Comments

Thanks for the wonderful album. I became intrigued with this place when I stumbled onto it during a recent bike ride, and came upon your site while doing some google sleuthing to uncover what the buildings had once been. Thanks for the 'tour' through your fantastic photos. All the best! JFR

Dr. Gair is not involved in the hope part only the doubt cast on hope

peace

Here is a quote from Dr. Gair and the link to the entire, hope filled article for today's young psychiatric consumers

http://www.boston.com/...with_hugs/?page=full

Dr. Donald Gair, professor emeritus of psychiatry at Boston University and an expert in the clinical and legal ramifications of seclusion and restraints, praised the work of the team at Cambridge Hospital. Yet he warned their success might be difficult to replicate, because a unit's entire staff would truly have to believe in the program to make it succeed.

''People might read about this and leap into it prematurely, and it might not work," said Gair.

Gair also warned against adopting too strict a policy against restraints. In his 16 years as superintendent of the Gabler Unit of Metropolitan State Hospital, Gair said, staffers resorted to restraints because ''there was no [other] way to put a limit on the extremes of behavior that would come out."

I also had a friend named on the ward named Patty, a fellow patient who had been a runaway and prostitute on the street before Gaebler, whom Mike was purchasing sexual services from, this didn't happen in a vacuum either. Given her trauma experience that was just the kind of treatment Patty needed right?

There was an old Italian cafeteria worker "Mike" who handed food to kids as they slid their trays through the serving line before sitting down to eat. If you were particularly overmedicated, nodding out from too much thorazine even as Mike handed you your slop on a plate; he would shout loudly: "hey kid WHY DON'T YOU WAKE UP TO THE FACT THAT YOU'RE LIVING!"
The staff person who supervised the line, always a counselor from the ward, never breathed a word to Mike to stop this verbal/emotional abuse.
Mike did this during the entire two and a half years I was at Gaebler. That tells you something about the culture of the place I think. I was more than once the drugged out kid he screamed at, so I do know the suffering you went through Pookie, believe me.

Jann Pinkowitz is not my real name

http://profiles.bu.edu/Donald.Gair

Dr. Gair graduated from Harvard College (1945) and Harvard Medical School (1950). His general psychiatry residency training was completed at the Boston Psychopathic Hospital (1954) and his child psychiatry fellowship at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center (1958) (same hospital, new name). He studied neurology at the National Hospital at Queens Square in London during the period of his general psychiatry residency (1953-1954). He was Clinical Director and later Superintendent of the Gaebler Children’s Center, the Massachusetts Dept of Mental Health state hospital for children under 16, from 1973 to 1989 and was Chair of the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine from 1983 to 1998. Dr. Gair currently consults to the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and teaches and supervises PGY3 residents during their Child/Adolescent Psychiatry rotation and also PGY4 residents on an elective basis.

Dear Pookie,
Dr. Donald Gair was in fact Heathwood's superior and he was ultimately responsible. That is a fact...he could have fired or controlled Heathwood. If you do a little research like a simple google "Dr. Donald Gair Gaebler Children's Unit" you will find what I say is true.
But sadly I know of Dr. Gair from the personal experience of two and a half years as an inpatient on Ward E in the seventies...he was as I recall a strict and hateful man. If you read any of the psychiatric articles or news interviews for that matter, which you can find online that he either authored or spoke with interviewers you will see that he favors force in treatment.

It is sobering to view the final resting places of those who have gone on before us. Some day, according to the Holy Scriptures, their bodies will rise again in the final Resurrection. "Thy dead shall live, their bodies shall rise; O dwellers in the dust, awake and sing for joy!"

Well ya think they could've at least gotten a shovel and buried it, what with the challenge of driving it through all that brush. Arghhh!

Mica, I was just over at that Facebook site. Amazing the work those folks are doing clearing out all that overgrowth and foliage.

Something about those carvings remind me of lettuce.

I agree. It's so sad to see dilapidated cemeteries. There's just no excuse for vandalism. Let the dead rest in peace.

And now I'm thinking of the Wicked Witch of the West...."Poppies...poppies will make them sleep."