1,944 Comments for Worcester State Hospital

One thing to remember is that for people with Mental Retardation, developmental disabilities or many mental illnesses, the institutional life could be very comfortable.

Now, I don't mean comfortable in the down comforter and feather bead sense of the word, but things in the institution are stable and unchanging. Meals are served on time at the same time. Everything is done on a routine and therefore there are no surprises, nothing unexpected. When you are MR/DD or have certain mental disorders changes and surprises can be down right intimidating if not plain frightening.

Moving out of a place like this after years or decades would be like being suddenly dropped in a foreign country. That was what I did. I worked in transitional facilities for Mentally Retarded multiply diagnossed former institutional "inmates." My clients' biggest fears were not communal showers or bed checks, but living in a world where life does not happen the same way every day.

As eerie as it seems.. you can almost hear a child crying when you look at the picture

i just have to say i love this shot!

Uh oh... It's been opened *runs shrieking in terror*

from"Divine commedy"(il vestibolo infernale)
"per me si va nella citta' dolente;per me si va nell'eterno dolore..........

for those love sickness...great!!!!!!

just read my posting, sorry for the misspelling. Has nothing to do with my state of mind just an inablility to type

ECT is still used today when conventional theraoies and medices don't I heve never had it but it was presented as a last resort. My understanding is that you are sedated. Depending on how much you've had, you can expierience long term memory lost among other things. My Great Aunt had it over60 plus years for postpartum depression. She is in her nineties unfortunatly no longer with the program. I dont believe this is because of her age because her siblings were all fine in their old age.

Well Lynne, I found this place by googling for abandoned institutions... I lost my UE virginity (so to speak) a while back in an old TV studio in Leeds and fancied giving an old facility on the edge of town a look.

I stuck around after I found the Danvers pages (my girlfriend, who lives in MA, told me abou this one) and became fascinated by Pennhurst just because it's so unbelievably eerie and there's a wealth of information on the Web about it (and so many stories surrounding the place). It's a perfect candidate for a film IMO...

At first I spent about 3 days going through the site looking at all the incredible photos, now I tend to check the Comments section first for interesting posts. But there's so many ways to explore it, kinda like an abandoned building I guess!

Either way I think it's the combination of the incredible 'eye' Motts has for a good image, the subject matter itself and the fascinating comments which are the perfect accompaniment to the photographs which makes this site one to visit daily.

rich,

I figure that people do the same thing I did when I first found this site, and that is that they grab a section and go through it and then haphazardly look through whatever grabs their fancy. Given how many stunning sections of photographs are here, that means you could end up anywhere. Every time I see an assumption in a comment that "the world is black-and-white" and "everything associated with institutions is/was evil" it seems that, in all fairness, some clarification is warranted. It drives me that people have already made assumptions about "how all institutions were" or "how all staff were" or even "how all people who lived in these places were." I suppose I am always hoping that people will stop for a second and examine their prejudices, but I suppose I have always been somewhat of a rosy-eyed optimist. ;-)

Awww thanks! Mind, I just read back through the previous messages though and realised you made exactly the same point a few weeks ago! Well, that will teach me to review a thread before I post to it *d'oh!*

And incidentally I can see where you're coming from regarding community placements. Some people (like the girl I work with mentioned in another post) benefit massively from it, but 'Care in the Community' (as we term it) has arguably been a monumental failure on a wider level, since many ex-patients ended up homeless and isolated, or living alone without adequate support in dingy social housing, often harming themselves, and in a few extreme cases others through lack of supervision, neglecting to take meds etc. Few of the former patients of large institutions have family / friends to fall back on, which simply compounds the problem.

Closing institutions is all well and good provided there's adequate structures in place to meet the needs of the patients in other ways. I suspect that much of the motivation behind the move to community care was a dramatic reduction in expenditure brought about by expecting people to fend for themselves.

