OUR MENTAL STATE
© 2025 Terry Harmon
In the TV series Designing Women, character Julia Sugarbaker said it straight out: “This is the South. And we’re proud of our crazy people. We don’t hide them up in the attic. We bring ‘em down to the living room and show ‘em off. See, no one in the South ever asks if you have crazy people in your family, they just ask what side they’re on.”
There’s truth in that statement, and we all have those eccentric family members whose antics are recounted through the generations. One that immediately comes to my mind is a great-aunt who wore a fur coat and bedroom slippers to a summertime baby shower and packed a homemade snack of peanut butter and crackers in a rubber glove, tucked inside the coat pocket.
All humor aside, eccentricity and mental illness are quite different things. It’s sobering and even sad to realize that, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries – particularly here in the northwestern mountains of North Carolina – those suffering from mental illness had few resources and little help. Unfortunately, mentally ill individuals were all too often locked up in the local jail because there were no local mental health alternatives for them in the early history of our county. They were held there until transportation could be arranged to asylums in other locations within North Carolina, and the cost of these transports was among the county’s most extravagant expenditures.
In 1894, our local newspaper, the Watauga Democrat recounted the circumstances of a young man who had been deemed “a lunatic”: “His condition is indeed a pitiable one. In his ravings he tears his clothing into entire shreds and has been nearly nude through this cold snap.” He was held in jail while an application was made to admit him into the asylum in Morganton. He had been confined (presumably at home) by iron shackles for seven years prior.
In 1904, the paper noted that the county sheriff took Mr. Harmon, a young lunatic, to the Morganton Asylum last week. This was most certainly my great-granduncle, who was admitted to the North Carolina State Hospital for the Insane (known today as Broughton Hospital) that same year, while he was in his late twenties. Although his admission records indicate he was sent there for “nervousness and jealousy,” his 1918 World War I Draft Registration Card labeled him as “insane.” According to a family member, my uncle helped cut meat at the hospital, and he did such a good job and liked the setting so much that he remained there for two decades.
In 1900, the local paper had stated, “It is hoped that the time will soon come when the facilities for the care of the insane will be enlarged, so that people who are so unfortunate as to lose their minds will find ready entrance and not have to be put in the home of the criminals.”
More than sixty years later, a concerned citizen sent a letter to the editor of the same paper stating, in part, “…we often treat [the mentally ill man] as if he were a criminal. We put him into the common jail while he is awaiting admission to the hospital. We have made progress in the field of mental health in North Carolina. There is much more to be done. The better days will be attained by pressing ahead, not by retreating to the beginning of the Nineteenth century.”