1 Comments Posted by Baili

That's not a monster painted on the back wall. If you look carefully, you'll see that it's the side of a gingerbread house. The walls are brown and those "eyes" are actually peppermints made to look like shingles. The room was painted like a candy-land. It actually probably wasn't such a bad place to play (besides the hard floors and walls).

And there was a lot of terrible things that happened at Pennhurst as well as a lot of other homes for the infirm, as they called them. Things that are awful by any account - sexual and physical abuse - , no matter the time or place. But many of the things that happened - the neglect, the experimental surgeries and treatments were what was in common practice at the time. Not because they were all sadists, but because that's where they were along the timeline of medicine. You all should remember that psychiatry and psychology are fairly young sciences and that resources for mentally and physically handicapped individuals didn't exist until more recently.

I'm not making a case for what they did or defending them in anyway. I think that the time that those people spent there was terrible and my heart aches for each and every one of them because no one deserves to be abandoned and stripped of who they are. Everyone should have an advocate and should feel loved and valued throughout their lives. But the majority of the people that worked there had good intentions. They were doing what was considered to be the helpful thing at the time.