Truth Behind The Barred Windows—

Brightening Misunderstood Corridors Of Fairfield Hills Hospital

(As future plans begin to redefine the role of the Fairfield Hills campus in the community, The Bee has opted to look at its past status in town and explore the years when those now abandoned buildings were devoted to the mentally ill. An extensive Internet search has produced an overwhelmingly mysterious view of Fairfield Hills and mental hospitals alike, yet The Bee spoke with former hospital staff still living in town who told stories that are compassionate, sad, and often convey frustrations amid the evolving psychiatric practices between 1932 and 1995.)

 

By Kendra bobowick

Located in Newtown, the Fairfield Hills State Hospital (also known as “Fairfield Hills”) was opened as a mental institution in 1932. An accredited facility, Fairfield Hills was one of the state’s largest mental health institutions until it closed in 1995. At its peak it housed more than 4,000 patients. The main campus consists mostly of large two- to three-story buildings ranging in size from 15,000 to 200,000 square feet.

Tales from former faculty are fascinating enough without the added allure of ghost stories, hauntings, or other supernatural cloaks thrown over facilities once referred to as insane asylums, mental hospitals, lunatic asylums, or sanitariums for the mentally ill. A thorough Internet search found few references that did not emphasize psych wards filled with pain, misery, and mistreatment.

Family Therapist Bart Schofield — although not a former staff member — offers an explanation for the dark images.

 “First of all, you have to remember that in institutions like Fairfield Hills you only had the most mentally disturbed people there. That was the place you would go if your behavior was uncontrollable,” he said.

While the community supported the hospital — both medical and nonmedical staff was bolstered by many Newtown residents as one doctor noted — a darker vein suffused public perceptions of Fairfield Hills.

“Many had seen the asylum as a horrendous and torturous environment,” said Clinical Psychologist James Bergeron, PhD, who interned at the state facility in 1965 when he began his career.

In truth, this interpretation is “not so,” he said. Dr Bergeron worked at Fairfield Hills for several years, transferred elsewhere, and then returned to the Newtown hospital in 1977. He remained at Fairfield Hills until it closed in 1995.

 “Some members of the public had misconceptions during the years,” he said.  “I think some people saw the asylum as a snake pit.”

Offering another stark suggestion, he said, “some saw it as a box in which you put people.” Within that box, however, were the professionals striving to assist those afflicted with severe mental illness.

Looking Back

Former staff members shared their experiences and observations from their time at the state hospital. Discussing his past, one psychologist recalled how he began to see clearly the vast gap between mental illness and effective treatment; a medical librarian who admittedly knew little about psychiatric patients but concluded after time that the boundaries of sanity are tenuous; and one former psychiatrist who was overcome with the emotion, memories, and his sharp compassion for patients. Nurses formerly employed at the facility also contributed their understanding of Fairfield Hills.

Through different personal experiences, these men and women also realized that many patients were delusional, sometimes dangerous, and ultimately impaired by illness. In their explanations is the evidence of the various ways the staff approached its work. Some sought to bring comfort to those shadows of a patient’s psyche where medicine could not reach. Others attempted treatments, explored the effects of therapy, and learned about dawning medications. Another more troubled faction trudged relentlessly after explanations.

Working at Fairfield Hills was Registered Nurse Melanie Tanner’s first job after graduation in 1979, where she remained until the facility closed.

Still in the nursing field, she remembers Fairfield Hills as “a great place to work overall; people were very supportive.”

Arriving at the hospital more than ten years after Dr Bergeron began working there, Ms Tanner also sensed some public misgivings.

“They were big buildings built in the 1930s when people were afraid of mental illness,” she said. “People who were delusional or psychotic were feared.”

Other developments were evident to Ms Tanner as she looks back to 1979. She saw progress in the new drugs used to treat patients. “With the advent of medications and treatments, things could be controlled,” she said.

Patients were also making constructive strides.

“People were able to seek help because the stigma was less,” she said. Becoming more commonplace were magazine and television ads for drugs for depression, she said. The stigma of the “box where you put people” Dr Bergeron described lingered, however.

Ms Tanner said, “For many people that was their home and the family did not want them back.”

Adding to her observations, Dr Bergeron said, “People say today that people were kept in the hospital when they didn’t have to be.”  He explains the reasons for extended stays, saying, “There were no community places to go.”

The availability of therapists, counselors, and support groups in the community had not developed yet, he said.

Ms Tanner noticed signs of improved practices nonetheless.

“In the 80s a lot of student nurses came through and it was nice to learn new theories,” she said.

Doing What They Could

Dr Bergeron talks about his main approach saying, “I wanted to help people stabilize and reenter the community if they could.” His hopes did not always match reality, however.

