Introduction
You carry hidden burdens when military trauma and domestic violence shatter your sense of safety. You struggle to understand how institutional psychiatric abuse and wartime atrocities break men beyond recognition. Diane Cameron examines these dark realities in Never leave your dead through the archival investigation of Donald's hidden past.
Unresolved military trauma and domestic violence reveal the dark gray reality of men broken by war and institutional psychiatric abuse.
The book guides you through childhood trauma, wartime psychiatric treatments, the evolution of war trauma terminology, and legal breakthroughs. You will discover answers to several key questions:
- How do early childhood chaos and military cultures forge extreme hypervigilance?
- What secret histories lie buried within wartime psychiatric institutionalization?
- How did veteran activism transform diagnostic terms for mental injuries?
- What legal steps free institutionalized veterans from historical neglect?
1. Childhood Trauma and Military Background
Parental substance addiction and totalizing military cultures create environments where survivors must learn extreme hypervigilance to endure ongoing chaos. You face daily volatility when caregivers plunge into unpredictable cycles of mania and violent rages.
Parental substance addiction creates a volatile and unpredictable household environment where children must learn extreme hypervigilance to survive.
Diane Cameron describes how her mother became a full-blown drug addict after being prescribed Dexedrine. This addiction led to daily cycles of manic energy followed by horrible night-time crashes and violent rages.
When the author was twelve years old, her mother used a sharp knife to saw at her hair after a botched peroxide bleaching attempt. This terrifying event led the author to adopt a completely passive and immobile stance. The author's father passed away in 1971 at the age of fifty-six. The author was ten years old when her mother began taking Dexedrine.
China Marine Culture and Identity
The United States Marine Corps instills a totalizing culture of absolute unity, obedience, and an unbreakable lifelong identity where ex-marines do not exist. Marine basic training is designed to break men down and erase individuality so they function as a single unit. This training creates a powerful esprit de corps that stays with veterans for life.
Donald maintained his military bearing, crisp attire, and spit-shined black military brogues decades after his active service ended. In 1937, Donald went to China with a battalion of United States Marines.
Service in pre-World War II China combined the luxurious lifestyle of the International Settlement with exposure to unimaginable wartime atrocities. While young Marines enjoyed light duty, cheap alcohol, and vibrant nightlife in Shanghai, they also stood as witnesses to extreme Japanese torture, mutilation, and mass killings.
Cliff Wells recalled the bombing of the USS Panay, where Marines locked and loaded for confrontation only to be ordered to stand down. Japanese aircraft bombed the USS Panay in 1937. A former POW nicknamed Bones weighed sixty-three pounds.
2. Donald Hidden Past and Psychiatric Treatments
Archival investigations reveal massive biographical gaps involving wartime atrocities, psychiatric institutionalization, and aggressive historical treatments.
When you attempt to write an article about family history for Mental Health Month, you might uncover chronological errors that expose dark secrets. The author experienced this when researching her stepfather Donald. Archival research revealed that Donald had murdered his first wife Norma and mother-in-law Catherine in 1953 using ten gunshots. He had previously spent seven years in a mental hospital after returning from military service.
The author mailed twenty dollars to a public library in Washington, Pennsylvania. She received fifteen pages of grainy photocopied newsprint from the Washington Observer detailing the 1953 murders and Donald's prior psychiatric confinement. Donald was twenty-six when he went to China. He was married to Norma for only seven months at the time of the killings. He then served twenty-two years before being released from Farview.
The 1953 Murder Trial
Donald's mental collapse began during his military service in Tientsin. The breakdown was triggered by a head injury and the compounding stresses of military life and a brutal environment. Military records and accounts from fellow Marines like George Howe and Dante Caruso established that Donald suffered a severe psychological break in 1939. This followed a head injury from a rifle butt and persistent friction in the barracks.
The 6th Marines were divided and sent to Tientsin in 1938. Donald experienced his violent incident and transfer to St. Elizabeths in 1939. The log recorded March 1, 1939, as the date for Donald's attack on Dante Caruso. On April 21, 1939, Donald was taken to the German-American Hospital for a head x-ray. He departed Chinwangtao aboard the USS Chaumont on May 18, 1939.
After returning from a handball game in Tientsin, Donald suddenly went berserk in the barracks. He had to be restrained by fellow Marines. He ripped the iron-framed door completely out of a padded quiet room.
