By and large, the interviews with ex-employees were positive. While acknowledging the abuse and neglect, those whom I interviewed projected a genuine caring regard for their former wards. Following are a few observations made about Danvers and the people who lived there. A former social worker said, "For many it was a haven. . . . It was a safe place. For some it was a home. For some, it was a snake pit. . . . but for others it was home much as jail can be home to a recidivist" (WGBH, 1995). A former charge nurse in an interview, said "Talk about coming home for Christmas! We would have forty patients in the ward who were then discharged. But the second week in December they would be readmitted! They all felt like it was their home."
A former chief operating officer told me: "I remember working with a guy who had been at Danvers State since the thirties and talking to him about the baseball team, and how Danvers had always had a great team. They won all kinds of trophies. They were really a premiere team, and he said, 'The only drawback on this was that if you were a really good player you were guaranteed not to get discharged, just because you were needed to be on the team." In a made-for-television documentary, a former employee related: "When I was there, there were a lot of people who had come . . . in the early 1900s. There was a young man . . . who had been there all his life--since he was eight years old. According to his records. . . .he had pulled three false fire alarms and that got him hospitalized." She also recalled a particular foreign patient: "There was a young man from Turkey who spoke no English. Was he behaving bizarrely? Perhaps. . . .the record doesn't indicate. He was picked up as a vagrant, jailed, and then sent to the hospital, and never left. . . . and nobody ever talked to him in Turkish" (WGBH, 1995).
In an article titled "Too Many Patients to Treat, Human Flood Turned Hospital into Madhouse," which appeared in the September 6, 1987, Lynn Sunday Post, reporter David Marrs wrote: "Stories like the tale of a boy whose mother could not discipline him anymore and decided to place him at Danvers State for 'treatment' are not unusual. Forty years later, when asked to sign his name, he held the pad and pencil, and in a rough free-hand sketch, drew a picture of--the hospital." A former nurse on "J-3" told me: "In a lot of aspects Danvers was a pit, as were a lot of state hospitals, but in a lot of ways it was a very humane, very caring environment." His point of view coincided with the sentiment expressed by a former unit director: "There was a time that the state hospitals were in their glory. . . .They were actually very nurturing, very positive places to be. People had real work to do. They went out in the fields and they were farmers. . . . They were in the kitchen baking, or cooking the meal people were going to eat that evening. . . . Clients would talk about when they had their real jobs--'I used to work in the laundry'. . . .'I used to farm"' (WGBH, 1995).
Marie Balter, the famous mental health advocate, recently deceased, wrote regarding her time as a patient at Danvers: "As the months go by, my friendship with Mother Eaton and Miss Harris, the head nurse on C-1, deepens. I feel very close to them both. . . . I feel trusted and accepted as a real person. . . . [Miss Harris is] a kind and gentle young woman. . .[who] always gives the impression of complete competence. It doesn't take long for me to feel close to her" (Balter and Katz 1987, 68).
In sharp contrast to these observations are the strongly held opinions of the Danvers Memorial Committee. This dynamic organization is made up of more than sixty ex-patients and their allies. It has convened in order to convince the State of Massachusetts to properly memorialize the cemeteries at Danvers, as well as at other former state hospitals, prisons, and schools for the developmentally disabled. The committee's Web site describes the challenge it faced: Although the cemeteries had been neglected and overgrown for thirty-five years, the committee "discovered [them] and the 768 people buried [at Danvers]. Since our beginning in February of 1998, we have succeeded in getting the two cemeteries at Danvers State Hospital cleared, but conditions are still deplorable." The gravestones are marked only with a number. The state had reportedly lost records of which name went with which grave number, so committee members have been forced to research the death certificates at the respective town halls in order to identify the buried.
In November of 1998, the committee held a service to commemorate the grave sites. The day was cold and blustery, and the hospital campus looked like a Halloween set. Some sixty members of the committee, a state representative, and several members of the media convened to witness the blessing of the graves, including the release of balloons--the latter representing "the letting go of the stigma of the past and the beginning of a new age of respect and dignity for people with mental illness" (Danvers State Memorial Committee pamphlet). There followed a tour of the two graveyards that contained the rows of burial sites, each marked by a circular stone with a number on top. It was an unforgettable experience, walking through the recently cleared site looking at the rows of stone markers.
