State mental hospitals are usually vaguely sad and vaguely threatening, but they are also almost always mysterious.  This wasn’t the case at Willard State Hospital in New York state. Before the entire campus was slated to be torn down, curator Craig Williams found an attic of patient suitcases. He called in psychiatrist and filmmaker Peter Stastny, patient rights advocate Darby Penney and photographer Lisa Rinzler to create an exhibit and an accompanying book called The Lives They Left Behind: Suitcases from a State Hospital Attic.

The result is an amazingly depressing, but surprisingly complete, description of ten patients’ lives out and in the mental hospital.  Many were wrongly diagnosed and left to wither in the hospital.  It’s a very personal history about where psychiatry was and where, thankfully, it has come.