St. Elizabeths and Farview Atrocities
Patients at St. Elizabeths Hospital during the mid-twentieth century endured harsh and experimental psychiatric treatments. These included hydrotherapy, insulin shock, electroconvulsive therapy, and prefrontal lobotomies. St. Elizabeths admitted its first patients in 1855 after ground was broken for the hospital in 1852.
As a military hospital for the insane, St. Elizabeths utilized aggressive interventions to manage and subdue traumatized or aggressive soldiers. Electroconvulsive therapy, originally observed being used to paralyze cattle in slaughterhouses, was widely applied alongside ice-water baths and brain surgery. Ugo Cerletti discovered electroconvulsive treatment in 1938.
Donald's Marine Corps records showed he arrived at St. Elizabeths in a convoy of insane mental cases in 1939. He likely received shock treatments there after being diagnosed with dementia praecox. Hydrotherapy ice-water baths lasted for eight hours to induce hypothermic shock.
China Marines faced extreme brutality and encountered horrific mutilations by Japanese forces that left deep, enduring psychological trauma. Veterans at the China Marine reunion shared accounts of systematic torture, starvation, and the discovery of brutally mutilated American corpses in the Pacific theater. This created an environment where normal psychological survival was severely compromised.
During the reunion at St. Louis, veteran Glenn McDole recounted the Palawan massacre. Troops herded 141 American prisoners into a trench, doused them in gasoline, and set them on fire, with only a handful surviving. The bones of 123 victims of the Palawan slaughter were buried at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery. A total of 129 men burned to death in the Palawan massacre, facing a drop of 125 feet down jagged rocks over the cliff.
3. Evolution of War Trauma Terminology
Attitudes and terminology regarding military psychological injuries have shifted dramatically across different wars due to manpower needs and financial liabilities. During World War I, soldiers breaking down were diagnosed with LMF or court-martialed. By the 1940s, troop shortages forced the Pentagon to reframe shell shock as a treatable illness to return men to the front and curb rising disability debt. Following the Vietnam War, Post-Vietnam Syndrome emerged, later officially codified in the DSM as post-traumatic stress disorder.
Shifting diagnostic terms and radical veteran activism forced institutions to recognize war trauma and mental injuries.
A May 6, 1972, New York Times article by Chaim Shatan used Post-Vietnam Syndrome to describe paralyzing symptoms like rage, nightmares, and flashbacks in returning soldiers. Military and psychiatric authorities noted that 30 to 70 percent of all soldiers were affected by stress casualties. The typical onset time for Post-Vietnam Syndrome ranged from nine to thirty months after a soldier returned from Asia. Soldiers also experienced gross stress reaction during earlier conflicts before terminology evolved further.
Veterans Protests and Legal Commitments
Direct radical action by Vietnam veterans forced the Department of Veterans Affairs to confront the catastrophic personal toll of untreated war trauma. In 1975, a small group of Vietnam veterans held the head of the United States Department of Veterans Affairs hostage in Washington, DC. They presented data proving that veterans were suffering from suicide, criminal convictions, homelessness, and long-term psychiatric institutionalization.
Vietnam veterans took the head of the US Department of Veterans Affairs hostage in his Washington, DC office to force a review of Post-Vietnam Syndrome data. In May 1953, two months after killing his wife and mother-in-law, Donald was examined at the Washington County Jail by a Lunacy Commission consisting of a local attorney and two general practitioners. Judge Cummins used their report to commit Donald to Farview State Hospital, denying him a criminal trial under the rationale that he was not responsible for his actions.
Donald K. Watkins was examined by the Lunacy Commission on May 7, 1953, and subsequently committed to Farview State Hospital by Judge Cummins on May 8, 1953. Farview State Hospital functioned not as a medical facility but as a brutal warehouse characterized by systemic torture, abuse, and murder. An investigation by Philadelphia Inquirer reporters Wendell Rawls, Jr. and Acel Moore exposed widespread regular beatings, sexual abuse, human cockfights, medical neglect, and murders committed by guards at Farview from the 1940s into the 1970s.
