Fred Chaney died April 18, 1975, in the General Hospital at Whitfield after having been institutionalized for over 40 years and with 53 years of his life. From his first admission at age 22 to St. Elizabeths Hospital in 1926, then to the Mississippi State Insane Asylum in 1932, and later to Mississippi State Hospital in 1939; Chaney considered Whitfield his home.
Hodding Carter, Jr., long-time friend of Chaney and his family kept up correspondence with him throughout the years of Chaney’s hospitalization and on occasion talked with him of his life at Whitfield. Carter said in an editorial that Chaney’s Washington County friends knew he had unusual analytical abilities and a power of expression that would have made an unusual newspaperman out of him. Whitfield staff would say his power of expression made him somewhat a problem for the hospital.
Chaney was a prolific writer throughout his institutionalization at Whitfield, even editing a one-page newspaper distributed to patients in the hospital. He described himself as “the man who writes interesting stuff about Whitfield.” He attended to everyone’s business and probably on more than one occasion Chaney was told by staff that he had little regard for authority or anything that authority represents, and that he couldn’t run the hospital.
Through his stubbornness and writing Chaney advocated for better care of the patients at Whitfield inspiring investigations that brought about reforms in mental health and mental hospitalization. Dr. William Jaquith said it was Fred Chaney who brought to light the problems at Whitfield through the letters he smuggled to his mother and to Hodding Carter, Jr. with the Delta Democrat-Times. In a letter to Chaney’s mother Dr. Jaquith stated “he has done many wonderful things for the hospital as well as myself.”
Fred Chaney’s description of the conditions at the hospital and his recommendations to correct these problems were published not only in the Greenville paper but in newspapers across the state. He stated “[p]erhaps these things will lie a long time in the Archives without much interest or particular worth to anyone. Perhaps they will in the future be much used as more and more public interest of all kinds centers upon the problem of mental health and mental hospitalization in Mississippi and elsewhere. At any rate they will be publicly available.”
Chaney believed writing a book about his life and his hospitalizations was his last chance to make something of himself. While his book was not published, his thoughts, words, letters, and manuscripts will now be available to anyone interested in his life, his accomplishments, and learning about mental illness and mental hospitalization at the Mississippi State Hospital.
Fred Chaney’s legacy is that one man’s voice and his pen cannot be silenced for what he believes is right.