Old Main Remembered
I just finished reading a gutwrenchingly romanticized eulogy of Old Main's demise (”How Not to Save Old Main,” Oct. 25, 2007). Old Main was the central building of the sprawling Northampton State Hospital, closed after over a century of incarcerating mentally ill people for most if not all of their lives. The author waxes lyrical about the architect’s design being sensitive to the needs of the "acute cases’ and mourns its passing.
Have we all forgotten what these warehouses were about? Human beings were sent to these bins for various reasons, including ”odd” behavior, homelessness, epilepsy, having a child out of wedlock, various non-psychiatric neurological conditions and a range of bona fide mental illnesses, some severe and some mild. They were generally over-medicated, subjected to electro-shock ”treatments,” deprived of their privacy and routinely stripped of their rights. They were subjected to a strict regime in which full compliance was the ticket to privileges and resistance was a sure route to ”consequences.”
Anyone who has seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest will be familiar with the regime, and if you think that film used any poetic license, I can assure you it did not. I have spent most of my career working in mental health services in the U.S. and the U.K. My experience as an aide at Northampton State Hospital in the 1960s fired my determination to completely revamp mental health services as chief executive of a long-stay psychiatric hospital in England in the mid 1990s. I closed that institution after putting a range of modern, truly client-friendly communitybased supported housing and in- and out-patient services in its place.
I am pleased Old Main and all it represents has been demolished. If anything to do with Old Main should be preserved, it should be to ensure that we never forget how we mistreated our fellow human beings because they were different. If there is a need to mark its passing, it would be suitable to place a plaque applauding the advent of modern mental health care practices and the demise of places like Northampton State Hospital.
Robert S. Haughton
Northampton
During the middle ages various enterprising groups, including the Roman Catholic Church, found the Roman Colosseum to be an opportune source of bricks and stones for various local building projects. However, in some 2,000 years of history, the Italians failed to produce a character with the destructive zeal of Mayor Higgins and her toadies. Thanks to Mark Roessler’s excellent piece, we are able to view the implacable, joyless momentum of the Citizens’ Advisory Committee. Now that there is nothing of great historical value or architectural magnificence left to ruin in Northampton, we can safely reelect Mayor Higgins as many times as we wish.
Phil Wilson
Northampton
