For decades, the primary therapy for persons who were unable to integrate into society was placement in one of several enormous mental institutions, some of which housed thousands of patients. Those with mental illnesses, on the other hand, were not always treated with the highest respect and care.
To say they were mistreated does not begin to express the atrocities and cruelty those patients endured. People in particular asylums faced terrible mental and physical abuse while being held in the most dreadful living circumstances.
Things began to change at the end of the 1950s when several incidences of abuse were documented. These severe circumstances have to alter. During the decade that followed, numerous asylums around the country were closed down and abandoned, with the exception, allegedly, of the many spirits who still roam the rotting hallways of the asylums.
Among these is the huge Pennhurst Asylum, also known as the Pennhurst State School and Hospital, or “Hell on Earth,” as many persons who worked or visited the facility characterized it.
Thousands of mentally handicapped children, the most of whom had been abandoned by their own parents, joined the Pennhurst Asylum and entered a totally new world. But this reality was more terrifying than anything they could have imagined.
Children, including orphans, were not the only patients in the Pennhurst Asylum; there were also many unfortunate immigrants and even criminals, but they all shared the horrific circumstances and many years of cruelty and neglect.
Pennhurst Asylum, sometimes known as the “Shame of Pennsylvania,” was designed to be both a school and a hospital, but it ended up being one of the most horrible asylums in the whole country.
Pennhurst State School and Hospital opened in November 1908, after construction began at the turn of the century. Once admitted, each patient was classified intellectually as a “imbecile” or “crazy,” and physiologically as “epileptic” or “healthy.”
The 1,400-acre state-funded education and healthcare facility resembled a small city in that it had its own power plant, farm, hospital, mortuary, barber shop, and firehouse.
Although it was intended to hold no more than 500 patients, by 1912, the facility had become overcrowded, and staff members were unable to provide sufficient care to each patient, with some abusing them. Chronic overcrowding and patient abuse had already begun during the institution’s early years, and it did not cease until it was torn down.
The employees at the facility would frequently tie the patients to their beds and leave them alone for hours, if not the whole day. This meant that by the time the orderlies arrived, many of them would be smeared in their own excrement. Patients that were combative were frequently sedated to settle them down, yet this was hardly the worst that might happen to them. For example, the staff would frequently extract all of the teeth of a patient who bit another patient or a staff member. In fact, this happened so frequently that visitors would recover teeth in the tunnels even years after the facility had closed.
Mistreatment and unsanitary, cruel, and hazardous circumstances persisted, but a 1968 short TV feature on Pennhurst inspired many to file a legal challenge against the facility.
This resulted in a grueling 20-year legal battle and federal rulings before the asylum was ultimately closed.