“The history of mental health is almost always told by psychiatrists and hardly ever by patients or through patients’ lives,” said Darby Penney, “so this is pretty amazing.” Ms. Penney, who worked in the New York State Office of Mental Health, and Dr. Peter Stastny, a psychiatrist and documentary filmmaker, spent years piecing together what happened to 25 patients from their belongings, medical records and interviews.

In their poignant detail the items helped rescue these individuals from the dark sprawl of anonymity. But barely a dozen of the thousands of objects, now in the New York State Museum’s collection, are in this tiny traveling exhibition.

The heart of the display consists of seven-foot-high panels, each with a sepia-tone portrait of one of the nine patients featured, their life stories and photographs of them and their cache of belongings. The same information and much more is on the Web site suitcaseexhibit.org and in a forthcoming book, “The Lives They Left Behind: Suitcases From a State Hospital Attic” (Bellevue Literary Press), written by Ms. Penney and Dr. Stastny with photographs by Lisa Rinzler.

Margaret, a tuberculosis nurse, owned the most suitcases and boxes, 18 in all. (Confidentiality laws prevented the authors from using the patients’ real last names.) Inside were the makings of a home: dishes, pots and pans, a Japanese porcelain vase, a percolator, lamps, clothing, a bone-china teacup and saucer, hundreds of photos, her nursing diploma, citizenship papers and a pair of ice skates. Suffering from TB herself, and stressed over a series of illnesses and deaths among her loved ones, she was brought to Willard in 1941 without ever having seen a psychiatrist on the basis of complaints that she “annoys people” and felt persecuted. On her way to the ward Margaret, 48, said she felt “like a fly in a spider web.” She died there 32 years later.

Like many of the women who ended up in this hospital, Ms. Penney said, Margaret was an immigrant and had little or no family nearby. The patients were definitely troubled, she added, but the cause was often an immediate crisis like a death in the family or the loss of a job, something that would rarely need lifelong commitment.