Asylum Ladies

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If every feeble-minded woman should be faithfully segregated for 20 years, at least 50% of the feeble-mindedness would disappear. Feeble-mindedness is no less an evil than tuberculosis. New York State say what? The feeble-minded girl of 15, 16 or 17 years is, in body, a woman with the instincts and dangers of womanhood, but in mind she is a child.

No more responsible than her younger sister of 6 or 8 years. She is innocent, gentle, affectionate, confiding. She believes everything that is said to her. If any man tells her that she is the prettiest girl in town, she believes him. What? What are you talking about? She then becomes a source of corruption and disease to scores of young men and she bears children, one after the other, who inherit her infirmities and entail similar afflictions.

Feeble-minded, source of corruption, what? She is an incorrigible, a repeater, an enemy to society. She is cast out and despised by reputable women. True weird stuff. There was an unusual, even a little bit strange, question on the 1840 United States Census. How many people in your household are idiots or insane? 17 million people were counted in that census.

Of that number, 17,456 were characterized as insane and idiots. Weird, right? How the government was suddenly so interested in how many lunatics lived at your address. Can you imagine a doctor diagnosing you as a moron or an idiot? How about an imbecile? No? Would you be okay with feeble-minded then? Because believe it or not, out of that bunch, feeble-minded is definitely the way to go.

It's the mildest of these afflictions, though if we're being honest, that doesn't much matter here. Here is the State Custodial Asylum for Feeble-Minded Women in Newark, New York. It was established in 1878, initially as an offshoot of the Syracuse State Institution for Feeble-Minded Children, which were plentiful enough back in the day to have created a problem.

What to do with female inmates who aged out? Some were discharged, but many weren't. And these female inmates, it's hard to call them patients with a straight face once you know how the place worked. Well, they had to be housed somewhere. A social reformer named Josephine Shaw Lowell had expressed grave concerns about where such women might best be placed.

She claimed that feeble-minded women had no regard for morality and were unable to practice sexual restraint and so would bear illegitimate children who would then be a burden on the state. Is that what you want? She demanded. Oh, no, most definitely not, came the response. These women, aged 15 to 45, childbearing age, must, Josephine Shaw Lowell said, be prevented from producing more children of their own kind, which sounds very much like a eugenics-based strategy, because it very much was a eugenics-based strategy.

In all, it's who is fit to reproduce glory. And so, with the support of the New York Board of Charities, Lowell succeeded in getting the state custodial asylum for feeble-minded women funded and built. Only women of childbearing age were admitted. And as soon as a woman hit menopause, she was bounced. The administrators were not even a little bit subtle about that mandate.

Commitments to the institution are made by the superintendents of the poor and also by judges of courts of record on blank forms prescribed by the institution. The purpose of the institution being to segregate women of the childbearing period. Every effort is made to make it as much a home as possible. It is conducted as an open institution, there being no locked doors and no fences.

Preventing women deemed undesirable from producing children. That was the mission. Dress it up however you like, make up whatever diagnosis gets the job done. This adult offshoot of the Syracuse State Institution for Feeble-Minded Children proved to be such a roaring success that the New York State Legislature made it its own separate institution just seven years later in 1885.

These were the boom times in America for insane asylums. And that was due in large part to that weird question on the 1840 census. Which was only there because social reformers pressured the government to include it. Why? Because they wanted to create more and better institutions for what they called lunatics. And they wanted government funding to pay for it.

In order to pry that money loose, they needed some hard, cold facts on their side. Enter the 1840 census. That strategy worked. By the year 1890, every single state in the USA had built one or more publicly supported asylums. Which sounds good, taking care of people and all that. Sounds like they were doing a much better job of it then than we are now.

Not so fast there. Psychiatry was still pretty much in its infancy in the 19th century. There was very little scientific understanding of mental illness at the time. Doctors had a limited grasp on how the human brain even worked. No one knew anything about brain chemistry or how trauma could impact a person's mental health.

But they did pay a tremendous amount of attention to social and environmental factors. There were all sorts of things that they believed could cause insanity. Starting with heredity. And at least they were right about that one. I mean, we've known for a long time that there are many psychiatric disorders that run in families.

Bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, ADHD, or just a few. 19th century doctors also love to blame gender. Guess which one? Social class, environment, and immorality for driving people mad. And that same cluster of variables shaped how people were diagnosed and treated. Which brings us to... Moron. Idiot. Imbecile. Lunatic.

Feebleminded. Insults in our time. But legitimate psychiatric diagnoses back then. Let's consult famed 19th century psychiatrist, Dr. Doc. Start with the diagnosis of Moron. A moron is a person of tragically low intelligence due to a defective family lineage. Such a person boasts a mental age between 8 and 12 years, and thus is trapped forever in the primitive phase of development known as adolescence.

Idiot. An idiot is a person with a severe intellectual impairment. Such a person requires round-the-clock care as they are simply unable to care for themselves. How about imbecile? An imbecile is certainly more intelligent than an idiot. Though one cannot expect an imbecile to surpass the abilities of a seven-year-old child.

Therefore, we distinguish between mental imbecility, a state of being subnormal, and moral imbecility, which is characterized by an inability to tell right from wrong. The moral imbecile is not only mentally defective, but vicious by nature and inclined to crime. The moral imbecile is also indifferent to punishment. Lunatic?

A lunatic suffers from an unreliable mind. At times, perfectly sound. At other times, the mind of a lunatic is severely disordered. It was once believed that some forms of insanity were caused by the moon. Hence the word, lunacy. As the moon waxes and wanes, so does the troubled mind of the lunatic. And, uh, feebleminded?

The feebleminded are, of course, mentally defective. What distinguishes the feebleminded from the idiot or the imbecile is their relatively high level of functioning. Yet the feebleminded are not productive. In fact, they are a bit backward. As feeblemindedness is known to be an inherited condition, it is wise to discourage these individuals from reproducing.

Whoa, eugenics much? I beg your pardon, madam. Note to self, no one likes a rude time traveler. Sorry, Dr. Doc. So, there was this huge movement to build asylums in the mid-1800s. But that doesn't mean there weren't other places where people with mental illnesses were already housed. It's just that those places were mostly wretched and terrible.

