“No one has a right to decide that patients aren’t going to get any better”: Dr. Mildred Mitchell-Bateman was the first Black woman to hold high-ranking office in West Virginia. A long-time mental health advocate, Dr. Mitchell-Bateman was hired as a staff physician in 1946 at Lakin State Hospital, West Virginia’s segregated Black mental hospital for patients labeled the “criminally insane.” In 1962, she was named the state’s mental health commissioner, a position she held for 15 years. Dr. Mitchell-Bateman spent her career advocating for the mentally ill. Her most famous program, “Breaking the Disability Cycle,” assured patients who had been declared “untreatable” that there was hope, and that psychiatric patients should be treated with respect and dignity. Notably, in 1975 Dr. Mitchell-Bateman served as the chairwoman on the Institute of Medicine’s Study on Legalized Abortion and Public Health. This groundbreaking work, published two years after Roe v Wade, explored medical and psychological complications after legal abortions and found that there were little to no long-lasting psychological ramifications after these procedures, and is still quoted today.
In 1973, Dr. Mitchell-Bateman was elected the first Black woman Vice President of the American Psychiatric Association, and in 1980, as one of four psychiatrists on President Jimmy Carter’s Commission on Mental Health, she was crucial to passing the landmark Mental Health Systems Act. From 1977 to 1982, Dr. Mitchell-Bateman served as founding chair of the Department of Psychiatry at Marshall University. She lived in Charleston, West Virginia until her death in 2012; in 1999, the Huntingdon State Hospital was renamed the Mildred Mitchell-Bateman Hospital in her honor.
She also received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Psychiatric Association (2000) and the Governor's Award for Civil Rights Contributions (2004).
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