Kings Park

About the Project

Kings Park offers an unprecedented look at public mental health care in America by focusing on the story of a single abandoned institution, Kings Park State Hospital. The film begins with director Lucy Winer’s efforts to come to terms with her commitment to Kings Park as a teenager in the late 1960’s. Winer’s goals are purely personal when the film begins, but she is soon overtaken by a driving need to understand the institutional world to which she was confined. To this end, Winer seeks out other former patients, their families, and hospital staff who share firsthand accounts of hospital life from their dramatically different perspectives, bearing witness to the many changes in treatment, policy and attitudes over the past century.

The film ends with a vision of today. Accounts are shared of the well intentioned, but brutally executed “emptying out” of the hospital, followed by scenes that capture the successes and tragic breakdowns of community mental health care in the surrounding area. In this way, Kings Park brings to light our nation’s current crisis in mental health care and helps us to understand how we got here, revealing the high price we pay for our unacknowledged prejudices about mental illness and the painful legacy of these soon to be forgotten asylums.

The Fledgling Fund Impact

We supported post-production of this film because we believe that it can play an important role in illuminating the current crisis in mental health care in this country.