By Joya Xu Class of 2025

The Evolution of Mental Health Treatment in America Through the Lens of Danvers State Hospital

Editor’s Note: The History Fellowship program offers students the opportunity to conduct college-level independent research on a historical topic of their choice, resulting in a substantial academic paper and oral presentation. Through guided discussions, structured support, and access to both on- and off-campus sources, students learn and apply the practices of professional historians.

In the 1940s, a mother who could no longer discipline her son sent him to a towering state hospital on Hathorne Hill to receive treatment. When officials asked him to sign his name forty years later, he held a pen up to the paper and drew a rough sketch of the hospital. The consequences of neglect and inadequate treatment this story, a feature in a September 6, 1987 issue of the Lynn Sunday Post article entitled “Too Many Patients to Treat, Human Flood Turned Hospital into Madhouse,” exemplifies was not an uncommon occurrence at the State Lunatic Hospital at Danvers, which later came to be known as the Danvers State Hospital. Although many patients entered for mental health reasons, several of them ultimately became prisoners at this snake pit of a hospital.

American society recognizes citizens with disabilities as the “unexpected minority” and their struggle for rights as “the last civil rights movement.” Throughout American history, society has defined individuals with disabilities as objects of shame, fear, pity, or ridicule. The government has incarcerated them in state institutions and various other community facilities. A blend of paternalistic treatment and social prejudice has prevented them from fully participating in society due to the belief that they are incapable of making decisions. The popularity of the eugenics movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries exemplified the depth of disability discrimination. Pseudoscientific notions that laziness and criminality were inheritable drove this movement, deeming mentally and physically disabled individuals a threat to societal peace and necessitating their institutionalization. Along with discriminatory laws, people with power advocated for and enforced sterilization in the hopes of eradicating disabilities from the U.S., ultimately leading to the surgical mutilation of tens of thousands of Americans with disabilities. This paper will explore the role of Danvers State Hospital in the treatment of disabled individuals in Massachusetts, including the treatments and mechanisms the institution employed on patients and its process of deinstitutionalization.

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