Conditions at Willard

While on my tour of the facilities, we were assured that this was a cruelty free hospital, and that this was one of the first psychiatric hospitals to focus on rehabilitation on patients rather than locking them away. I can't seem to agree with this statement. The buildings that we were taken inside of were ones that were actually still in use, meaning they were nice and displayed qualities of psychiatric hospitals today. I on the other hand, was able to climb through the window of a condemned building to get an actual look at what they didn't exactly want us to see. My first post about willard contains my photographs from this experience, and in my next post I will upload the footage I took. What I saw were restraint  chairs, electrodes for electro-shock therapy, and restraint bath tubs for hydro-therapy, in which you were stuck into a boiling hot bathtub and left there. What I saw was actually strikingly similar to season two of American Horror Story: Asylum. My other reason for my disbelief is the Willard cemetery down the street. Over 7,000 Willard patients are buried there, each with only a small piece of metal with a stamped number to signify that they were there. No way to tell who they were or when they died. These patients were probably not even put in caskets. The morgue on campus still reeks of formaldehyde, a smell I'm all too familiar with from my AP biology dissections, and is full of refrigerators for bodies. Just the fact that over 7,000 people died there, over a short period of time, offers proof of the cruel treatment of the facility. Mental patients, even up until the 70s, were treated like animals, and locked away to die out of the eye of the public.