Here are some additional maxims from Dr. Pomerantz's website that may apply:

+Institutions are not built, they arise from indifference.
+You cannot move to the community, it must be built.
+When you change the way in which you see things, the things you see change.
+Being on a community placement list is not seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, it is standing on the edge of the precipice.

Oh, rich, you are marvy! :-)

Another fantastic post by Lynne. It seems that people assume that the ECT, chemical coshing' and neglect of their worst institutional nightmares still goes on, even in the modern age of human rights lawyers and formal, written procedures for everything.

All through my school years we were expected to take communal showers in a room very similar to this following games (physical ed) lessons. No-one ever called these dehumanising or exploitative, despite the fact that at 14 or 15 years old we were seeing one another as naked as the day we were born. And as far as I know they are still in use to this day.

Frequently the showers were cold because the education authority that funded the school couldn't afford to heat the water. No word of a lie. And a good friend of mine who was, erm, rather larger than average (about 25 stone, or so he later told me) was often on the end of abusive and foul-mouthed comments from other students. He sucked it in and dealt with it. Wrong of course, but certainly not unusual.

My point being that if they could 'subject' a load of 15 year-olds to this just a decade ago, is it so terrible that it happened in psychiatric establishments?

Cold water was always a possibility if the state didn't provide adequate funding for enough electricity or if there was a cruel staff member in charge of showers. This did happen in the community as well, however. Rather than thinking that institutions are a separate and specified place, it's important to keep in mind that in reality "an institution is not a place, it's a state of mind." This is a quote from Tom Pomerantz, a psychologist who does training programs for staff who work with folks with intellectual disabilities. Having worked in schools, hospitals, group homes, nursing homes, foster homes, private homes, and institutions, I assure you that what happens "in there" also happens "out here." Right now, in fact, if you do not live with your own family you may even be safer in an institutional setting (at least for folks in MR/DD settings) because of the many, many, many pairs of eyes that look at you every day, a minimum of three times a day. If someone has so much as a pimple and the previous shift does not write it up they can be in serious legal trouble. This does not happen in other settings because you don't have the same number of people coming through on a daily basis. That is the positive and the negative at the same time.

In group homes or private home settings some pretty horrible abuse happens and can continue to happen for a long stretch before someone discovers it. And hopefully it will be discovered before someone has died. In institutions today the staff have to do body checks at shower time every day on every single client and they also do a brief lookover at every shift change because they know if something is found that they didn't report, they will be called in to explain it. This doesn't mean they strip them down and do a cavity search - but they MUST do a quick check and make sure the person doesn't have any obvious cuts, bruises, "booboos," nicks, etc. I get incident reports every day over pimples and shaving nicks and mosquito bites and hangnails. I get incident reports if someone bumps into someone else or falls down and there isn't any apparent injury. I get an incident report if someone sneezes too hard.

As is the case everywhere else, abuse still occurs in institutions, just as it does in the house next to you and maybe even your own home. But I can pretty much guarantee you that it will be found much quicker and an end will be put to it much more quickly when you have lots of people whose job it is to watch to make sure you are safe and that your injuries are explainable. If there is the slightest doubt, we send staff home or to another area until an investigation occurs and abuse/neglect is ruled out. If someone has advanced osteoporosis and their t-score is so far off whack that you can't believe they are able to bear weight without snapping and they then break a bone, we are still going to do an investigation, because we owe it to the people we have said we would watch out for.

Abuse happened and happens, but it is decreasing as the culture that created/supported it changes. However, if people continue to look for ugly things and believe the worst of everyone, pretty soon that is all that will exist for them and they'll be as trapped in their own cynicism as some people seem to want to believe that every single resident of an institution was "trapped".

I am not "pro" or "anti" institution; I am "pro" or "anti" the attitudes and behavior of the people who work there. This mirrors the outside culture. Simple as that. If you are lucky enough to have a family with the love, the means, and the resources to take care of you, that is usually the very best place to be. But for the rest of us we should be lucky enough to end up where the majority of the people who work truly care about us.

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