Elizabeth Parsons Ware Packard (28 December 1816 – 25 July 1897), also known as E.P.W. Packard, was an American advocate for the rights of women and people accused of insanity.

At the insistence of her parents, Elizabeth Parsons Ware married Calvinist minister Theophilus Packard, fourteen years her senior and said to be "cold and domineering", on 21 May 1839. The couple had six children. They lived in Western Massachusetts until September 1854. Beginning in 1857, after having lived in Ohio and Iowa for short periods, the family moved to Manteno, Kankakee County, Illinois, and appeared to have a peaceful and uneventful marriage.

Theophilus, however, held quite decisive religious beliefs. After many years of marriage, Elizabeth Packard outwardly questioned her husband's beliefs and began expressing opinions that were contrary to his. While the main subject of their dispute was religion, the couple also disagreed on child rearing, family finances, and the issue of slavery, with Elizabeth defending John Brown, which embarrassed Theophilus.

When Illinois opened its first hospital for the mentally ill in 1851, the state legislature passed a law that within two years of its passage was amended to require a public hearing before a person could be committed against his or her will. There was one exception, however: a husband could have his wife committed without either a public hearing or her consent. In 1860, Theophilus Packard judged that his wife was "slightly insane", a condition he attributed to "excessive application of body and mind". He arranged for a doctor, J.W. Brown, to speak with her. The doctor pretended to be a sewing machine salesman. During their conversation, Elizabeth complained of her husband's domination and his accusations to others that she was insane. Brown reported this conversation to Theophilus (along with the observation that Mrs. Packard "exhibited a great dislike to me"). Theophilus decided to have Elizabeth committed. She learned of this decision on June 18, 1860, when the county sheriff arrived at the Packard home to take her into custody.

Elizabeth Packard spent the next three years at the Jacksonville Insane Asylum in Jacksonville, Illinois (now the Jacksonville Developmental Center). She was regularly questioned by her doctors bupt refused to agree that she was insane or to change her religious views. In June 1863, due, in part, to pressure from her children, who wished her released, the doctors declared that she was incurable and discharged her.p Upon her discharge, Theophilus locked her in the nursery of their home and nailed the windows shut. Elizabeth managed to drop a letter complaining of this treatment out the window, which was delivered to her friend Sarah Haslett. Sarah Haslett in turn delivered the letter to Judge Charles Starr, who issued a writ of habeas corpus ordering Theophilus to bring Elizabeth to his chambers to discuss the matter. After being presented with Theophilus' evidence, Judge Starr scheduled a jury trial to allow a legal determination of Elizabeth's sanity to take place.

The jury took only seven minutes to find in Elizabeth's favor. She was legally declared sane, and Judge Charles Starr, who had changed the trial from one about habeas corpus to one about sanity, issued an order that she should not be confined.

In 1867, the State of Illinois passed a "Bill for the Protection of Personal Liberty" which guaranteed that all people accused of insanity, including wives, had the right to a public hearing. She also saw similar laws passed in three other states. Even so, she was strongly attacked by medical professionals and anonymous citizens, unlike others such as Dorothea Dix, with her former doctor from the Jacksonville Insane Asylum, Dr. McFarland, who privately called her "a sort of Joan D'Arc in the matter of stirring up the personal prejudices". As such, Elizabeth's work on this front was "broadly unappreciated" while she was alive. She only received broader recognition, starting in the 1930s, by a well-known historian of mental illness, Albert Deutsch, and again in the 1960s from those who were "attacking the medical model of insanity".

The case drew state and nationwide attention. The Illinois Legislature appointed a five member Congressional Oversight Commitee to investigate charges brought by Elizabeth and six other patients that she had compiled and printed into a best-selling book, detailing their experiences under Dr. McFarland and the refusal of the Board of Trustees to act on them, as they sided with him, citing that patient testimonials couldn't be trusted as, obviously, the patients giving them were insane and therefore unreliable. Led by House of Represenative member Allen C. Fuller, an almost year long investigated showed abuses that ranged from water torture, restraints, beatings, chokings, and other actions to shocking to mention. The recommendation of the Committee was the termanation of Dr. McFarland.

When the Board of Trustees refused to receive the report due to the legislature not being in session (and wouldn't be for another year), Representative Fuller leaked the report to a friend at the Chicago Tribune. It's findings were published in December of 1868, and made national headlines, shocking not just Illinoisans but those around the country and even the world. When the legislature finally sat for a new Congress in 1869, Dr. McFarland turned in resignation before he could be fired, but not before receiving glowing reports from his Board of Trustees the previous years, including a gift of a gold-tipped cane for all his outstanding work at the facilty.

In the 1950s and 1960s, my own grandmother was a patient at the then-called Jacksonville State Hospital for what we now believe to be schizophrenia. As a her granddaughter and a fellow mental health sufferer myself (depression, anxiety and PTSD), I am apalled that now that the Jacksonville State Hospital is closed (recently memory may remember it at the Jacksonville Developmental Center), our local residental mental health facilty here in Springfield, built in 1968, is called the Andrew McFarland Mental Health Center.

WHY IS OUR LOCAL MENTAL HEALTH FACILTY NAMED AFTER A MAN WHO WAS KNOWN FOR ABUSING PATIENTS AND KNOWLINGLY ADMITTING SANE WOMEN WITHOUT A FAIR HEARING, ONLY BASED ON THE WORD OF A HUSBAND WHO "DIDN'T LIKE HOW SHE THOUGHT"?????

Please help me get the name of Dr. Andrew McFarland taken of of mental health buildings here in Springfield, where he can no longer do any more harm to the mental health of the female population of women in Illinois. Thank you!!