Kristyn Vinikour - The Gennie Messages (2009)

A project telling the true story of Genevieve “Gennie” Pilarski, a manic-depressive who was committed to Monteno State Hospital in Illinois by her parents in 1944 at the age of 25. By 1950, Gennie was placed in a research ward at MSH where she was involuntarily experimented on for years. 

For the rest of her life, she was sent from ward to ward and nursing home to nursing home. It was at one of these nursing homes, at the age of 80, that she died, a ward of the state. For the last 20 years of her life she was “incapable of any kind of human interaction” and spent her last days “buried under her bedclothes or roaming the halls of her nursing home, drooling and babbling“.