“Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage”

I grew up in Central Massachusetts near the small towns of Ashburnham, Gardner, Hubbardston, Templeton, Westminster and Winchendon. I have strong connections to that area of the state and pleasant memories of the days I spent exploring the roads, woods, lakes and streams that make up this collection of industrial and rural townships.

To my surprise, my daughter found a book specifically dedicated to telling the history of this region and sent it to me for my birthday. One particular story in the book about the history of the Gardner State Colony for the Mentally Ill brought back memories of my own exposure to that institution when I was a boy.

The Gardner State Colony was originally established in 1902 on 1500 acres of land near the Westminster/Gardner town line. It was designed as a self-supporting complex for mentally disturbed patients who were considered able-bodied and sufficiently cooperative to engage in construction and agricultural work.

Dr Charles E. Thompson, the Colony’s first Superintendent, utilized an innovative cottage system to house the patients. Groups of patients were placed in separate cottages according to their needs and interests. Patients worked 10 hours a day, six days a week to support the material and physical needs of the community.

The idea behind the colony system was to to place the mentally ill in a rural environment where they could form an independent agrarian society. It was reasoned that simple farm life – where patients worked the soil in close harmony with nature – would give the patients a better chance for a secure and stable life.

Once the colony was up and running, it became well known for its fine orchards. The various cottages produced just about every fruit and vegetable that could be grown in New England. Records show that in 1912 the colony produced more than 1800 quarts of blueberries, 300 quarts of piccalilli, 400 quarts of string beans and 600 gallons of pickled cucumbers and tomatoes. Their bee hives produced 550 pounds of honey. By 1917, the colony was generating so much produce that a cannery needed to be constructed on the grounds.

Animal husbandry was also practiced within the colony including the raising of dairy cows, sheep, pigs, chickens, turkeys, geese and rabbits at various times. With an aim to be fully self-sufficient, the colony also set up shops to produce shoes, brooms, clothes, sheets, pillowcases and mattresses. Furniture was made in its own shops from wood cut on its own acreage.

In 1935 the institution was renamed the Gardner State Hospital and placed under the jurisdiction of the State, subjected to the same uniform laws applicable to all the other state mental hospitals.

In 1976 the hospital was closed because there was an increased emphasis on alternative methods of treatment and a trend towards outpatient community based mental health services. The diminishing population resulted in the closing of the hospital in 1980, at which point it was turned into a medium security state prison.

The system originally employed by the Gardner State Colony was a bold idea at the time and one that I’m guessing was preferable to the limited alternatives that the mentally ill had in those days. However, the evidence of a successful farm did not mean that it was a successful hospital. As idyllic as life at the colony appeared, the architects good intentions alone were not enough to render moral the forced labor and incarceration of the mentally ill.

The early years of the 20th century were ones of involuntary commitment for the mentally ill, whose freedoms were taken from them while being forced to live their lives out in unfamiliar surroundings without their consent.

A case can be made that some patients enjoyed certain types of occupational therapy such as sewing or light gardening, but tasks such as building roads, chopping down trees, clearing fields, working in hot laundry rooms, etc. were probably not enjoyable and there is really no way to know what kind of coercive and abusive measures the colony’s overseers used on the patients to get them to perform some of the more difficult and undesirable tasks.

In addition, there were stories about how the practice of involuntary commitment were used by those in power as a weapon to suppress dissent and punish political opponents. An example is a woman named Aurora D’Angelo who was sent to a mental health facility for psychiatric evaluation against her will after she participated in a rally in support of anarchists. This kind of practice once led Ray Bradbury to note that “Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage”

There is also no way of knowing what happened to the more than 700 former patients, many of them unidentified, who are buried in the Colony cemetery and who took their stories to the grave with them.

To society’s credit there was a gradual trend by the mental health profession, starting in the 2nd half of the 20th century, towards deinstitutionalisation. Most states now have laws that abolish or substantially reduce involuntary commitment. Individuals now have a right to the least restrictive treatment, not what a doctor may consider the most beneficial treatment.

Getting back to my boyhood exposure to the Gardner State Hospital. It was during the Summers when I was just a boy of 10 to 13 years old. A group of my friends and I would take day-long bike trips around the city and towns in which we would travel 20 miles or more while stopping to play at various interesting locations.

I fondly remember these bike trips with my friends because they really gave me my first taste of independence and they helped me to expand my view of the world beyond my own street and neighborhood.

One of my favorite bike routes had us riding through the back roads of the Gardner State Hospital grounds while on our way to a dairy bar where we would stop for refreshing ice cream cones.  The ride through the State Hospital grounds was very scenic, filled with pastures, meadows, flowering trees and cottages. It had the appearance of a relaxing summer camp.

However, as we rode along I remember my friends telling me that the people who lived in the cottages were crazy and weren’t like normal people. They told me to speed up and avoid anyone who tried to come near us – and they told me stories of insane ghosts haunting the institution’s graveyard. They stigmatized the people who lived there as damaged and made me think of them as “freaks” or “monsters”.

As I got older I gradually came to know better and realize that people afflicted with mental illness are simply sick and deserve to be treated with respect and dignity. They are one of society’s most vulnerable and least understood populations and often there are no easy therapies or miracle medicines that can cure them.

Anyone who has lived with mental illness, or has a loved one who has suffered from mental illness, knows how painful it can be and how hurtful it is when others characterize them as defective.

If I could go back to those young boys riding their bikes through the Gardner State Hospital, I would tell them that the mentally ill ought to be treated with compassion and kindness because one of the greatest cruelties in life is blindness to the despair of others.