490 Comments for Mesa State Training School

Whoa, are those boxes of files?
Waaaant!

So they would restrain the patients bodies?
Was it only for the more spastic of the patients?

liquid helium....liquid nitrogen? ummm, all u would see of me would be ass and elbows if I came across that

Usually (or at least I thought so until seeing this and other photos on this site) one of the big questions a state has to answer when closing down at institution is where to store all of its records. Then every social worker/psychologist/nurse etc. has to try to keep track of where the state has Hospital X records this year (they tend to move them around as other institutions shut down, or departmental space is re-allocated). That's why I always asked for a copy of a person's entire institutional record upon discharge, and when the DD center here was being closed I requested the records of any person we served who had ever been there.

I wonder if any of the agencies serving people with developmental disabilities near where this facility is located know about all this equipment that has just been left here. If they do know, I wonder if they have asked the state about acquiring it. Sometimes all it takes is someone asking for it, or letting advocates know about it, and letting them work to get it to the people who need it.

In my state, and I would think in most other states too, the law mandating the closure of the institution contained specific procedures for the community placement of the residents. We were required to ensure that the community placements included all services at least equal to the services the people were getting in the institution. There was a court monitor and very close follow-up after each person's discharge until all services had been in place for 18 consecutive months after discharge from the institution. The state provided start-up money to the community agencies. In some cases people were moved to vacancies in existing homes, but in most cases we set up new 3-person homes for them. I think when institutions for psychiatric patients were closed or downsized, there was a lot less planning and follow-up, and people may have been just "pushed out." There was so much planning and oversight for the resident of institutions for the developmentally delayed because most of them had very intense medical and behavioral needs and very involved families (the people who were "easy" to place in the community were discharged in most cases between 1975 and 1988).

When I was involved with the closure of an institution for people with developmental disabilities, we were allowed to take the pieces of equipment used by the individuals we were moving to community group homes. So we got their wheelchairs, shower trolleys, and other pieces of positioning/mobility equipment, which helped reduce our start-up costs. Whatever was not being used by the last individuals living in the institution, or what was being used but was not wanted/needed by the community agencies, went to state surplus property and is probably still sitting in a warehouse somewhere 11 years later. The facility itself was turned into a prison, and it made me so angry to see how, on my last few visits there, all the maintenance that had been "deferred" while the disabled lived there was now being done by the Dept. of Corrections, even before the facility was closed for good.

When I would get a new person on my caseload, I would request all of his/her records and complete a new comprehensive social history. For people who had been in the system for decades, this was boxes and boxes of info and hours--sometimes days--of work, but it was worth it. It was amazing to rediscover things that at one time had been known about the person but had been "lost" or "forgotten" in the intervening years, had come to be considered (and documented) as "unknown," but really it was there in the record all along. It just hadn't been brought forward appropriately, and then it became easier to assume that it was unknown than to search for it. Sometimes the lost information explained lots of aspects of a person's behaviors.(I have some compulsive tendencies and always wanted to know all there was to know about each person with whom I worked, so I dug until there was no digging left to do.)

I can't speak for this facility, but at all the places I've worked with people with developmental disabilities, the doctors and dentists prescribed whatever sedation the patient needed, whether that was a benzo before the appointment, nitrous, IV sedation, or some combination. However, as these were considered "chemical restraints," we also had to implement a dental desensitization program, which is great in theory but not if a person needs immediate dental treatment and doesn't have the several months or more that it might take for him/her to get comfortable with dental treatment. I think that the dental clinic in the institution also had some means of physical restraint to use when required, called a "papoose board" if memory serves me. this would be used only in emergencies, not for routine care.

Best picture of the collection in my opinion. It looks (kinda) like someone got up and walked out, away from the wheelchair into the sun!
ahhhhhhhhhhhhh... (gets stupidly imaginative)

I actually gasped aloud at this one xD SO MANY FILES! It's insane...

The stuff here is much more hi tech than some of your other locations, and it's a little upsetting that it's not bewing used! Nice to see the old equipment though, very cool xD

Imma go this way you can head back =D I will stick to the light.

Looks like an old bath chair!

I would love to read this stuff, it would be very insightful!