Squalid, inhumane madhouses where people would be committed, locked away, and left to die. It didn't take all that much to earn a diagnosis of insanity in the early days of America. A tendency toward melancholy could be enough to do the trick. Difficulty learning, disobeying a husband, not to mention that nearly any behavior could be construed as possession by an evil spirit or demon.

Superstition jockeyed with science and won out more often than not. Until about the 1820s, treatments for mental illness reflected the widespread belief that madness was a matter of moral deviance and that the mad could not be reasoned with. The mad, like lions in a circus, had to be tamed. Beatings were a common treatment, along with ice water baths, bloodletting, and restraint.

Restraint could be a straitjacket or ropes or chains or a cage. Those cages were narrow and small. Inmates would be locked inside until they were calm, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days. And that's if you were lucky enough to be locked up in an actual madhouse. It was just as likely you'd find yourself in jail or a poorhouse.

Because remember, back then insanity was almost synonymous with criminality and poverty was as much a moral failure as it was an economic one. Everyone knows what a jail is, but a poorhouse? Well, on paper, a poorhouse was a place where the poor could find food and shelter. These places were supposed to be about charity, but in reality were much, much darker.

Many functioned like prisons, filthy prisons where disease ran rampant. That's the shelter part. The food wasn't much, often because the individuals charged with running the poorhouses were caught pocketing the money meant for the poor. People starved in poorhouses. The elderly were often the victims of that greed, which made the asylums of the mid-1800s a paradise in comparison.

These were meant to be places where a person might receive compassionate care in a peaceful setting, where a person with mental illness wasn't seen as immoral or evil, but as curable. That was the goal anyway. In practice, the differences between public and private, between people who had money and people who didn't, well, you know from experience how that usually shakes out.

Those with money and resources could elect for a private asylum, cleaner, quieter, far more voluntary, much more spa-like, often in quiet, rural settings designed to help soothe the jangled nerves of the afflicted. Afternoon tea, painting with watercolors on the lawn, a diet of bland foods served by white jacketed attendants, that sort of thing.

The poor and those of undesirable race or ethnicity got shipped off to public institutions. They called it long-term custodial care. We call it warehousing. These were patients committed involuntarily, sometimes for legitimate medical reasons like psychosis, sometimes for alcohol use or masturbation or promiscuity or truancy, things that weren't mental health disorders at all.

The public institutions were routinely overcrowded and understaffed and relied on harsh and abusive methods just to keep the place under control. And once you were locked in, good luck. The shocking and tragic truth is that once in, you might not see freedom again for decades. If ever. Which brings us to the doors of the State Custodial Asylum for Feeble-Minded Women in Newark, New York.

Designed to hold up to 853 inmates with roughly 100 employees. The waiting list was, from the start, a very long one. The place had been operating separately from the children's home for just under eight years, but was already piling up charges and accusations of mismanagement and cruelty. State of New York was forced to investigate.

Those findings were released on Tuesday, May 2nd, 1893. Cases of discipline and punishment of considerable variety were narrated by the witnesses. Among them, three cases were selected for special mention as follows. First, the case of Josephine Blessing, being sick with pneumonia and confined to the bed, was... While in the bed, my clothes were pulled down.

I was spanked with a ferrule of hardwood twice in one day. The first time by the second assistant matron, and the second time by the matron. The alleged reason for this violence being my refusal to take the medication prescribed for me. Three months later, I died. Josephine Blessing, beaten with a wooden rod while sick with pneumonia.

The case of Teresa Clinton, who, according to the testimony of witnesses, was an invalid. Brought by the physician to the matron with the medical advice that the patient was sick. To which advice the matron replied that she knew better, and the patient was only... Ugly. The matron called me ugly. Whereupon, she punished me with the wooden ferrule.

Within one or two days, I was confined to the bed with meningitis. Ten days later, I died. A pattern was beginning to form. The case of Mary Moore, confined by straitjacket and a cord tied about her ankles, and in such condition with her clothes pulled up, was... Severely and persistently beaten with a wooden ferrule.

First by the matron, and then by the assistant matron. Another witness says that a towel or cloth was wound about Mary Moore's head during this operation, but that it did not stifle her screams. The investigation found that the matron had basically given permission to the assistants to feel free to inflict whatever corporal punishments they felt necessary or useful without getting prior authorization or even reporting it.

Then it was revealed that the superintendent of the State Custodial Asylum for Feeble-Minded Women had invented his own special kind of punishment for the patients. Listen to this. Tripping the patients from behind and letting them fall on their backs, the superintendent claimed that the general method was to clutch the women by the dress around the neck and thus ease their fall to the ground.

But it is evident that he sometimes omitted this feature of the performance and suffered the fall to be made without any attempt to break it. It is conceded that there was never any means used to ease the fall or force of contact with the ground except this garroting or pressure on the throat or neck. Oh, but there's more.

The proofs also established the fact that sometimes a patient would be thrown to the ground, ordered to her feet, and then thrown again several times in quick succession. The superintendent made clear that these cases of violence were not committed in self-defense of employees or other patients but were for punishment.

Punishment which he describes as very effective. Spotty and indifferent record-keeping along with a near complete disregard for the human dignity of these three women means we know very little about how or why they ended up committed to the state custodial asylum for feeble-minded women. The official report notes that Teresa Clinton was an epileptic.

That is all the information we have. So what were the consequences then for the superintendent, the matron, and all of the other employees accused in the 1893 investigation? The superintendent, Dr. Walter L. Willett, resigned. The matron, Kate R. Willett, wife of the superintendent, resigned and that's it. You can't even say they resigned in disgrace because there was apparently no disgrace to be found.

Still, so much go on, right? And it did under new management with new inmates arriving by the day. Lillie Patch would eventually become one of those inmates. Born the same year the state custodial asylum for feeble-minded women opened for business, Lily found herself at age 18 standing before a magistrate in Saratoga Springs County Court charged as a common prostitute and a vagrant.

I hereby order you to serve a sentence of no less than five years as an inmate of the House of Refuge for Women. So the House of Refuge for Women in Hudson was the only state prison for women in New York. It was a harsh place known for physical punishment, solitary confinement, and even a dungeon. Like all the inmates, Lillie Patch had to sign a document giving the prison authorities permission to open and read her mail or withhold her mail and even destroy it as they deemed fit.

