ETSU professor, institute staff developing oral history

By DAN KEGLEY/Staff

If you have memories from past years at Southwest Virginia Mental Health Institute, a group of staff members there and a professor of anthropology invite you to share them.
East Tennessee State University and SWVMHI are collaborating in the creation of an oral history of the institute that, while once almost a self-sustaining community unto itself, remains a large part of the Smyth County community and region.
Melissa Shrift, Ph.D., assistant professor of anthropology in ETSU’s sociology department, will coordinate the conversations with folks with knowledge about SMVMHI that will constitute a volume of oral history she will edit and author.
Shrift met with SWVMHI’s Sharon Nietch, Karen Chavers, and community member Edna Pennington Wednesday to talk about the work involved in compiling an oral history—meeting people with knowledge of SWVMHI, taking notes and making recordings of the knowledge they share.
“Oral history is like a conversation, basically,” said Shrift, the author of two previous books and numerous academic papers.
She called SWVMHI “a unique situation that has been around for such a long time and in a community that is interested in preserving its past.”
Much of the work will be done in a private setting on the SWVMHI campus in small groups of participants.
“In anthropology we call them focus groups,” Shrift said. But their intent is to broaden the recollections of participants.
Thursday morning, in a meeting with a small group of former SWVMHI employees, Shrift, Neitch and Chavers saw how well that method worked. As one employee spoke, he triggered memories in others that might have gone unrecalled in a one-on-one conversation with one of the oral historians.
“We touched on a lot of topics,” Nietch said. “Once they got started, more memories came.”
“We could have stayed in that room all day,” Chavers said. She said that for employees of SWVMHI, “it was more like a family than a job.”
And among those first participants was a man who said he has 1,400 photos from SWVMHI, lacking only images of the Davis Clinic and the horsebarn.
Neitch showed the group two notebooks from 1953-54 that her mother and father used to take notes from their classes when they worked as aides at SWVMHI. She’ll comb them for clues about what it was like to work there, although the notes predominately cover the technical aspects of caring for psychiatric patients.
As a child, Nietch was immersed in the SWVMHI culture of caring. She remembers one Christmas riding home in the car and there was a cardboard fireplace and other gifts. Once inside their home, the Neitch children realized those gifts did not come inside with them and learned they were for the patients.
“We got a lot of lessons like that,” she said. Later as employees, “we went in with a lot more empathy for them than a lot of people had.”
Neitch said she originally had no intention of working at SWVMHI, and then it would be for only a year, and no more.
She celebrated her 37th anniversary of employment with the institute yesterday.
Schrift said hearing and recording the oral histories will begin soon and continue through spring, when the book will begin taking shape for publication possibly by the university of North Carolina Chapel Hill as part of a special series on social medicine.
Alternately, “the UT [University of Tennessee] press would jump on it,” as would the University of Virginia, Schrift said.
The group encourages anyone with memories about the institute or who know people who worked there to contact Shrift or Neitch. They will schedule times for participants to come to the institute or arrange and in-home visits.
“Once people have done it, they say it’s not so bad” and encourage their friends to participate, Neitch said.
Pennington noted that many people working in corrections worked previously at SWVMHI, and “they should get in touch.”

Wanted: Photos of the Davis Clinic and the horse barn that once stood on the Southwest Virginia Mental Health Instutute. To share these or to participate in the East Tennessee State University’s SWVMHI oral history project, contact Melissa Schrift at (423) 439-4997 or or Sharon Neitch at (276) 783-1200, Ext 108, or .