“Unknown”: How Technical Reports Erased Black Women’s Mental Health Narratives at Virginia’s Central State Hospital

Richmond Times-Dispatch From the Archives: Central State Hospital | From the Archives |
Richmond Times-Dispatch, From the Archives: Central State Hospital

Medical documents and reports are known as objective sources that provide accurate information about patients and their experiences. However, for Black women and other marginalized communities, this has not always been true. In fact, Black women’s mental health narratives were often excluded from technical documents, erasing their experience and providing little information about their lives.  

“Articles, Rhetorical Absence, and Critical Imagination: Examining Black Women’s Mental Health Narratives at Virginia’s Central State Hospital,” published in IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, documents the erasure that Black women and other marginalized groups have experienced in current and historical documents.  

According to Dr. Miriam Williams, professor of English and Associate Chair of English at Texas State University, and Dr. Natasha Jones, associate professor of English at Michigan State University, archived records and reports from the late 1800s and early 1900s glaringly left out Black women’s narratives and experiences.  

The medical archives did not contain sufficient patient records, so the research team analyzed reports written by white administrators instead. These reports included narratives that were racist and included information that could not be proven as fact. Indeed, the most cited reason for Black women and men being admitted to the facility was “unknown”, showing the lack of care and understanding for mental health issues that impacted Black people. These causes are now known as being “often related to physical and social situations, and political control and oppression.”  

These gaps in information show how important it is for technical communicators to think outside of the box when analyzing historical or technical documents. By questioning the “facts,” acknowledging biases and rhetoric, and looking for what (or who) is missing, future research can be more inclusive and provide more accurate insights about groups that have been historically marginalized and left out of official records and documents.