1,256 Comments for Foxboro State Hospital

They're coming to take you away, hahah.
What happens if you get caught? You get a fine or what?

I've seen dead people in similar freezers and I don't find those places attractive. Not at all. But this vintage styled freezer holds some real stories.

amazing view, so lonely, yet serene.

It wasnt just for your feminine side, A sitz bath, can be enjoyed by either sex after hemorhhoid surgery. The men sing oh what a relief it is as loud as the ladies.. It also proivided my Dad some relief during his battle with prostate cancer.

Hey my union is picketing out there as we speak.

My problem isn't lost "soles" screaming, it's the darn socks that just won't stay with their partners. One runs off and I never do see it again. Its poor little partner is almost useless after that, relegated to being nothing more that a dusting rag for the rest its life. :-)

Guitorman, what kind of medals are given today? I know about the medals that Alcoholics Anonymous has for people celebrating milestones of sobriety, but is that what you mean?

The word "senile" makes me think of an elderly person whose memory and ability to live independently are failing due to an organic process in their brain. But "deranged" and "demented" conjure images of sociopaths, serial killers, mass murderers. I know that "demented" derives from "dementia" and refers to the loss of abilities many elderly people experience, especially after the age of 80-85. But I think in common usage, "demented" has a connotation of evil that "dementia" doesn't have. If I'm remembering correctly, there is a type of dementia caused by long-term alcohol abuse (Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome). I'd be interested to hear what others think of when they hear the various words used to describe mental problems.

Thanks, old timer. Your voice of wisdom and truth, as well as your past service, is very much appreciated. I'm sure the patients did pray that their condition would improve so they could return home, escaping not the hospital, but the problems caused by their illness. A person who believes in God knows that there is no "god forsaken" place or person. A person may turn away from God, but not the other way around.

Hopefully the police, the governor, the protective service agency, etc. were called whenever the screams of the patients were heard. If people really thought the patients were being tortured and just sat back and let it happen....at least the residents of the towns around the Nazi death camps claimed to have never had any idea of what was going on.

But I'd probably scream too, if someone tried to do any "expire-mnts" on me. I'd like to live a few more years. :-)

I'm sure the escape attempt made the local paper. How about a citation for the article so the rest of us can also be enlightened? (even the most psychotic person I've ever known would know that jumping off the roof of the hospital building would only result in landing at the base of the same building!) Not everything has to be a horror story. All the sensationalizing diminishes the truth of the lives of the people who lived and worked here.

I don't find the morgue shots at all disturbing, aside from the knowledge that they mean a life in this world has ended and there is sadness associated with that. On the practical side, they are nothing more than a temporary and necessary storage space pending transfer of the body to a funeral home. From a medical perspective, the autopsies help further our knowledge and hopefully lead to advances in treatment that prevent deaths in the future. I don't associate them with evil or patients having been tortured or bodies being forgotten in them. People go to hospitals because they are sick, some sick people die, therefore hospitals have morgues. In the rare event that abuse or neglect did cause or contribute to the patient's death, the autopsy can reveal that and the person responsible can be prosecuted.

*falls off chair

Really now...if they stored bodies in that safe, they would have had to miniaturize them first, with that invention from "Honey, I Shrank the Kids." If the results of the experimentation were really such a road to scientific fame, we would all know about it by now. So I have to conclude that this insistence on the reality of non-existent experiments is an example of what "they" call a fixed delusion.

Several of the comments on this photo brilliantly illustrate the axiom "a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing." People who choose to become doctors, psychologists, nurses, social workers, therapists, aides, etc. and to specialize in work with individuals with mental illness/developmental disabilities do it precisely *because* they believe those individuals are valuable, worthy of assistance and care, and have much to contribute to the world. The jobs are too hard unless you have those beliefs. This erroneous assumption that "they" considered the patients "useless to the world" may reflect a great deal more about the beliefs of the one who makes such an accusation than it does about "they" who are accused.

Autism is manifested in many different ways in different people. That's why there is not one simple picture of "autism." Instead, we have "autism spectrum disorders." Some people with this diagnosis may show evidence of it only in specific situations and need only a little support. Others have much more severe symptoms that seriously impair every facet of their lives, all day, every day, in ways that are almost impossible to imagine except by personal experience. It stresses the entire family, and parents of a child with an autism spectrum disorder have a much higher than average rate of divorce.

It takes far more than "just a few problems" to result in admission to a state psychiatric hospital. The decision to pursue commitment is only made when there are no other alternatives available or when the other, less restrictive options have been tried without success. "Insane" is not a blanket label given to someone who is a bit eccentric. Each disorder has specific criteria that must be present for the diagnosis to be made. I would be interested to learn what "insane" means to those who think the patients "were not really insane."

Lobotomies were an attempt to find some form of treatment that would help the patients who had not improved with the other treatment modalities available at the time. Some patients were helped. Others deteriorated further. When modern medications first became available, lobotomies were no longer done. As awful as we think they were, with our 20/20 hindsight, at the time they were seen as a last chance for someone who had not been helped by anything else available at the time. Just as today, there are people who seek out experimental treatments in the hope of finding some way to cure their cancer or halt the progression of dementia.

The idea of the Russian steam bath makes sense to me. When I go into a steam room, I feel like I am suffocating. I think I would like something like this, that kept my head in cooler, drier air and let my body benefit from the steam (and NO, this is NOT what is called waterboarding today!).

When people in town found out about what was happening in the hospital, what did they do?

Just a few questions:

1) Were the experiments done in the bathtub, or was the tub used to clean the patients afterward?

2) If you don't know what kind of experiments they were, how do you know there were any experiments at all?

3) If you can't describe the "experimental juices," how do you know there were any juices at all?

4)If these barbaric experiments were done, why weren't the records destroyed? Obviously this sort of experimentation would have to remain secret, but the records were just dumped in an old farmhouse?

5) Just how did you become the one--the few-- who knows all these dreadful secrets? With all the class action lawsuits that led to deinstitutionalization, wouldn't some lawyer have already come across this experimentation and used it to help win the case?

Now a few facts:

1) There was a strong eugenics movement in the US, which the National Socialist Party under Hitler took to the gross atrocities of the "Final Solution." By the time the Nazis were in full force committing crimes against humanity, the eugenics movement in the US was in decline.

2) Involuntary sterilization operations were done in the US, made legal under state laws and upheld by the Supreme Court in a majority opinion written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. There were a few doctors who thought that it was best to withhold treatment from newborns with severe abnormalities, but this never went further than a few isolated cases. While there were plenty of people who wanted to prevent individuals with mental illness, and more particularly those with mental retardation, from having children, there was never any proposal to "eliminate" people already living. An excellent book on these topics is "War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race" by Edwin Black.

3)There were experiments done without the kind of informed consent and other ethical safeguards we consider mandatory today, but those experiments were not exclusive to psychiatric hospitals and institutions for people with developmental disabilities (think of the Tuskegee airmen or the studies of deliberate air contamination over towns and schools, etc.).

Finally, it is always a good idea to question, to verify, to THINK. Sometimes people take a subject that has a grain of truth, and expand on it until it fills a whole silo, just to see how much outrageous BS they can get others to accept. Believing and spreading this kind of garbage does nothing to further the cause of better care for people with mental disabilities. It only makes people skeptical of everything you say, and plenty of regrettable actions really did happen. There's no need to embellish with such far-fetched nonsense that serves only to diminish the real suffering that did occur.

sorry so long. I tried to not say anything, but the more I thought about it, the more I had to respond. At least I finally figured out how to arrange my posts in paragraphs instead of one big block :-)