SPH-R 210 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Deinstitutionalisation, Insulin Shock Therapy, Lobotomy
Inclusion
Recent History
• Samuel Howe & the Massachusetts School for Idiotic Children and Youth
o Boston, 1849
o Function as a family
o Gain knowledge
o Be clean, decent, temperate and industrious
o Happy
o They were so successful families did not want their children back.
o Against Howe’s wishes the dehumanizing institutionalization of
individuals with disabilities began.
▪ Forces labor
▪ Disabled = Societal ills
• 19th Century
o Industrial Revolution (1800-1840’s)
▪ Required higher educational level – 3rd Grade
▪ Anyone under that level was “feebleminded”
▪ This included individuals who were
• Blind
• Deaf
• LD/DD
• Physical Disabilities
▪ Spreading – inferring that because someone has a physical
disability they also have a LD/DD’
• 20th Century
o As women’s rights began to take force, individuals with disabilities
had their rights stripped.
o Public’s perception
▪ Feebleminded
▪ Unable to resist their own impulses
▪ Burden on Society
▪ Menace to the future
o Solutions
▪ Involuntary sterilization
▪ Extermination
o Involuntary Sterilization become law and upheld by the Supreme
Court (Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200; 1927)
▪ Classified people as Defective
o Over the next 40 years over 63,000 people were sterilized
involuntarily for “genetically related reasons”.
▪ 1974 – Funding was cut off, but it still happens today.
• Dehumanization in Institutions
o Institutions changed from places that helped people with disabilities
to places that managed/controlled people with disabilities.