This was required even though Lily was declared illiterate on her intake paperwork. Illiterate even though she wrote frequent letters to her mother and enjoyed reading and knitting in her little bit of free time. Lillie Patch was clearly not a violent or dangerous offender. There were well-intentioned efforts by the prison to release Lily to her mother's care, but the State Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children forcefully blocked that move.

Her mother is the last person to whom Lily should be entrusted. According to them, Lily's father was guilty of incest, her mother had trafficked the girl, and if that wasn't enough... The Patch family resides in a tenement building known to rent to thieves and prostitutes and Italians of lower class. So no going home for Lily.

Instead, she was transferred in 1900 to the State Custodial Asylum for Feeble-Minded Women. You can tell a lot about what kind of era that was both for women and for mental health just by reading Lily's application for transfer. Her face is peculiar and carries her head more than erect. Wait, wait, wait, back up. What did Lily's appearance have to do with whether or not she should swap one prison cell for another?

And how can a head be more than erect? What does that even mean? Observe also that the inmate suffers from crossed eyes. Regardless of her posture, her shoulders are not symmetrical, giving her a most unsteady appearance. Her speech is affected by some unknown impediment. The inmate has a history of fits. Okay, so extra erect head, crossed eyes, and asymmetrical shoulders.

None of which qualify as a mental illness. The application also notes that Lily was of good temper and had no peculiar or destructive or wanton habits. In fact, while imprisoned at the House of Refuge, Lily's record was almost spotless. A very good girl, to quote one assessment. It was Lily's background that earned her a diagnosis of feeble-minded.

Trafficked into prostitution as a child by her own mother, according to the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. By age 16, Lily had contracted syphilis and given birth to a child. Her particular form of insanity, according to the professionals, was... Promiscuity, the influence of which can only be described as evil.

A young girl facing a hopeless struggle for moral preservation. Such corruption cannot help but pollute body, mind, and spirit. Page after page. And it's a pure wonder that her file even survived the passage of years. Her application ended with this summary. The girl is feeble-minded. The only history I can obtain is by questioning the girl herself.

And her statements cannot be relied upon. And so, Lillie Patch entered the state custodial asylum for feeble-minded women in Newark, New York in January 1901. Not only were her statements deemed unreliable, apparently the authorities thought she couldn't be trusted to read her own mail. Though she, like all inmates, had been compelled to sign away all the rights to her mail.

There seems no reason beyond cruelty why letters from her sister were confiscated. And why they thought those letters might be triggering is extra confusing given the way they insisted that Lily was illiterate. Lily had been at Newark for six months when her sister wrote a letter to the superintendent expressing how worried she was about Lily.

About how no one had heard from Lily in far too long. Dear Madam, will you please tell me where Miss Lillie Patch is? She is my sister and I have not heard from her in a long time. Mother got a letter from her and she gave her address as Newark. And mother sent it to her and it came back unopened. And mother is dead now and buried and she said for me to look after Lily.

So please let me know as soon as possible. The letter was signed in the sister's married name of Coleman. She included her address. She never received a response. Which might have been a response in itself. There was a cemetery at the state custodial asylum for feeble-minded women. Buried there were women whose bodies went unclaimed by relatives.

Women were buried in anonymous unmarked graves. But let's be slow to judge those families for not showing up to claim their loved ones. Many if not most of the inmates came from impoverished backgrounds. These were women who've been scooped up by the state as children. Sent to almshouses. It's another word for poorhouse prisons and institutions like this one.

What ties they had to family or community were severed. Like in the case of Lillie Patch who had family trying to find her. An effort that was ignored. And why not? Who cared what became of yet one more lost girl. Wasn't it for the best that her hopeless story ended with her? That no poor innocent child was forced to carry the stain of its mother's legacy?

Oh god. When you're able to find even one moment in human history where women and the bodies of women weren't considered fair game for the state. Do please let us know. Anyway here's where it gets really dark for the women incarcerated. At the state custodial asylum for feeble-minded women. For them and for every Inmate of New York state hospitals for the insane.

State prisons reformatories and charitable institutions. Rapists and confirmed criminals in penal institutions. Oh a state law was approved on April 16th 1912. Allowing forced sterilization based on principles of eugenics. Candidates for the procedure were to be selected by. Decision by majority of board after examining mental and physical condition of the subject.

His record and family history of the improbability of improvement of his condition. And the consequent inadvisability of procreation. Or of the probability of substantial improvement of the subject's condition thereby. A year later the data was presented at the New York state conference of charities and correction. We estimate there are 30,000 feeble-minded in the state.

About 5,000 are cared for in institutions designed for them. About 10,000 are confined in institutions not intended for their care. About 15,000 or half the total number of feeble-minded are at large in the community. Feeble-minded at large. The kind of phrase generally reserved for dangerous criminals. The feeble-minded are of course mentally defective.

What distinguishes the feeble-minded from the idiot or the imbecile. Is the relatively high level of functioning. Yet the feeble-minded are not productive. In fact they are a bit backward. As feeble-mindedness is known to be an inherited condition. It is wise to discourage these individuals from reproducing. Of the 30,000 feeble-minded in New York.

10,000 are women and girls of childbearing age. At least 160 of those girls were incarcerated at the Syracuse state institution for feeble-minded children. 800 of those women were locked up with Lillie Patch at Newark. The rest were scattered among the state's other hospitals, prisons, and poorhouses. But it wasn't just the incarcerated feeble-minded that the state had its eyes on.

That does leave 15,000 feeble-minded for whom no public provision has been made. Thousands of poor mothers are giving up their lives largely to the care of feeble-minded children. But these mothers are unable to prevent them from becoming a menace to the community. Okay, here it comes. Not just the forced sterilization of girls and women in custody.

In the long run, it would be far more economical for the community to separate them in institutions than to allow them to remain in the homes. Only to become ultimately paupers, criminals, prostitutes, or parents of children like themselves. They were really gunning for this population. Population that was basically made up with a diagnosis so vague that it was more opinion than anything approaching a medical or scientific fact.

It is the popular superstition in the community that the insane are dangerous while the feeble-minded are harmless. We are learning at last that the feeble-minded boy and girl are three times more of a menace to the community than the senile and the mild chronic insane in our hospitals. Buddy, three times more dangerous?

