The Dark History of Treating People With Disabilities

Some of you may have heard of Pennhurst Asylum, which is dedicated to serving people with disabilities; I first learned about it about five years ago or so. The locals of Pennsylvania call it, “The Shame of Pennsylvania” simply because of how they treated people with disabilities there. It’s also known as Pennhurst State School and Hospital, and these so-called “asylums” began to appear across the country in the late 1800s. If you had a child with a disability, that was where you were going to end up, against your will. People back then, and even up until the 1960s, didn’t really know what to do with their child or children if they were even the slightest bit different from everybody else, so they would get rid of them. Pennhurst opened up on 23 November 1908 and stayed open all the way up until 9 December 1987. To think that the doctors could’ve told my parents that an insane asylum was the best place for me is horrifying. A place where they would perform almost Nazi like experiments, give you lobotomies, hose you down, be mean to you and they would also leave you in your own filth for days. Thanks to modern-day schooling, we have come a long way since then.

Inside Pennhurst Asylum: Understanding Disabilities Through The Decades | Only Human: