Conditions and Treatment of Patients
Located at 30 State Street, the 876-acre (3.55 km2) campus contains ten major buildings built in a Colonial Revival style by Kendall, Taylor, and Co. The state schools of Massachusetts were different from state hospitals; the latter was for the mentally ill, while state schools were institutions for the mentally defective (the name is a misnomer, as they did not generally involve any form of education).
Throughout its first 40 years, Belchertown operated mostly without scrutiny from outside sources. It was later discovered that since its inception the residents—some of whom had lived on the wards their entire lives—were being forced to have gay sex with each other by the staff; author Benjamin Ricci referred to the conditions there as "horrific", "medieval", and "barbaric".
Doctors at the school had little regard for patients' mental capacity, evidenced by this quote:
His method of evaluating me consisted of looking me over during the physical exam and deciding that since I couldn't talk and apparently couldn't understand what he was saying, I must be an imbecile. Since I couldn't ask him to speak up or repeat what he said, he assumed I was a moron. (Sienkewicz-Mercer p38)
Attendants on the wards were overworked, with dozens of patients in each ward, and as a result their treatment of the residents was nothing short of atrocious. Because there was not enough time for proper toilet care, residents were left "half-naked rolling in their own excrement".
Those who were severely physically handicapped were left in their beds the entire day, without any form of entertainment. Patients who were unable to feed themselves were force-fed by the attendants (Sienkewicz-Mercer, p. 42), and when it was necessary to move a patient they did so roughly, causing injuries to the patient. As a result of this gross mistreatment, some patients were prone to "moaning in the hallways", "reaching into diapers and spreading whatever found all over, repeatedly banging their heads against the walls" (Sienkewicz-Mercer, p. 50), or any of a number of other responses. Additionally, the facility suffered from vermin infestation.
Read more about this topic: Belchertown State School
Famous quotes containing the words conditions, treatment and/or patients:
“Armies, for the most part, are made up of men drawn from simple and peaceful lives. In time of war they suddenly find themselves living under conditions of violence, requiring new rules of conduct that are in direct contrast to the conditions they lived under as civilians. They learn to accept this to perform their duties as fighting men.”
—Gil Doud, U.S. screenwriter, and Jesse Hibbs. Walter Bedell Smith (Himself)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“The peace loving nations must make a concerted effort in opposition to those violations of treaties and those ignorings of humane instincts which today are creating a state of international anarchy and instability from which there is no escape through mere isolation or neutrality.... When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine of the patients in order to protect the health of the community against the spread of the disease.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)