You just pulled that right out of thin air. What are you talking about? Moreover, the feeble-minded girl is vastly more dangerous to the community than the feeble-minded boy. The reason for this statement is that the heredity of feeble-mindedness, for the most part, comes from the feeble-minded girl. Not only is this true, but investigations made in New Jersey have demonstrated that the feeble-minded woman is twice as prolific as the normal woman.

This arises partly from the fact that the feeble-minded woman is unable to protect herself, and partly for the fact that she is not afflicted by the moral restraints or the regard for consequences which restrain the normal woman. New York was the eighth state in the U.S. to pass a sterilization law. It stayed on the books for six years until being declared unconstitutional in March 1918, and then was repealed in May 1920.

I guess we have the slow pace of bureaucracy to thank for the fact that the state only got around to forcibly sterilizing 42 people. That number? 41 were women. It's a safe bet that Lillie Patch wasn't one of them. None of the women sterilized were incarcerated at the Newark facility, but it's a real possibility, an unhappy possibility, that Lily's was one of the nearly 6,000 bodies buried in anonymous graves at the State Custodial Asylum for Feeble-Minded Women in Newark.

The asylum changed its name in 1916 to the Newark State School for Mental Defectives, which somehow sounds worse, though it was actually ahead of its time. The diagnostic category of feeble-mindedness was less and less in public view by the 1930s. The U.S. Census kept up using mental defectives in its 1932 report instead of feeble-minded.

In 1934, the American Association for the Study of Feeble-Mindedness changed its name to the American Association on Mental Deficiency, and that name stuck right up through 1985. Today, the Newark State School for Mental Defectives is mostly abandoned. The long, unused buildings are decrepit and condemned. If you're picturing some gothic pile deep in the forest, think again.

It's surrounded by working businesses. Busted windows with rusted-out metal frames stare blankly at lush green grass and neatly parked cars and minivans and trucks. The cemetery's still there, too. What used to be a forgotten and overgrown tangle has been cleaned up by former staffers and folks who live nearby. An Eagle Scout named Tucker Crawford and his dad put in 300 hours' worth of work on the place.

They've all done what they can to give a little dignity to the souls that are buried there, women made invisible while they lived and then erased after they died. People do say the place is haunted, that inexplicable sounds can be heard, images flickering at the corner of your vision, a heaviness in the air. Why wouldn't there be?

So many of the former inmates are still right there, lying in graves marked only by a number. The suitcases they arrived with were found crammed in an attic. Their liberty was stolen. Their names were forgotten. And all that's left now is the outline of a person. A young woman severed from her past, denied her future, trapped forever in the place where she'd lived as a captive and died as a number.

What else can you call that but a ghost? Next time on True Weird Stuff, what happens when a banker obsessed with ancient hallucinogenic mushroom rituals gets tangled up with the CIA? The birth of the psychedelic age in America, that's what. Meet the granddaddy of shrooms on the next True Weird Stuff. Special thanks to our voice talents on this episode.

Heather Elizabeth, Kary "Doc" Bowser, Don Morgan, Bridget Goolsby, Beth Latino, Sherri Wellman and Stuart Watson. So asylum ladies, one of the things that prompted us to do this episode was the discovery that they just back in the day, they just made stuff up. Like all of those diagnoses of idiot, imbecile, feeble minded moron.

You know, that was all just made up, right? Well, yeah, the whole thing. And by the way, Doc did a great job of voicing that. And I think that it was the whole idea that, OK, so an imbecile is this. An idiot is this. Feeble minded is this. But feeble minded is not as bad as being an imbecile. And it is like somebody somebody just sort of looked at it and just spitballed it.

There was no there was no real medical science behind what they were doing. And the idea that you could put somebody in a mental hospital, in an asylum for promiscuity is just it's it's astonishing. And and for poverty. I mean, let's face it, like a lot of the women who were scooped up and play and the children. So if we start with the children, a lot of the children that found themselves in the Syracuse Home for Feeble Minded Children, which then later spun off the Newark Home for Feeble Minded Women in New York state, you know, they would scoop these kids up off the street.

They were poor. They were skipping school, you know, whatever the reason was. And then they would, you know, in order to get them committed, they had to have a diagnosis. So I'll remind you that a moron is someone of low intelligence due to, I'll quote Dr. Dock, a defective family lineage. So moron is hereditary. An idiot is a person of such severe intellectual impairment that they can't even care for themselves and have to be institutionalized.

An imbecile more intelligent than an idiot. But they're never going to get beyond like the capabilities of a seven year old child. And if you remember, there are two kinds of imbeciles. There's like kind of a subnormal imbecile. That's a person who just is like, I don't even know what's happening. I can't tell wrong from right.

And then a moral imbecile who's not only, according to Dr. Dock, mentally defective, but vicious by nature and inclined to crime. Minority report anyone? Then, of course, a lunatic. They're just their mind is unreliable and disordered and feeble minded. And of course, they were considered the most feeble minded. Women in particular were considered the most dangerous population of all, because while they're mentally defective, according to the diagnosis, they're also pretty high functioning.

And this is also a hereditary condition, according to the mental health experts of the time, which is why the push to stop them from reproducing was in play. And that's all part of the eugenics movement that really swept this country at the turn of the 19th century into the early 20th century. And I'll tell you what put a bloody end to eugenics in the United States of America, although many people still believe this stuff.

They just call it by different names. What put an end to eugenics were the Nazi concentration camps, because eugenics was the name of the game for like Mengele, for example. What were they doing? But exterminating those they saw unfit to be part of the human family, unfit to reproduce. I'm not sure what the world or what the USA would look like today.

Had history played out differently, would we also have entered into a pretty robust program of managing who could and who could not have children? Well, you know, one of the things that always astonishes me about this one and some other episodes of different things we've done is that how similar what they were doing in Nazi Germany, which were astonished and just, oh, it's awful that those that how many of those things were happening in this country.

And everybody just kind of went, well, you know, that's just how we do things. Yeah, that's what we're going to do. Also, it's tough to be a woman, you know, because men are making this stuff up and they're just doing it off the top of their heads. And they're determining that you should be institutionalized on the flimsiest of excuses.

I mean, you know, the asylums of the time. So as we as you heard in the episode and be very careful, the U.S. Census is back in the news again. Pay attention. Anytime you see the U.S. Census in the news and it's being tossed around by politicians, pay attention because the U.S. Census gets used to do some dirty work historically in this country.

