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Worcester State Hospital | | | Silent Creatures |  |
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Worcester State Hospital | | | Silent Creatures | |
Maybe they have individual stalls for everyone these days, though. It's been many a year since I was in a junior high or high school, and that was when I was doing psych testing for the school districts, and I luckily never needed to go near the showers. :-)
I do believe mass showering was thought of as a timesaver. Hosing down in particular would get the job done even faster. I doubt the patients showered daily. What a horrible thing to have to undertake-by both staff and patients.
This little washdown facility may have doubled as routine mass hygiene and as intervention/punishment. Think of COLD water.
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
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.
http://www.universalli ... rticles_poems.html
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?
+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.
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.
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. ;-)
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.
"per me si va nella citta' dolente;per me si va nell'eterno dolore..........
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.
...I'll say again, externally and internally, the purpose of these places was sanctuary.
These were not horrific places to begin with....(some of the history is bad, bad ,bad, but...) the reason for them was good and caring.
This being said ,in my opinion...there probably were some pretty horrible happenings over the years.
If we circumnavigate the whole
imprisonment/ institution/ asylum issue and look beyond our ken and try to see the core, we may see, again, that these buildings were built as homes...sanctuaries....
Look at postcards of some of the more respectful hospitals (a lot of these hospitals are on this site!) and see that there was pride in the facilities! Changes in the internal structure are due to stress, misunderstanding, misinformation, egoism, and mis-staffing (not, mind ya'll, in order.) Those changes alone caused potential and permanent damage . Oh yeah, they did.
Visceral? look at the buildings and know, in your gut that they were built for good...I'm an optomist as were many of the people involved with the building of the places and the running of them.
I do realize that there were some wrongs (OK, maybe many-as in any sociaty) and they can't be righted .
Presently, I guess my jabbering applies....
Getting even more philosophical...once we were an orally historic society (nothing to do with histolology ;-] )
...now, more of a visually historic one.
What do we have without our buildings...our recorded words?
Intaglio rules -)
That pic gives me the Hebily Jebies!
Just... *Brrr...*
Thats gonna give me night mares
No argument there. NY has involuntary outpatient commitment and I've seen / known of atrocities in a wide variety of settings. Inpatient psychiatry doesn't have a monopoly by any means.
Be that as it may...
rich_edwards: > It seems that people assume that the ECT, chemical coshing' and neglect of their worst institutional nightmares still goes on<
They do. Involuntary electroconvulsive treatment still takes place in NY's psych centers. (Not each and every one of them, but yes, they have procedures and those procedures set forth exactly how one imposes electroshock on folks against their will when they wish to do so). And yes, neuroleptic drugs and shock are both used as punishment for unwanted behavior.
To me, this is only one of the reasons why your site is so fantastic.... (I'll rave more another time., OK, now.)
Your photos compel responses from many of us . I think all of our comments prove that your work "catches " tremendously varied emotions, and compels us to verbalize our feelings...an opaque rainbow of emotions, lets say....
Much like the reaction to the work of a great painter or sculpturer would be ( yeah, I sayed it! )
Because of the feelings generated, the work ends up having a following.
I love the following.
Opacity....
...As said in a comment: people find a location (here) interesting or relevant to them (or "whatever grabs their fancy ") and then make their assumptions: Perhaps believing that life is only, "black and white" (like the photos) ; or that life seems only bad or good; that it only digresses or progresses; that we only have ONE way of seeing things.
Emotions are not refutable.
Opacity....
Nothing is black or white only.
Nothing is this or that way only... it ain't so. It just ain't so...not in photos, not in movies, not in any time-line is anything only black or white; one way or another (except on a one-way street, remember for safety, please!)
Don't assume your friend or child or dog loves parsley or hot peppers as much as you do....
This said, mind you, I want it to be know that I don't do this personally. Assume, I mean... well, I really try not to cause I know too much to do this! And , well Bennie Hill said, " Never assume...."
Anyway...strong sentiments are loved by all.
Thanks from "quest" to everyone who has moved into this "community" because someone (Monsieur Motts and crew, I speak of you) cares enough for this community to be built. :-)
could the purpouse of these showers been for delousing patients?
