4,537 Comments for Pennhurst State School

This picture really bothers me. A medicine cabinet "inside" a shower stall, Pink paint in the men's room.....okay..... The steps at the window appear to be a permenant fixture rather than a random placement. Theres no theraputic reason for them... perhaps it was an entrance - for visitors that didnt want to be noticed?
Motts, was there a roof or something right outside the window maybe?

Motts, if you were to guess... what would you say this room might have been used for?

a friend of motts?

Llaynay... with all due respect... If the Owner of this site doesn't seem to commented on the "POST A COMMENT ON THIS PHOTOGRAPH"
why then should it bother you if someone sees a view different than yours? I believe that is what the whole it' about... each person's point of view..... (Motts, I hope you didn't mind me writing this, I know its not a message board)

Lynne where do you work?

It appears as if it is someone with long dark hair ether walking up the attic steps either with something slung over the shoulder or someone sitting against the wall with their arm over their knee. You can only view it threw the sun light streaming in. WHAT A WONDERFUL SHOT!

at the top of the loft there is a guy in a baseball hat with his head down

Nah, all large residential centers have morgues. You have to understand that the majority of people who lived in these places were folks with some pretty serious physical/medical/behavioral needs and that even with the best of care (which this group of folks obviously did not get) by definition deaths were expected, as these people were sent here for life. And given that many of these folks did not have families to claim them after they died, you couldn't just dump them somewhere for the city to collect and dispose of, so they were often buried on the institution grounds.

These days a morgue in a residential facility is where you keep people until they are transferred out to the local medical examiner's office, which most folks are these days, exactly so they can rule out (or rule in) abuse and homicide as a possible cause of death. However, sad to say there are still people living in institutional facilities with no one to claim them when they die, so some things haven't changed.

This was a different age and different time and it's always been easier to judge people with 20-20 hindsight than to advocate for government to give more money to the states to provide for folks with serious handicaps. That is true even today. It's always been easier to toss bricks at the people who worked at these facilities with people that no one else would take care of, who did not have adequate facilities and supplies, who had crappy salaries, who had no support from other people in doing the difficult jobs they did, who had atrocious staffing ratios, and who received minimal training and compensation but who kept these societally rejected people alive, than it has been to understand what an impossible job these staff had and how remarkable it is that they kept as many people alive as they did doing work that very few people will do even today.

Just a little note of levity there. ;-)

Stepping down off soapbox now.

Well, a "state school" was basically a hospital for young people with mental illnesses, and many of them had physical ailments as well because of birth defects and other complications. Some of them needed constant medical attention, and as with any hospital, there will be many deaths involved with treating these people, especially when we didn't have the medical technology and understanding of today.

What's most unnerving is the fact that this so-called "school" needed a morgue. Excuse me, but was the policy 'abuse 'em til you lose 'em'?

Willowbrook was in Staten Island..

Out of all the pictures I have looked at on this site over the few hours, this is the one that disturbs me the most. The thought of some small child knowing that their friends didnt "make" it, just makes me want to cry.

I could have ended up in place like Fernald or Pennhurst had I been born earlier in the century.
I was born in 1969. My IQ registers quite high, 137, but I have endured severed depression my entire life. A lot of it is hereditary, some was environmental.
I was depressed, withdrawn, didn't socialize well, and was easily frustrated in childhood. These exhibited behaviors might have classified me as an "almost."

Eh, not really. It would be scare if there was a bag of bones on the the thing! Otherwise, it's just a slab. Most of us will end up on a slab not much different from this, but by the time you're there, you don't care anymore.
How do you feel now, Java?

The story that made Geraldo Rivera famous was his expose of the Willowbrook state school on Long Island. I believe that was 1972.
As both Motts and Cecilia point out, parents with seriously handicapped children were encouraged to "put away" the child and forget about him/her.
Families often felt ashamed of having a retarded or mentally ill member, a holdover from the "eugenics" attitude prevalent in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
This attitude of "denial" continued straight through the 1950s, in spite of muckraking books, such as "Shame of the States."
From what I've read, there was a lot of talk about reforms in the professional community in the '60s, but Geraldo's "Willowbrook" report grabbed America's dirty secret and flung it right in the face of the general public. Willowbrook may have paved the way for the Pennhurst lawsuit.