And in the 1840s, the U.S. Census was used to figure out how many idiots you had living in your household. And right now you would go, oh, my idiot brother-in-law. But no, remember that an idiot was a person so impaired that they had to be institutionalized right back then. So they used the census to kind of put to kind of turn the problem into data because that's something that we like to do.

Right. We like to say we have a problem of 15,000 blah, blah, idiots and imbeciles. And here's how we're going to solve that. So that was the issue in the 1840 census was trying to figure out, OK, how many of these people? And as soon as we had data, as soon as we converted the problem into a number, then we could go to Congress and we could ask for funding, which every state did because every state built one or more institutions for the insane.

And it's so like to modern ears, we're like, oh, my God, that is so judgmental and tacky. Why are you calling it a lunatic asylum? That's what they were called. They were called lunatic asylums. So once we had the bill, now we get to fill them up. And in the same way that that kind of the facts were manipulated to get the funding to build the hospital, the facts were then manipulated to decide who would or would not be committed.

So if you had money, you know, you could go to these private hospitals that were just like, look, they were like spa retreats. Right. You know, you're you're jangled nerves. You would sit on the lawn and whatnot. But the other thing about having money was if your wife was a pain in the ass, troublesome off she goes. That's the thing.

Off she goes. And if you if you listen to the episode called Adios Ida about the writer Ida Addis, her husband tried so hard. They were going through an ugly divorce. He tried so hard to have her committed because that was the thing that you that was where you put your pain in the ass. Troublesome wife or I guess other female family member.

So it's it's just interesting. Pay attention to stuff like that, because those are the those are the beginnings of the strings getting pulled behind the scenes for these big, massive social changes like the building of all of these public lunatic asylums. So other than the fact that I'm looking at my notes from when we originally did this the first time, I can't figure out why I wrote down Strasburg sock.

I have no idea what that means. There was another note that I had in here about the poor house. You had mentioned of something called the poor house. And when I was a kid growing up, my mother told us that that's where we were going to end up if we kept going this way. We keep going this way. We're going to end up in the poor house.

Now, I had no idea what she was talking about. I thought she was making it up. Tell everybody what year your mom was born. So my mother was born in 1921. When Max's mom was around, poor houses were places they were. They were real places that were created to house the needy people that were in poverty, people that were dependent, and they they were funded by the public.

So it was like, I guess, taxpayer dollars. I would think by the time your mom was old enough to pay attention to stuff, this kind of was on the way out. But your mom was raised, we are always time travelers because we are born into a world and we're raised by the people of the past to live in a world that doesn't exist anymore.

The world that existed when I was born doesn't exist anymore, yet I raised my daughters with the only knowledge I had, which is of that world. So your mom was raised by people that were born in the 1800s when poor houses were a public solution. It goes all the way back to colonial times and to Great Britain before the U.S. was colonized.

And there were terrible, terrible things that happened in poor houses. There was a poor house in the state of Virginia and in the early 1900s, I want to say 1909, 1910, somewhere around there, an elderly woman was wandering. Now today we would wonder if she had dementia, right? She was confused and she would wander. And it drove the warden, listen to the language we use around poor houses, it drove the warden of the poor house insane.

So he stopped this elderly poor, poor woman, this elderly woman from roaming. Basically, he attached a 28-pound iron ball to her leg with a chain and she wasn't strong enough to drag it. So just think about that for a second. That's 1909. And that was like in a report that was investigated. We don't even know about some of the other crazy that went on.

Poor houses were not much different from prisons in a lot of ways. Right. Well, and she grew up in an alcoholic home, so my alcoholic grandfather was not reliable. And so my grandmother had to work and my mother, when she was in high school, had to work and they weren't doing it because they were looking for some fun money.

They were doing it because that's the only way they could survive. And so I think that there was always this fear of the worst situation. And that would be the aforementioned poor house. Well, you know, and I want to shout out, everybody knows, who do I hate the most? The Puritans. So I want to shout out those big black buckled shoes mofos for turning poverty into a moral failure.

You were poor because you were of bad character, criminal character. Right. And so the poor houses were designed to punish people for the sin of poverty, which now, I am just going to say, after all those years in Catholic school, the impression I came away with was Jesus was about helping the poor. But apparently the Puritans did not get the memo that you're supposed to care for the poor and the widowed and the orphaned and the refugees and all that.

You want to hear a fun little fun fact about poor houses in America? Yes. Everybody knows who Helen Keller is, right? Right. Well, everybody knows who Annie Sullivan is, right? Right. Right. So when Annie was 10 years, Annie was blind herself, as I think maybe it's been a while since, you know, you've read the Helen Keller, thought about the Helen Keller story, but Annie Sullivan was blind.

And in the year 1876, she was 10 years old and she and her brother were desperately, desperately poor. And they were housed in a poor house in Massachusetts. And Annie Sullivan, 10 years old, completely blind, and her brother, they slept on iron cots on thin mattresses with rats running up and down the floors and over the beds.

That was I want you to imagine like it's easy to feel just crushed by your own circumstances, right? But I want you to imagine you're a 10 year old child and and you're blind and you're you and your brother are alone in a poor house. You're hungry. You're cold. You're treated like criminals. There are rats running over you.

And yet you somehow grow up to be such a powerful force for compassion and empathy and change that they call you the miracle worker. That just that's humbling, isn't it? It is humbling. I look at my own life, you know, buying useless crap and, you know, I know. I mean, it just it just blows you away. So maybe we should do a true word stuff on Annie Sullivan.

Everybody knows about Helen Keller and you know that Annie was her teacher. But what do you really know? Like, did you know any of that about Annie? No, I didn't know that about her. A lot of people don't. So anyway, back in the day, we had these are where we sent people that were burdens on society or that were unsightly or that we deemed problematic.

If we could get them into prison. Hallelujah. Poor house. OK, well done. School or home for feeble minded or imbecile children. Great. What happens when they age out? And here comes the Newark facility for the Newark asylum for feeble minded women in New York, which was designed to capture the population of women as they aged out of the children's home.

But it only took women of childbearing age. If you were a feeble minded woman who was past menopause, you were free to be feeble minded all the live long day. Because at the end of this, what this really comes down to is eugenics. This really comes down to we're not going to let these women reproduce. That's that's what it is.

