As we continue rounding out the year with quick hits on laws taking effect Jan. 1, today’s date brings an opportunity to tie together two bills with a bit of history.
Elizabeth Parsons Ware Packard was born on this day in 1816 in Massachusetts, but her significance to Illinois history began when she and her family moved to Manteno shortly before the Civil War.
In June 1860, according to Capitol News Illinois, “Packard was committed to the Illinois Hospital and Asylum for the Insane in Jacksonville by her husband, a Calvinist minister, for, in part, publicly disagreeing with his positions on religion, women’s rights and slavery. She remained there for more than three years under the care of a psychiatrist who used torturous treatment methods likened to waterboarding, and who collaborated in the imprisonment of women sent to the center even in cases when they were not actually suffering from mental illness.”
That psychiatrist was Andrew McFarland, whose name was on a state mental health center in Springfield for 55 years until August 2023 when Gov. JB Pritzker signed an order to rename the 120-bed hospital in Packard’s honor. One year later, Pritzker signed Senate Bill 647, which in part amended the Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities Administrative Act to reflect the name change.
Also this August Pritzker signed SB 857, which among other changes expands the responsibilities of the Department of Human Services Inspector General to conduct unannounced site visits of mental health and developmental disabilities facilities, including Community Living Arrangements and Community Mental Health Centers. Both chambers granted unanimous passage.
“Unannounced site visits to community facilities and enhanced employee accountability will allow the OIG to implement (preventive) measures to underlying issues that have occurred in the past,” said state Sen. Laura Fine, D-Glenview, the bill sponsor. “By implementing these changes, we can deter repeated patterns of abuse and remove the source of these issues as they occur.”
These advances honor Packard, who “documented inhumane conditions and patient mistreatment” during her confinement, per CNI, then on the outside “championed the civil rights of people wrongly accused of ‘insanity’ as well as those living with mental illness. She traveled the country telling the story of her wrongful imprisonment and authored several books. In 1867, she successfully lobbied the state legislature to pass a law that afforded people accused of ‘insanity’ the right to a jury trial prior to commitment against their will.”
In 2021, British author Kate Moore, already famous for “The Radium Girls,” another dark chapter of Illinois history, released “The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear.”
Packard’s legacy should never disappear from Illinois and beyond.
• Scott T. Holland writes about state government issues for Shaw Local News Network. Follow him on X @sth749. He can be reached at sholland@shawmedia.com.
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