King Davis, Ph.D., to Deliver Benjamin Rush Award Lecture

King Davis, Ph.D., a senior research fellow in the School of Information at the University of Texas (UT) at Austin, will give the 2019 Benjamin Rush Award Lecture at APA’s Annual Meeting in San Francisco. The Benjamin Rush Award, established in 1967, recognizes an individual renowned for his or her contributions to the history of psychiatry. Davis, a former commissioner of the Virginia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services, has published myriad articles, books, and reports on mental health, managed care, fundraising, race, and social justice.

Most recently, Davis concluded a 10-year project to preserve the archives of the Central State Hospital in Petersburg, Va., which was originally established in 1870 as the Central Lunatic Asylum for Colored Insane. Although the hospital had maintained extraordinarily thorough records since its inception, they were in danger of being ravaged by time and the elements.

“The director of the hospital was concerned that all of this paper they had accumulated since the 1870s was deteriorating. Nothing was in an archival environment. The temperature was 130 degrees, and it was damp and moldy,” Davis explained.

After looking at some of the material, faculty and students from the UT School of Information, which had previously restored records related to the Holocaust, Steven Spielberg, and Marilyn Monroe, joined Davis in Richmond and Petersburg to work on the archives. The project, which was funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation, involved digitizing the hospital’s 800,000 documents and developing a way that researchers, the media, and the patients’ families could find and read some of them.

The work was not without its challenges, said Davis.

“We had to make sure that those records maintained privacy [and were compliant with] the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and the ethical standards of psychiatry, counseling, psychology, and social work, so we had an attorney join our team. We wound up with 17 people on the project, including doctoral students and IT engineers,” Davis said. “Mellon requires that anything you develop will be open source and accessible to the public at no cost, so our computer engineers are developing the electronic capacity to allow access to the material in a way that is still protective of the information.”

In his lecture, “Access, Privacy, and Utility of Historical Psychiatric Records in the Digital Age: Central Lunatic Asylum for Colored Insane Archives,” Davis will discuss how the project sought to use digital technology to balance the competing demands of access and privacy. Rich in history, the lecture will also explore what the hospital’s records add to the collective body of psychiatric research.

“The lecture will raise critical questions about the utility of accessing and analyzing historical records on blacks with mental illness for the information that they yield about admissions, diagnoses, treatment, outcomes, and mortality to the first such hospital in the U.S.,” Davis said. “Research findings from the archives on the black population admitted to the hospital from 1840 to 1940 will be an overriding theme throughout the lecture and will tie the various issues together since data from Central form the corpus of the research.” ■