And that's all it is. And there's no other way. I don't care how many times the Puritans, you know, want to demand reverence and modesty. There's no other way to look at it. But that how else can you see it? But that. And they randomly determined it by a willy nilly process. I mean, yeah, yeah. Um, so one of the women that we talked about, Lillie Patch.

Part of the reason that Lillie Patch is is a known entity is because hers is one of the few files that survived intact when these institutions were closed. In some cases, they just locked the doors and walked out. And in other cases, you know, they they trashed and destroyed and burned records, sometimes out of malice and sometimes out of just like, well, this is garbage.

Nobody's going to need this or want this. I mean, if you I mentioned it in passing at the end of Asylum Ladies. But when they went back into the Newark asylum, the attic was filled with suitcases. Yeah. And all I could think about was that time I visited Dachau, the concentration camp, the suitcases, the shoes, the jewelry.

Right. These women, they they might have been told that this was a temporary situation. But for most of them, they died there. They lived out whatever time they had and they died. And they were buried in mass on marked graves and not just in Newark, but in San Antonio and California and everywhere, Florida, everywhere.

And it didn't just happen to these women. It happened to men. It happened to children. This is how society dealt with the people on the margins and fringes that they didn't have any better way of integrating. So Lillie Patch, for some reason, her file survived intact. And it is a mass of contradictions. On the one hand, she's filthy, illiterate and slutty.

On the other hand, she loves to knit and read and has never given anyone a moment's time. And was writing her mother. And was writing to her mother. And and the male, the male would come for these these women, these inmates. And they wouldn't they wouldn't be given their mail. Well, they weren't going anywhere and they weren't being cared for.

These were not hospitals. There was not therapy or medication or any kind of treatment in any way. These were prisons that went by different names. They were just. Yeah, if you murdered somebody, if you're a woman and you murdered somebody, you ended up in prison. If you're an older woman past childbearing age and you're poor, you end up in the poorhouse.

And if you are young and capable of reproducing your feeble mind and off you go. The Lillie Patch part of this story is my favorite part of it, because I think what what you what you did very well was you personalize this in a way because you can say, well, this is what happened and that sort of thing. But when you look at what her specific situation is and not only that, but she had a sister and her sister said, my mother died and I told her I would look after Lily.

What has happened to her and what she got was nothing in return. Because Lily was dead. I mean, and then the suitcase part of that that you were just talking about, that to me was so haunting. It really was. And I think that that part of the story is what really struck a chord in me. You know, what's hard about a story like this one?

Is finding the the women who were victimized by it. It was so hard to find those women like first name, last name, why you were there, what happened to you before and after we had three women, Josephine, Teresa and Mary. And the only reason we know their names and what happened to them, they were the women that were beaten by the matron and her assistants with a wooden stick till they died.

Right. The only reason we know is because those women were captured as part of a state investigation, meaning their stories were captured. They themselves weren't captured because they were dead, as you know. Right. The only reason we had those three names is because of that state investigation. Nobody cared about the women in these facilities enough to document them or tell their stories.

Um, Lillie Patch, completely a fluke that that one file is the file that survived and was as detailed as it was. She was in some ways like you have to go that might be the benevolent universe because she was like the perfect composite case for a woman put away in that facility. She wasn't any of the things they said she was.

She wasn't a criminal. She wasn't dirty or illiterate or amoral or insane. She's none of those things. And her file shows that abundantly. And maybe that's why her file was the one to survive. So that there would be some truth told to the people of the future. What do you think? When you were doing this story, I thought about Rosemary Kennedy.

So Rosemary Kennedy was the sister of John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy. And she had some issues and probably would have fit into a category where they would have put her in one of these places if her family didn't have money. But her family had money. So what they did is rather than warehousing, they had this new therapy, the lobotomies.

And if you listen to that episode, if you get its ice pick to the brain, I think it was what it was to the brain. Yeah. And I thought about her when I was listening to this, because she would have fit in one of those categories and would have ended up in a place like this. And then how just we're looking at 40, 50, 60 years later, you'd think we'd evolve.

But instead, we're sticking ice picks in people's brains and trying to rectify the situation that way. And Rosemary Kennedy, you know, you'll hear different things and be careful about what you believe, because sometimes you'll hear, well, she had some sort of intellectual disability and she couldn't function on her own.

Okay, or hear me out. Look at the other accounts of Rosemary Kennedy's life where she was boisterous and ebullient and rebellious and didn't want to play by the rules. We saw both of those in that episode, right? We did. And one of the diagnostic criteria to get a woman locked up into one of these facilities was she likes to read.

She has a loud personality. She has a boisterous laugh. These were criteria that could get you committed if that's what your father or brother or husband or the judge decided should happen to you. And so there are really conflicting stories about Rosemary Kennedy. You'll hear that she was catatonic, pre-lobotomy, and you'll also hear that she loved to put on lipstick and fancy dresses and dance the night away.

So, yeah. One thing that's interesting, and this often happens in life, in a desperate attempt to warehouse their daughter in an asylum because the Kennedys, like everybody with any money or access to power understood full well by the 1940s, was a shit show. They decided to flip around in her brain a little bit with a literal ice pick.

And instead, they broke her. They ruined her. And she ended up warehoused in a facility for the rest of her life. But not because of what was wrong with her. It's because of what they did to her that was the supposed cure. And during the operation, and it's in that episode, you'll hear it in the episode, you have to be awake during a lobotomy.

So Rosemary was awake. And in order to assess where they were in her brain in their crude way, they had her singing songs and reciting poems. And she was just singing away. And then she fell silent. And that was the end of Rosemary Kennedy. They had scrambled her brain. If you're not haunted by that. And that the idea that this was, in some circles, a perfectly acceptable way, an acceptable form of treatment for a myriad of different things.

But we have a very... Our relationship in American culture to mental health is itself diseased. We still carry the legacy of our Puritan forebears in viewing mental health disorders as character failings. We do. And people are ashamed and they're stigmatized sometimes for seeking treatment. Now, there's a part of you, of course, that wants to go, that's not true.

Look at online therapy and look at all the TV commercials for depression medications. Yeah, you are correct. But we still do not view mental health as an organic biological reality the way we do physical health. Look at how our for-profit health care system treats mental health. We have a scarcity of resources. We have insurers that don't want to cover it or who make the process so burdensome and I know so many therapists who don't even accept insurance because dealing with the insurance companies is a full-time job.

