Friday, September 17, 2021
Dormitory
This was my freshman dormitory in 1971, the unfashionable one, unlike those preppies at Yates. Long-term patients from Eastern State (before Deinstitutionalisation), would sometimes just show up, puzzled, in the dorm looking for their old room.
When you are that far off campus and the college no longer cares what happens to you, things get weirder than usual. We had our own Olympics, with the 267-inch dash and the Refrigerator Shove as events.
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7 comments:
Isolation does evoke strange behavior sometimes.
The winter-overs at the Pole report that they do a "journey to Mordor" using treadmills/etc while watching the LotR extended trilogy. I assume they take some breaks.
They've also the 300 degree club tradition. When it hits -100 outside, they crank the sauna up to 200, roast for a bit and then run outside naked--though only for long enough to say they did it.
Refrigerator Shove sounds like a fine event. Suitable for a Strongman competition. Maybe I'll suggest it.
It's tough on floors
Interesting/chilling line in the article about Eastern State:
“Foundation officials discovered that screams of hospital patients could clearly be heard at the proposed (Williamsburg Lodge) site,” he wrote. “The suggested solution involved removing the noisy patients to a 500 acre farm known as Dunbar, two miles outside of town, which was owned and used by the hospital therapy.”
Having worked in buildings with similar populations, I have a mixed impression. I have certainly heard wails of such profound despair that they would break your heart. I quickly learned that not all of those were real, or more exactly, were acquired as a primary weapon for getting cigarettes or coffee. The majority were at least mostly real, because the patients' situations were sad overall, and it's not unreasonable that in a restricted world, existential despair might emerge around issues that look small to an outsider. And certainly, it breaks your heart to hear a mother crying for a baby she cannot hold, even if you know that she is dangerous to that child and the current intervention is entirely justified. Separation from family is sad even when necessary.
Screams are another matter. Maybe in that day real pain and hardship were being inflicted, but even in the bad old snake pit days of my early career, they were nearly always a manipulation for effect. Eastern State was the first psychiatric hospital in the country, and there is a museum in Colonial Williamsburg that went up some time in the '00s.
Is that the after-party photo you posted? A wild time!
The Maine Department of Environmental Protection was (maybe still is) housed on the campus of the state's mental health hospital. When I used to go to the MEDEP for meetings we'd sometimes be sitting around the conference table when a siren would go off. "Hmmm, I guess another patient escaped," one our our agency hosts would announce. Made for interesting meetings.
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