district attorney’s office on three separate occasions. She wrote letters to the editor and published op-eds. In 1978, she even ran for governor. She became an advocate and supporter of fellow patients, helping them to access the services and support they needed. Her life was not an easy one, but it was long and lived largely on her own terms. She died in 2015, at the age of 94.
In a 1984 Milwaukee Journal profile of Lessard, the reporter asked her if she thought she was abnormal. “I would consider maybe what I have done is abnormal in the sense that what I do, not too many other people do,” she replied. “But maybe what I do ought to be normal.”
Speaking to Lessard’s motives, the piece goes on to say:
“Indeed, almost all of her confrontations with authority have an underlying motive in her own mind—justice, her rights, fairness, freedom. And she said that many people had done a great deal throughout history to fight for everyone’s rights by doing things that were regarded as abnormal. ‘If it hadn’t been for some of them shouting, maybe no one would have freedom,’ she said. And if we do not shout our opposition to what is wrong, ‘maybe we’re every bit as much of a criminal.’ ”
Alberta Lessard’s prescient words echo through the decades, a potent reminder to keep lifting our voices to demand “abnormal,” out-of-the-box policy solutions that reach the tangled roots of our mental health crisis, that redefine what it means to care.
Correction: The Lessard v. Schmidt ruling did not lead directly to the demolition of North Division, but instigated a change in how involuntary admissions were handled.