Kings Park: Stories from an American Mental Institution

About the Project

Kings Park: Stories from an American Mental Institution 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 on Long Island, NY. 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. Although her goals are purely personal when the film begins, her desire to resolve the issues of her past is soon replaced by a driving need to learn about the institutional world in which she was once locked away. To this end, Lucy seeks out other former patients, their families, and hospital staff, who share riveting firsthand accounts of life at Kings Park from dramatically different perspectives. These intimate glimpses of a vanishing world bear witness to the many changes in treatment, policy and attitudes over the past century.

The film culminates with a clear look at conditions today. Vivid accounts are given of the often brutally executed “emptying out” of the hospital. These vignettes are followed by scenes that capture both the poignant successes and tragic breakdowns of community mental health care in the area surrounding the former state hospital since its close. We meet individuals whose lives demonstrate the recovery that can be achieved with appropriate treatment and services, despite the meager support afforded mental health care in this country today. In contrast, scenes shot at the local jail -- now the default “provider” for people in the county with serious mental illness -- depict the frequency with which individuals fall through the cracks, cycling between imprisonment and homelessness.

Without pointing fingers, Kings Park reveals the lessons of the past as a means of generating open discourse about our current crisis in mental health care, providing a creative platform from which we can face the dire challenges of the present and imagine the possibilities of the future.

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.