After 77 Years, Western (Washington) State Hospital's Patients' Graves Get Markers

From the Tacoma News Tribune via the Spokesman-Review (Spokane):

STEILACOOM, Wash. – For 77 years, patients who died at Western State Hospital were buried in graves marked only by numbers stamped in bricks of cement.

It wasn’t about money. It was about shame.

And it was about the law.

The state sought to protect families from the stigma of their relatives’ mental illness by barring state psychiatric hospitals from putting names on the graves.

Read here to discover how the Grave Concerns Association is rectifying this issue.