I think I remember reading or being told that for institutions the delousing liquid was put in a pail or basin and then you doused yourself or were doused with it. The cost associated with constructing delousing showers would not have been part of an institution's budget. Actually, I am not familiar with them being used anywhere but in Germany, but I am very likely wrong. Anyone else know?
The ones in the concentration camps were very different they did not know if it was going to be gas or water they were given soap and told to wash the next time it was the gas ..
that is how it was at my junior high and highschool :o/
lol.
Anyways, nice photo Motts. I think its very interesting of how patients were washed.
Oh, nowadays. In my middle school there was three showers (stalls within stalls actually so quite private- no joke) but no one ever used them, and the water was turned off in them anyways.
My high school has private stalls too. Yay. I'm in high school now woot woot.
Lol anyways. Also, in pools and stuff they normally just have a room with some showerheads and soap dispensers. Though you are in your bathing suit......
Just my input. =)
for the record the showers at my junior high were way worse....
After hearing former clients of mine tell me how they were taken outside and hosed down in the middle of winter at the Ladd School, or how even worse, they were never given showers because they were too "high functioning" to need assistance, but not able to function well enough to bathe themselves....i think being bathed in one of these rooms would be a blessing.
Please remember that many (too many) citizens of this country (and others I am sure) lived here. And by lived, I mean this was the only home they may have had. Ever. Whether because family members had washed their hands of them, (often the case) or were unable to care for them properly...and provide for their "special needs". Thankfully care for DD, PDD and severe MH issues has come a long way (at least up North)...consider the alternatives....but it has a long way to go still.
Remember..."there but for the grace of god..."
and if your community MH or MR program lacks funding....
and is forced to consider returning to a earlier model in order to provide any sort of care....
thank a republican.
Documentary filmed by Fredrick Wisemen in 1967--about Bridgewater State Hospital. "Originally banned by the State of Massachusettes for commercial release (outside the field of education). In 1992 , MS state supreme court overturned previous ruling.
Hosing, humiliation, and force-feeding of patients are all portrayed in the film--to a disturbling and brutaly real degree. The film maker/director says nothing nor questions anyone, rather just films the general going ons and interactions of patients, orderlies, nurses and doctors.
What is most disturbing about what is shown, is the general indifference and bullying on the part of the institutions staff--as well as the general conditons, treatment and "behavior modification" methods.
These are not Moral Treatment methods, by any stretch--on the contrary,..as one patient says while arguig his case to a doctor, "If your not mad when you come in here, you certainly will be when you leave...if ..you leave."
This is a great thread on an incredible site btw.
<sorry Lynne>
I don't mean to throw fuel on the "Institutionalized Treatment=Hell on Earth" fire. But you should definately check it out. It definately sticks with you for a few days afterward.
Signed: An American Soldier in Germany.
In worcester?
Please tell the us the murder story.
Thank you.
Signed: An American Soldier stationed in Mannheim, Germany.
2:25 P.M. / Saturday / 21 / July / 2007
this is really disturbing looking.
/:
But it was worse when they closed all of the facilites in my part of the state. There was very little provision made for most of the patients. They were mostly taken back to the county they originally were from and became a burden to the county. Many group homes were opened. Most of the MR/DD stayed in the homes. The mentally ill....not so much. I live in the county seat and many of the mentally ill stay in my town so they can walk to the offices that provide their benefits. So we have "crazy" people walking around town all of the time. Many of my neighbors are afraid of these people. The folks are not violent, but they act out and scare people.
The old way was bad and probably Very bad in many instances, but this new way is not better. The only difference is now there is no large hospital building for the state to support. The mentally ill are still underserved and abused, but now this happens because there is no where for them to go. They live on the streets, in garages with no plumbing, and anywhere they can find. They do not wish to be confined and with the current laws unless they are a danger to themselves or someone else there is no way to force them to stay anywhere. Some of them choose the street over the nice warm dry housing they were originally assigned. So do we have it right this time? My answer is NO. Do I have an idea that addresses all of the needs? NO, but I wish I did.
Getting down off the soap box now. Thanks for listening.
:)
You take an Urbex-Picture and next moment find yourself in the middle of a discussion about the treatment of mentally ill and the history of psychiatry. How exciting!