So what we have here is a system where there's a middleman between us and our doctors. And it's not the government like in the NIH in the United Kingdom. It's a for-profit company that has one agenda and one agenda only. And that agenda is not for you to get better. That agenda is to drive profits for their shareholders and their executives.

That's what for-profit health care is. The end. And the conversation right now in America because of the assassination of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare has been really interesting to watch because people are now saying all of these things out loud. They're just leaving off how they hate the Puritans. But you're hearing people talk about this.

So back when our story took place, there was almost no understanding of what really caused mental illness. They had a dim idea of hereditary even though nobody understood about DNA or any of that. But they could look and say, well, idiocy runs in families or being an imbecile runs in families. And feeble-minded women will give birth to children who will then be feeble-minded.

So they had some notions of heredity. But they didn't understand about brain chemistry or neurotransmitters or how the brain, we're meat. We're meat creatures. Everything about us is made of some form of meat or mineral, right? Our brains are not guaranteed to be flawless from the factory. There are structural disorders.

People can have lesions in their brains that cause all sorts of mental health issues. And they didn't understand any of that when our story takes place. And in fact, we have some understanding of it. Now, there's an awful lot we still don't understand about it. I mean, there's just an awful lot. I mean, back in the day, they stuck everybody in the same place.

Whether you had emotional problems, if you had disabilities, whether you had substance abuse, whether you were bipolar, all of these things, these people were all just sort of stuck into the same place. And lumped together. And again, there's no care unless you're the kind of sadistic descendant of the Puritans who thinks that submerging people in ice water is a cure, or beating them is a cure, or putting them in something the size of a crate for a German shepherd is a cure.

Those were the treatments on offer. I mean, you heard about that poor house in Virginia. You have an elderly woman who's struggling with orientation and memory, and you lock her down with a 28-pound iron ball on her ankle. This isn't medicine. This isn't care. This is punitive. It's sadistic. And you can't tell me there isn't sadism here, because I invite you to look at the Newark Asylum for Feeble-Minded Women, where the superintendent and his wife, who was the matron, his wife instructed her assistants that they could do as they pleased to the inmates without reporting or getting prior approval.

And what is it that they pleased to do? They pleased to strip them and beat them with a wooden ferrule. How about that part where they would shove them forcibly to the ground and catch them by the neck? Oh, that. Strangle them a little bit. Is that care? Like, in what universe is that care? Is that therapeutic, right?

These were terrible places for the most part. And you will find, and there will always be people attracted to those. You know, one of the things that came up in the Nuremberg trials that was very interesting about these people that were doing these atrocities, these people weren't, by nature, weren't monsters, but they were monsters in plain sight.

In other words, given the opportunity, if they weren't given the opportunity, they would never have committed these atrocities. But given the opportunity, they leaned into it and were able to do it. And the same was true in these places, because they had no advocates. I mean, even today, it's difficult to find people who are advocates for mental health.

I mean, you hear about them, but mental health issues is something people don't want to talk about. There was a situation, and I asked a friend of mine who's a journalist, he said, when you cover this, he goes, I've got to tell you something. He said, I'm not going to cover this because no one wants to hear about it. And, you know, for most parts of journalism, they're in the business of getting people to read or watch or something.

And most people don't want to talk about it. They still, you know, they still want it shut away somewhere where I don't have to deal with it. I don't have to think about it. And we haven't made much progress, by the way, with that, and we really haven't. Like, we're better in some ways, but we have not made much progress.

People are still fearful and hesitant to let other people know that they're struggling. We still don't really want to hear about the afflictions and suffering of people on the margins in our communities. What we want to do is we don't want to look at the homeless and say, what's going on here? What issues have put this person in this situation?

Instead, we say it's against the law to sit here. So you have to move. So we criminalize, we criminalize behavior that is driven by these other forces. And it's really depressing that we haven't made very much progress in this area at all. And as far as the people who worked in these facilities that were so terrible to their fellow humans, like, listen, what kind of an asshole puts a 28-pound iron ball on an old lady's ankle?

Who does that? Somebody that's getting off on that just a littlest bit. And which brings me to the next thing to pay attention to when people say, well, I was just doing what I was told. I was just following orders. Very few times in history does I was just following orders end up working out for you. No, and that was that was brought out at the Nuremberg trials as well.

Sorry, can't use that as an excuse. Sorry. Yeah, that doesn't. And I saw that again, you know, oh, my God, ripped from the headlines. I wrote this episode ages, months ago, before weeks ago, before the UHC assassin showed up on the scene. But one of the things I've seen a lot of in my news feed is, well, we can't be killing CEOs, which I agree with.

We can't just be willy nilly murdering people. OK, that's correct. He was just doing his job. Oh, was he just, you know, following orders? Because there are people. Who when presented with a job that conflicts with who they what their values and morals and faith aligns with. They don't do that job. They walk away from that job because they can't.

And now you're now you're going to say, well, he had a family. My brothers, we all have families. OK, we all have families. We all have choices to make. He should not have been assassinated. Right there. We should I'm a fan of the rule of law. We should have other and better and more civilized mechanisms for dealing. But do not justify the blood on his hands by telling me he was just doing his job because he was he was following orders.

That's a pretty shabby justification. And the really depressing thing. The really depressing thing is when you look at how little has changed in the way we take care of people with mental health issues. And in the way that they have always been gleefully denied care and dehumanized in their need for care and cast out of the circle of warmth and light because they need that care.

That has always been true and it still continues to be true. And what are we going to do about that? Or maybe the answer is we're not going to do anything about that because not enough people care because it's not happening to them. I don't know. Unfortunately, I think what you just said is true. Yeah. I mean, I guess we're just I guess that we're just we're just good with this, right?

Like we're just OK with this and this this story what happened in New York State and not to pick on you, New York State, because in a lot of ways, New York State is pretty evolved even back then. But what happened in New York State is still kind of happening. It just looks a little bit different now. We use different names and different codes and we don't even have public facilities really anymore, which is something the average person does not seem to know.

I can tell you as a social worker, my phone rings a lot with people that are like, hey, girl, my brother's son. Long, painful story of a person spiraling out. Where should we take him? How about us? Yeah, maybe the wizard can help. The same is true for people with substance abuse problems. So true. And then a lot of people who have substance abuse also have, you know, mental health issues as well.

