Belchertown State School - Changing Attitudes Towards Mental Retardation

Changing Attitudes Towards Mental Retardation

The reason for this situation was partly due to the prevailing cultural perspective of what was often called "mental deficiency". Around the turn of the 20th century, many people with handicaps were simply kept at home when possible. This changed in the 1920s and 1930s because state governments and bureaucracies developed special divisions to manage these individuals—in Massachusetts and elsewhere, this was the role of the Massachusetts Department of Mental Retardation. In addition, expertise on "the infirm" became a specialty in the medical world, which in turn helped shape social policy. And while few parents would want to send their child to live in squalor and suffer abuse, many felt they had no other choice as there was simply nowhere else for a child with severe disabilities to go.

Beginning in the Kennedy administration, and partly due to the civil rights movement started by African Americans, awareness of disabled people as individuals with human rights increased. In 1966, Massachusetts passed the Mental Health and Retardation Services Act, which mandated a gradual transition from a few institutions around the state to a more community-based system of care facilities. Coincidentally, a conscientious objector to the Vietnam war was arranging for a group of six mobility impaired, non-retarded to move into "Prospect House" in Cambridge, Mass. These men would still commute to their highly paid day jobs at the tool and die factory abutting Fernald; but with the alliance with the Cambridge-Somerville Assn. for Retarded Children (as it was the known), efforts to socialize these men into community living were undertaken. This enabled Fernald to join Brandeis' Florence Heller School in undertaking the systemization of creating a community residential program. Working to create partnerships with Associations for Retarded Citizens, mobilizing staff on the units, and working with the families of residents to educate them on the concepts of normalization, these efforts were rewarded with the opening of a community residence for eight moderately retarded women on Morse St., in Watertown, MA in 1970. From this beginning, state-private collaboration expanded and community residential and support programs began to flourish. The horrendous conditions at Belchertown were revealed in 1971 in a newspaper article entitled "The Tragedy of Belchertown". Parents sued the school, and when the state Attorney General toured the facility, he described it as "a hell hole".

This was the first lawsuit against a state school, and others followed in Massachusetts for the next few years. In 1973, the unnecessary death of a patient resulted in a lawsuit that saw the hiring of nearly 100 new ward personnel. In 1975, Belchertown was sued once again for denying its patients the right to vote (this was one of the first disability-related voting rights cases in the United States), and in 1977 a case was brought against the school on behalf of a 67-year-old severely retarded man with leukemia to determine if a court-appointed guardian ad litem could refuse treatment on his behalf.