Opal Marie Petty, 86; Won Lawsuit Over 51 Years in Mental Hospitals

Opal Marie Petty, the Texas farm girl who spent 51 years wrongly locked away in mental institutions and ultimately won a six-figure verdict for her suffering, has died. She was 86.

Petty died of unspecified natural causes Thursday at a hospital in San Angelo, Texas.

In 1989, four years after she was rescued by a nephew she had never known, Petty won a $505,000 verdict against the Texas Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation for negligently subjecting her to “institutionalization syndrome.”

The Texas Supreme Court upheld the decision three years later, cutting the amount to the $250,000 legally allowed in damage suits against the state. With interest, she received about $350,000.

Because the state’s Supreme Court issued a 9-4 decision, and declined to resolve several issues over mental health treatment records, the ruling was not considered a legal precedent.

Nevertheless, Petty’s case became a rallying cry for those in Texas and across the country working to reform mental health treatment practices through the courts and state legislatures.

Petty’s sad saga began on the family farm in Goldthwaite, Texas, in 1934, when she was 16. She talked about seeing a man at her window and frequently lashed out at family members. One day she was found digging her own grave with a butcher knife.

Her parents, baffled, consulted a local doctor who convinced them to commit her to Austin State Hospital. Depression-era conditions meant that patients slept on concrete floors and cared for each other because of a lack of staff.

State officials claimed that Petty was schizophrenic. Her lawyers argued that she suffered a brief period of psychotic depression and recovered but was never released.

The Texas Supreme Court majority opinion concluding her personal injury case on Dec. 31, 1992, noted that Petty was variously diagnosed during her confinement as being schizophrenic and not mentally ill, and mentally retarded and not mentally retarded.

“Her treatment, however, was never affected,” the court said. “For five decades, her treatment consisted of only ‘custodial care,’ the principal rehabilitative therapy being 35 years of work in the hospital laundry at a salary of $2 per week.”

After 37 years at the Austin facility, Petty was transferred to a state school for the mentally retarded in the west Texas town of San Angelo in 1971, when she was 53. Her status was first reviewed by a court in 1979.

In 1978, Texas had passed its Mentally Retarded Persons Act, which for the first time set standards for involuntary commitment.

A year later, the U.S. Supreme Court upgraded involuntary commitment standards, forcing all states to revamp their mental health laws. By 1983, Texas completed its revision, which included periodic reviews of all mental health patients.

But Petty’s involuntary institutionalization had long pre-dated those measures and seemingly was not to be affected by them.

Her personal happy ending began not in a court or legislature but at a family reunion in 1985. Her younger sister happened to mention Petty’s whereabouts -- the first time Clint Denson, the son of a third sister who had died, had ever heard of his Aunt Opal.

Denson and his wife, Linda Kauffman, went to see her -- finding her dirty, disheveled and barely able to communicate. They began visiting, took her clothes and convinced officials to place her in a group home. When that didn’t work -- she had become so institutionalized that she couldn’t bathe herself -- they moved her into their own home.

At age 68, Petty finally began to regain her independent life. With the help of a speech therapist, she became more verbal. She resumed playing the piano, which she had learned as a youngster, and took an interest in wearing jewelry and polishing her nails.

She sewed clothing for the six dolls she had purchased with her earnings from the hospital laundry, caring for them like the children she never had.

Denson and Kauffman worked with Texas Civil Rights Project to file suit on behalf of Petty. The money Petty received in her court case was administered through a trust fund by the Texas Mental Health Assn.

She used some of the funds for her health care and to purchase a limestone ranch house on a 6 1/2-acre lot 20 miles outside San Angelo, where the trees outnumbered people and she could simulate her early farm life. She lived there with Denson and Kauffman.

Petty disliked talking about her half century of involuntary confinement, saying only that it was “awful” and that she missed having birthday parties.

She allowed herself one big celebration after receiving money from her personal injury case -- a trip to Disneyland.