Yep. Which is why America's corrections facilities, our jails, really, and our prisons are de facto mental health institutions. Like, it's shocking. It is shocking. The overlap between people with a diagnosed, chronic, recurring mental illness and a conviction that has landed them behind bars. And sometimes it's the symptoms of that chronic, recurring mental illness to get you arrested in the first place.

Public disorderliness. This is Max and I both, we do different kinds of work in the community, but this is a place where we overlap. People are arrested who actually need medical care. Right. That is true. And treatment for substance use and bipolar disorder. A person who's having a psychotic episode, they're hearing voices, they're seeing things that aren't there.

That person is not going to behave in ways that seem rational to you. They're not going to behave in ways that maybe make you feel safe. So 9-1-1, here come the cops. And, oh, look at that crazy guy. They're taking that crazy guy away. They're taking that crazy guy to jail. When what that person needs is medical treatment.

And we're not really built for that, are we? Well, and one of the first things that gets cut whenever there's going to be an economic downturn or a trim on the budget, the first thing that gets cut is any extra programs that are rehabilitative in nature, in corrections facilities, because who is their advocate? There is no, you know, they go, well, we're going to cut it from here because they're in prison.

They're not going to squawk about it. And that has happened time and time again. I know that that happened in a major way when we went through the Great Recession. Oh, it is the first to go, the absolute first to go. And do you hear, listen, listen, you hear the echoes of the Puritans. Well, maybe, you know, maybe I'd like a nice, long, quiet stay in a mental hospital.

But of course, I don't drink every day. So I, you know, I go to work and I do what I'm supposed to do. You hear that moralizing and that judgment. When in reality. And I hate their clothing, too. I just thought I'd mention that. Even though it's, you know, you would think it's very Wednesday Addams, you would think I would like it, but because I hate them so much.

Anyone who has a family member or a friend, someone in your life that you are intimately acquainted with, who has a serious mental health diagnosis, you now know, don't you from experience and heartache? You know that no one's choosing this. No one's doing this because they're weak or lazy or terrible, right? They're sick.

It's a disease. But until you know that, sometimes it's hard to believe that. And just, you know, understand what you vote for when you vote for the mayor and city council and and all of that, because when you need help in a crisis in your community, where do you think you're going to go? Let me help. You're going to go to the emergency department at the hospital.

And you're going to hope that some very nice health care worker there is going to give you a referral to a beautiful facility on some wooded rolling ground where the person you love can get help. Those places don't exist. You're going to get put on a mandatory 72 hour hold if a judge deems you a danger to yourself or others.

You're going to get stabilized and then you're going to get discharged. That's right. And when you ask us, what now? What now? I just gave you the answer. Well, huh? Well, there's a long waiting list for the one substance dependency treatment facility that accepts public patients. So we'll get you on that waiting list.

Well, you're sick right now. Well, yeah. Hey, can you afford private therapy? Because we can refer you out to this really excellent psychiatrist. Oh, you don't have any money? You don't have any insurance? Hey, Sherry, even if you have insurance, you know. The deductible. Oh, my God. It's a whole separate. It's prohibitive thing.

And until the Affordable Care Act, people one reason people would give for not seeking mental health care is, is they were afraid that once the diagnosis hit their record, their insurance company could could kick them out. You know, or maybe maybe their next job wouldn't want to hire them. So you had people who needed care but didn't get it because they were afraid of the stigma, right, of the care.

Something that and then we'll wrap up. Something that I want you to also pay attention to is any conversation in the news about something called EMTALA, EMTALA, the Emergency Medical Treatment Act. It's an unfunded congressional mandate. It's an unfunded federal mandate, unfunded, which means it's a law that emergency departments have to treat you regardless of your ability to pay.

If you present at a hospital emergency department and you're suicidal or hallucinating or bleeding, they have to provide stabilizing care. They have to. It's the law. Now, there's nobody paying for that except people with insurance and the hospital figures it out by charging 60 bucks for a Tylenol or whatever. It's creative accounting.

But there's a lot of talk right now that's been circulating for the past probably decade about maybe we need to get rid of the emergency medical treatment. Act. The word labor is in there, too, so that if you were in labor, they would have to help you deliver your baby. They couldn't just send you out to the parking lot.

There are a lot of people that want to get rid of that because they say that people are using the emergency department for routine health care. Well, my brothers and sisters, that's because they have no other access to routine health care. The emergency department is the only place they can go to get their heart medication or their medication for their bipolar disorder.

So like the system is grotesquely broken. But we're not going to fix it by making it worse, except I think we're going to make it worse. Whether whether whether we understand that that's not going to fix it or not, I fear that that's going to make it worse. And that is unimaginable to me as like a person and as a social worker, especially the idea of not having the EMTALA laws in place.

Where will people go? Where where will people go? And until you've spent time in a hospital emergency department and seen what comes in, your neighbors, their grandparents, they have no money, they have no insurance, they're having a heart attack or something. Elderly people can get a urinary tract infection and go into complete psychosis, hallucinating.

It's awful and it can be fixed with antibiotics. But the only place they can get them is the emergency department. So when you think about, oh, the bad old days where we locked women up and called them feeble minded and and then buried them in unmarked graves not that long ago and in always in danger of coming back. And I really feel it now.

And I hope that I'm Max, I hope I'm wrong. Let's hope. I mean, do you not do you not kind of feel like, hey, hey, I shouldn't do that. You know what's going to happen if we do that, right? It's going to be like what happened to Lillie Patch and Josephine Blessing and Mary Moore and all of those other women who were just out there, you know, getting by when they were scooped up and their freedom was taken from them and they were beaten and harassed and worse and then dumped into a mass grave.

Folks, we can do better than that, I think, don't you? So thank you for joining us for the bonus chat. We really appreciate your listening. And if you listen to us on Apple podcast, hit the plus button in the top right corner. And now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered. And we really appreciate it.

If you subscribe, rate and review True Weird Stuff. Hit our website True Weird Stuff dot com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it and bonus content. Everything True Weird is waiting for you at True Weird Stuff dot com. And follow True Weird Stuff on Instagram. True Weird Stuff is a Now! Media production.

Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Sweeten. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser. Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr. Original graphics by Kevin Nash.

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