1,382 Comments for Dixmont State Hospital

It just came over the local news that Dixmont is on fire right now. Fire crews have just been called out.

The only chance I really get to be one on one with on of our residents, is when they flip out, and we have to stay with them till the psych doctor comes.

This is my first post...Execellent site Mr. Motts, your amazing! Yea..this door looked like a psychiatric patient was a bit pissed and wanted to escape that bad that they broke the door open

the disability history website is great, it has alot of information on a wide range to topics. its worth a visit.

*Blushes*

Truckie, I wasn't implying that you did or didn't find something on your camera. I was just noting that once when I thought my camera was taking "spooky" pix it turned out to be something else. I've quoted Don Marquis' cockroach, archy, before, but here goes again:

"you want to know whether i believe in ghosts of course i do not believe in them if you had known as many of them as i have you would not believe in them either"

Hats off to you Motts. Congratts on another superb job in the galleries

kind of what my skin feels like when i have to go into the "treatment room"

I can assure you it was not a dirty lens, because all the other pictures I took on the same day were OK.

Motts, i can't belive some of the glass stood the tests of time

looking at these photo's helps my work night go bye so much easier. thanks motts

You've got a sick mind rich. actually i was thinking about that earlier.

rich,

It used to be a common thing back in the 50s to 70s to take school children to institutions for field trips. The intent was educational, but as soon as people with disabilities began to be seen as "people," this practice died off. Back in the 1500-1700s in both England and the US people would pay admission to go to the "lunatic asylums" on weekends and get their entertainment staring at the "inmates."

http://www.cwu.edu/~warren/addenda.html
"Public admission to the wards at Bethlehem Hospital, London, was discontinued. For at least 200 years, visits to 'Bedlam' had been a common entertainment for Londoners, but the practice became more restricted after 1766."

http://ise.uvic.ca/Lib.../society/bedlam.html
"And why visit? Not necessarily to see relatives, or to offer charity. The sight of the mentally disturbed became a spectacle, an entertainment."

http://www.disabilitymuseum.org/lib/docs/1315card.htm
"Considerable anxiety is sometimes expressed by persons who derive a morbid satisfaction from looking on scenes of human misery, as to the propriety, safety, &c., of their visiting the Asylum. This diseased state of the sentiments is most incident to those who have been badly educated..."

http://www.disabilitymuseum.org/lib/docs/1124.htm
This is a fascinating article from 1852 written by the Superintendent of Butler Hospital in Rhode Island. You can see that the same issues we discuss today were relevant back then as well.

http://en.wikipedia.or...sychiatric_hospitals
This is a good overview on the history of psychiatric hospitals, types of hospitals and treatments, and, most interesting to me, a discussion about how mental illness and psychiatric hospitals are portrayed in the media.

Finally, if anyone is truly interested in the history of disabilities there is probably no better source for historical documents than the Disability Library Museum, available on the Internet. I believe to profit from it you need to read more than one or two of these original source articles to get a feel for the history of the field, but I have spent many, many hours over many months going through these documents and I find them fascinating and a great backdrop to the pix Motts has taken. Some of the facilities he has photographed are discussed in these papers, so you can actually read about these places from a time when they were still in use.

http://www.disabilitymuseum.org/lib/
Disability History Museum
"Mission: The Disability History Museum's mission is to promote understanding about the historical experience of people with disabilities by recovering, chronicling, and interpreting their stories. Our goal is to help foster a deeper understanding of disability and to dispel lingering myths, assumptions, and stereotypes by examining these cultural legacies."

Oh, no! Don't be goin' there! They have real live terrorist training going on there and you might get shot! Honest to God! These Homeland Security people seem to be the most paranoid folks out there, so they will truly shoot you if you go there! Ix! Nix! No!

Sadly that is the truth some places. Even regular hospitals. I went in for a heart murmor and they wanted to give that to me since my sister was concerned about having me stay overnight for a known problem that my regular doctor was fully aware of.

Needless to say I walked out against medical advice. Find out that this hospital, yes regular hospital, is known to give Haldol out to help the night shift. Especially on the cardiac ward!