Prisoners were heavily overmedicated with powerful tranquilizers to keep them in a zombielike state known as Cold Storage. In 1947, the institution held 1,098 inmates and 110 guards. By 1975, the population grew to 1,300 inmates and 500 employees including 244 guards. Reporters spent three months investigating Farview, leading to a 1976 Philadelphia Inquirer series and a confirming grand jury report. Rawls and Moore won the Pulitzer Local Reporting Award in 1977 for this expose on dementia praecox of a paranoid type and tardive dyskinesia inside the facility.
4. Legal Breakthrough and Moral Injury
Persistence in archival research and modern search tools can unlock historical legal mysteries after decades of dead ends.
For years Diane tried to find the attorneys who helped discharge Donald Watkins from Farview in 1975. She searched university records and telephone directories without success. While taking an investigative writing class at SUNY Albany with Ed Sanders, she typed the names from old correspondence into Google.
In November 2003, Diane found Joshua Goldblum via a Google search, faxed him a note along with a 1975 letter from Dr. Thomas Szasz, and received a phone call from him about twenty minutes later.
Finding the Lawyers
Law students Joshua Goldblum and Roy Diamond joined the University of Pennsylvania's Prison Research Council through a government-funded summer program. Tasked with reviewing files of institutionalized mental patients in dismal facilities like Farview, their legal intervention for Donald Watkins set the course for their lifelong careers as advocate lawyers.
Roy Diamond and Joshua Goldblum, who met at a summer camp in the Poconos, worked on the Prison Research Council project. They used a writ of habeas corpus supported by Dr. Thomas Szasz to free Donald Watkins from indefinite commitment at Farview State Hospital after 22 years of confinement.
After ten years of a peaceful and supportive marriage with Florence, Donald experienced a severe disorientation episode while driving. Overwhelmed by confusion and perceived following vehicles, he accelerated and turned his car into the path of an oncoming eighteen-wheeler truck.
On September 16, 1992, Donald drove into the path of a large truck on Route 4, severely injuring Florence. She required emergency shock trauma surgery and spent 10 years in a nursing home without regaining consciousness, while Donald emerged without physical scratches. Donald then lived in a Brackenridge nursing home for 4 years after the accident before his death.
Witnessing Atrocities and Moral Injury
Witnessing atrocities and being unable to intervene can inflict deeper moral injury and psychological damage than personal combat exposure.
Bessel van der Kolk explains that trauma occurs when the rational brain is hijacked and language centers shut off, leaving only fragmented sensory residue in the nervous system. Consequently, forcing trauma survivors to repeatedly recount their stories through debriefing amounts to malpractice.
At an Omega Institute conference, van der Kolk showed a video of a car crash survivor whose severe trauma stemmed from her absolute certainty that she was going to die. This mirrored Diane's own realization during Donald's reckless driving incident.
Loretta Malta explains that military personnel trained to protect who are forced to stand by as passive witnesses to violence suffer immense regret, shame, and guilt. Their natural fight-or-flight responses are restricted, and the resulting numbness, isolation, and avoidance behaviors perpetuate their trauma.
China Marines like Donald Watkins witnessed civilian suffering and handled human remains daily without the ability to intervene, compounding their psychological injuries. Veterans still required mental health support 50 years post-WWII, and men above age 65 face the highest risk of suicide.
10 Key Ideas
- Parental substance addiction and totalizing military cultures create environments where survivors must learn extreme hypervigilance to endure ongoing chaos.
- Archival investigations reveal massive biographical gaps involving wartime atrocities, psychiatric institutionalization, and aggressive historical treatments.
- Patients at St. Elizabeths Hospital during the mid-twentieth century endured harsh and experimental psychiatric treatments.
- China Marines faced extreme brutality and encountered horrific mutilations by Japanese forces that left deep, enduring psychological trauma.
- Shifting diagnostic terms and radical veteran activism forced institutions to recognize war trauma and mental injuries.
- Direct radical action by Vietnam veterans forced the Department of Veterans Affairs to confront the catastrophic personal toll of untreated war trauma.
- Farview State Hospital functioned not as a medical facility but as a brutal warehouse characterized by systemic torture, abuse, and murder.
- Persistence in archival research and modern search tools can unlock historical legal mysteries after decades of dead ends.
- Roy Diamond and Joshua Goldblum used a writ of habeas corpus supported by Dr. Thomas Szasz to free Donald Watkins from indefinite commitment at Farview State Hospital after 22 years of confinement.
- Witnessing atrocities and being unable to intervene can inflict deeper moral injury and psychological damage than personal combat exposure.