[Counselor_Educ] Book Launch by Counselor Ed Alumna Dr Katherine Ziff

Wed Mar 28 14:24:01 EDT 2012

Dr Ziff is a graduate of the OU PhD program and is currently a school counselor at Athens elementary schools. Her book (developed from her dissertation on the history of the Ridges) titled Asylum on the Hill: History of a Healing Landscape is being launched on Friday March 30, 2012.

>From 3-5 p.m., a Ridges open house and two guided tours of the Ridges Cemeteries Nature Walk have been organized. A new historical guide and map of the Ridges will be given away at the reception.  Please visit www.ohioswallow.com/ziff_psa<http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1109640815455&s=39937&e=001T_xeyU_8fnAVeIlEvvB9IvHiWx3fpv6j2Pqz_P83EV5XGBnHwp3mF_wLb-H-M1CwDW46V1hjMC_ptm7yptPj1iyRXOuW1-H7QHMF5FqR0lPWSzLWRWu6Gnlv0tglzyJp> for complete details.  Ohio University Press will host a reception for Dr. Ziff at the Kennedy Museum of Art from 5-7 p.m. Light fare and a cash bar will be available.  Copies of "Asylum on the Hill," published this month by the Ohio University Press, will be sold at the event.

Congratulations Katherine! We are really proud of you and your work!!

Christine Suniti Bhat

--

Amber Casey, a current first year master's student in counseling, interviewed Dr Ziff for the CSI winter newsletter.

The article is copied below:

Dr. Katherine Ziff, an alumna of the Counseling and Higher Education program at Ohio University, has completed a 12-year research project on the Ridges, the facility that was formerly known as the "Athens Lunatic Asylum." I got the chance to interview Dr. Ziff on her passions, research, and what has culminated into her book "Asylum on the Hill." Here is a little of what we discovered!

1.   What inspired you to write about the Athens Lunatic Asylum's history and lifestyle?
Asylum on the Hill is an extension of my doctoral research in counselor education at Ohio University. Twelve years ago when I was considering a dissertation topic, it was actually my mother who suggested a history of the asylum. The research questions that I ended up engaging were very much shaped by 1) my undergraduate work in sociology at the University of North Carolina, which at the time was rooted in human ecology and 2) a graduate degree in public policy from Virginia Tech in which I studied the work of Martin Rein and the idea of storytelling as a form of public policy analysis.

2. What did you want readers to come away with after reading your book?
The book goes beyond the traditional debate about whether asylums were built to serve a humanitarian purpose or to act as an instrument of social control. The truth is that asylums did both; Asylum on the Hill describes how this dichotomy played out in Athens and it goes further by creating a holistic picture of an asylum in its nineteenth century moral treatment years:  patients, politics, landscape, caregivers, architecture. It tells a parallel story of American history in the mid to late nineteenth century - the Civil War, industrialization, the Long Depression, the rise of big public institutions.

3. Did you find certain parts of the book particularly challenging while writing it?
The hardest part while working on the dissertation was focusing on a particular research question; someone once described the Athens asylum as a room with a thousand doors. My committee was good at helping me set boundaries and stick to them.  My research was sponsored by the Ohio Department of Mental Health as one of their non-funded projects; because of that I was given full access to the very large archive of asylum materials held by Alden Library's Mahn Center for Archives and Special Collections as well as the Ohio Historical Society, including confidential patient records, superintendent's correspondence, case books and so on. So the book contains much information that has never been made public. With this came a responsibility to maintain confidentiality, so patient names are not used, instead using the asylum's system of patient numbers. Two years ago I spent a summer reading hundreds and hundreds of those documents from the nineteenth century, that provided stories of lives of many people who suffered great difficulties. It felt like it was a big responsibility to decide which stories to portray in the book that would represent the many reasons people were hospitalized at the asylum.
Then there are the technical things about writing a book, especially learning to use the 956-page Chicago Manual of Style, which is very different from APA style.

4. What else (in addition to stores of patients and families) does the book portray?
The book has stories of some of the asylum's early figures: the coal miner from Nelsonville who was committed to the asylum because he was trying to start a labor union; women in Athens who earned extra money by selling their buttermilk, eggs, fruit and plants to the asylum; the adroit political moves of Athens state legislator Dr. William Parker Johnson to secure the asylum for his home town, and Dr. Alonzo B. Richardson, superintendent in the 1880's who went on to a prestigious post as head of St. Elizabeth's Hospital for the Insane in Washington DC.
To know the history of our asylum in Athens is to know the history of our community - the Athens Lunatic Asylum (the first of its many names) played an enormous political, financial, and medical/mental health role in Athens County and southeastern Ohio for nearly a century. At one time it was the major employer in Athens and a buyer of vast quantities of goods and services in the area. Its once grand and still beautiful landscape served as parkland and playground for Athens families and children as well as Ohio University students.
The story of the landscape and grounds is woven throughout, from the formation of its terraces above the Hocking River, its religious and psychological significance to Native Americans, its mainly deforested state when it was conveyed as a farm to the state of Ohio for the asylum, and the development of its park, lakes, and substantial agricultural operation, and its beautiful natural state today.

5. Any advice for those pursuing a degree in mental health counseling?
I would say in choosing a research topic pick something that feels compelling to you so you will enjoy the process and the work. When it comes to writing, and I hope many counselors will choose to write articles and books, don't wait for that big block of time in which to do it because those are hard to find! A friend gave me Anne Lamott's book, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. I find it helpful to follow her advice and do something toward my research and writing every day, no matter how small. For example when it came to writing the book, I aimed for three pages a day, so in a week you have a substantial amount of work done. Of course, I am just a beginner in the book writing department, my former professor Sam Gladding at Wake Forest (where I earned my master's degree in counseling), who wrote the Foreword to Asylum on the Hill, has fifteen books on his Amazon Author's Page!

To learn more about Dr. Katherine Ziff, and Asylum on the Hill: History of a Healing Landscape,
Please visit the publisher's webpage: http://www.ohioswallow.com/book/Asylum+on+the+Hill
Or Dr. Ziff's blog Asylum Notes: http://katherineziff.wordpress.com/
Don't Miss The Ohio University Press's launch for this book!  Friday, March 30 at The Ridges.
3-5 pm are self-guided walking tours, 5-7 is a reception at the Kennedy Museum.
Counselor Education students and Chi Sigma Iota Members are welcome to attend!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Christine Suniti Bhat, Ph.D., P.C
Assistant Professor, Counselor Education
Department of Counseling and Higher Education
The Gladys W. and David H. Patton College of Education
Ohio University, Athens, OH 45701

Office: McCracken Hall, 374
Phone: 740-593-4425
Fax: 740-593-0477
Email: bhatc at ohio.edu<mailto:bhatc at ohio.edu>
Website: http://www.cehs.ohio.edu/facultystaff/bhatc/
Media:
http://www.ohio.edu/ucm/media/experts/ohioexpert.cfm?formid=1822088&pageid=1844292

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