PennHurst Asylum

Pennhurst Asylum 

Back in the mid 1960s, fledgling TV reporter Bill Baldini ran a five-episode exposé of Pennhurst State School and Hospital on Philadelphia’s TV10 (now an NBC affiliate). It painted a picture of neglect and abuse in the Chester County institution that was hard for the regular viewers to stomach. On the flickering monochrome televisions of the time came images of full-grown hands and feet bound by straps to adult-sized crib beds. Inmates of the institution were shown rocking, pacing, and twitching. Many were severely disabled either mentally or physically, but others were quite lucid and coherent—but withdrawn into themselves because of over-stimulation of the senses in the loud and sometimes frightening place, and a lack of much-needed mental stimulation. The five-minute news segments were entitled “Suffer the Little Children.” When one patient was asked by the interviewer what he would like most in the world, if he could have anything he wanted, the sad and withdrawn reply was simply, “To get out of Pennhurst.”

Pennhurst first opened its doors in November of 1908, and due to pressure to accept not only the mentally and physically handicapped, but also immigrants, criminals and orphans who could not be housed elsewhere, it was overcrowded within only a few years. In 1913, the Commission for the Care of the Feeble-Minded was appointed, and boldly stated that those with disabilities were “unfit for citizenship” and furthermore, “posed a menace to the peace.”  Patients at Pennhurst were grouped into several general categories. Under the classification of mental prowess, one was listed as either an “imbecile” or “insane”. Physically, the patient could be declared either “epileptic” or “healthy”

By the mid-1960s, Pennhurst had been open for fifty years. It housed 2,791 people, most of them children, which was about 900 more than the administration thought the buildings could comfortably accommodate. But as a state school, they had to take what they were given. Only 200 of the residents were in any kind of art, education, or recreation programs that would help to improve their condition, though many of the patients were high-functioning enough to improve with the right care. The administrators interviewed in this program recognized that they were falling short of their ideal treatment, but with a crumbling building, a budget shortfall of four million dollars, and only 9 medical doctors and 11 teachers (none of them with special education training), their hands were tied.

From that point on, it was inevitable that the hospital would close down, but it took two decades of legal actions, federal judgments made and overturned, and growing financial crises for the place to be shuttered. By the 1980′s, overcrowding, lack of funds, inadequate staffing and decades of abuse and neglect accusations caught up with the operation, and in 1987 Pennhurst closed its doors. Its death was not without positive impact, though. The martyrdom of its long suffering patients helped put into motion changes to medical practice across the country and to society as a whole