There was a mood of incredulity that these "pauper" burials had been carried out. I found myself saying the numbers--194, 276, 389, and so on. We were walking over the remains of more than seven hundred persons, with not one name of a deceased to be found. Who were these people? What had their lives been like? Each had been a unique individual in life, yet here they were unnamed and unacknowledged in death.
As I walked through the recently cleared plots of land, I looked up over the northern stone wall and the adjoining field where, just a short while before, we had released balloons. I peered through the tangle of naked tree branches, intertwined like so many gnarled limbs, and saw the dark silhouette of "A"wing on the eastern side of the hospital. It seemed to be brooding over this public gathering in the "pauper graveyards." The sharp points of the hospital wing loomed forebodingly. I experienced the eeriest feeling--one that came close to reconciling the dichotomies of Danvers. I realized the institution had been a home, but now I wondered, what sort of home? Viewed from the stone wall that formed one side of the graveyard, it seemed a monstrous one.
Many questions have crowded my mind about Danvers. For instance, I have wondered what this hospital looked like at night before the advent of electricity. Did the candles highlight the silhouettes of human figures from within? How many generations of crows and pigeons have inhabited the worn gray wooden air shafts, whose vents are shaped like a bird's wings? What did Danvers smell like when the institution succumbed to "the evils of overcrowding"? Had the electric fans that were installed in the ventilation towers in 1894 actually relieved the stench of rising misery in the overcrowded Castle?
I have no idea why I wonder about such things. I sometimes have thought I might be haunted by this place on the hill. It is without a doubt the most powerful building I have encountered, and I wonder if Kirkbride's creation has not perversely worked its therapeutic magic on me--namely, that I have internalized the structure, but not the psychiatric paradigm, of the wreck it has become. I have done more than four hundred drawings in pastel of its exterior, interior, and what its inhabitants must have looked like. The size of the drawings range from twenty by twenty to twenty-eight by one hundred and twenty inches. Because I work full time as a social work director in a private psychiatric hospital, I have done most of my work early in the morning to cups of coffee and the pounding of hard rock/heavy metal.
Perhaps some find it incongrous that I enjoy such groups as Fat Boy Slim, Nine Inch Nails, Praxis, Prodigy, Rammstein, Ministry, and Motorhead, even though I am over fifty. These bands reflect my own transient feelings of depression and alienation. As I listen to the likes of Pearl Jam wailing away I pick up snippets of lyrics through the rumbling beat that echo what I have heard at work in the hospital: suicidal and homicidal ideation, total despair, and memories of abuse. For at the hospital, I see the "revolving door" spin too fast; the people coming in for desperately needed help, too sick; the insurance companies' pressure to discharge, too strong; and the community supports too decimated through cutbacks to really assist those we are mandated to serve.
How does one reconcile the acts of caring with the image of the snake pit? "The answer is that we are better scientists than Kirkbride and his friends, but not better people. . . . Kirkbride imagined far better things in the relationship of citizens to mental patients than the failures for which we are responsible. So the present times cry out for a woman like Dorothea Dix, a man like Thomas Kirkbride" (Bond 1947, 160). Dix's biographer, David Gollaher wrote that "where Dix failed, and where every other reformer has failed since, is in making the humanitarian ideal tenable within the perpetually self-interested scheme of American politics. While modern society frets about visible madness in the streets, now as then, it seems resigned to tolerating a mentally ill underclass whose condition thwarts treatment, palliation or control" (Gollaher 1995, 448). The historian went on to assert that by "default the Los Angeles County Jail, violent and overcrowded, has in the late twentieth century become the nation's largest mental institution" (450).
Returning to the lunatic hospital of an earlier era, I have found that Danvers is about many complex issues far beyond my ability to convey. My obsession about the place continues. These images from Poe are fitting.