“Almost all patients, especially toward the end, were catastrophically ill,” he said. Two primary groups were schizophrenics and bipolar patients.

Times and practices changed in Dr Bergeron’s favor.

“As medications improved, some patients could return to the community,” he said. Approaches to mental illness were also shifting.

“Over the years there was more of an orientation on getting patients back into the community,” he said. Dr Bergeron also noted an increase in community programs for people with a mental illness.

Medications were a help, but not the entire answer to solving mental health problems.

“I sometimes think the meds gave us a window of opportunity and if you combined it with … therapy you could really help.”

Mr Schofield, a marriage and family therapist in private practice, offered perspective on the psychiatric field.

“As with other [medical treatments], psychotherapy has undergone many, many changes and many of the original principles are now refuted,” he said.

Early approaches were not necessarily meant to help the patient.

“Procedures used in institutions were designed to control a patient’s behavior and make the patient easier for the people around him,” Mr Schofield pointed out. He said treatments could be severe, such as lobotomies, which severed the frontal lobe, where impulse control is based. “A lot of early approaches were to make people more acceptable to society,” he said.

Mr Schofield expressed relief when he said, “We’ve come a long, long way. Psychiatry and psychotherapy are much gentler today.”

Professional views of patients are far different also, he said. “Approaches were much kinder in the last ten years compared to the first ten years.”

Striving to help patients, Dr Bergeron practiced an approach considered controversial at the time: he employed cognitive behavioral therapy. Essentially, some patients were “difficult to manage even with meds,” he said. A ward was established and would accept anyone “who was not profiting from any other program.”

“We wanted to help the person recognize their strengths and capabilities,” Dr Bergeron said. He described a reward system meant to motivate patients.

“It would be explained to them that there were a lot of constructive behaviors and if they fulfilled one they received a token. Tokens could be ‘spent’ on rewards,” he explained. “We kept things the patients liked and we looked for what the patient found reinforcing and rewarding.”

Today, people exhibiting and acting on the impulses that would have landed them in Fairfield Hills years ago now are considered criminals who land in Ward A, Dr Bergeron said.

Explaining this remark, he said, “It’s the first name and middle initial of Mr Garner.”

Down the hill from the Fairfield Hills campus is Garner Correctional Institution, a Level 4 high-security facility that was designated as the state Department of Correction’s “dedicated mental health facility for adult male offenders with significant mental health needs,” according to the DOC website.

Although medications have made life much easier for a lot of people who could rejoin the community, Dr Bergeron said, “There are still some who have trouble controlling themselves, and they end up in Ward A.”

Not all individuals deserve prison, he said. “If you have someone who is psychiatrically ill who doesn’t necessarily follow society and does bizarre things in the community, that doesn’t make them criminals,” Dr Bergeron said. “Help them in the hospital.” 

He sought ways to help patients relate, he said.

“You have to help them overcome the behavior,” he said. “The mistake a lot of people make about someone who is disturbed or mentally ill is ignoring the underlying personality. The patient could be a manic-depressive, but a very nurturing person is underneath,” he said. Dr Bergeron feels that, unfortunately, “what gets more attention is the negative.”

Despite improvements in medications, advancements in counseling and therapy, and leaps of understanding about treating mental illness, medical librarian Eleanor Thompson notes one constant element. She said, “I did learn one thing. There is a line between sanity and something else, and it’s very, very thin.”

Adding To Apprehension

Disquieting medical truths emerge in descriptions of treatments and methods of managing patient’s illnesses and behavior.

“Some people received lobotomies, of course,” Dr Bergeron said.

Shock therapy and lobotomies were two prominent means of handling intense psychiatric ailments. Shock therapy required preparations.

“We would give the patient medications to relax and at about the time of the shock we would administer a med to temporarily paralyze to keep muscles from going into spasms.”

Treatments were effective in some cases, he said.

Mr Schofield spoke about the procedure’s archaic factors that he feels fed into the public’s dark perception. “Shock treatments were violent,” he said. “Muscles would contract so much it would break a patient’s bones.”

A real fear prevailed regarding facilities — often referred to as insane asylums or lunatic asylum — piquing curiosity. Movies like One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest portrayed heavily medicated and lobotomized patients.

Discussing the procedure’s reality, Mr Bergeron said, “They would frequently drill holes above the temples near the frontal lobe and make a hole about one-half inch in diameter on either side and they would go in and sever the lobe.”

Describing an alternate transorbital procedure, he said, “They moved the eyeball down and went in that way.”

Offering a disquieting view of lobotomies, Mr Schofield said, “In the early days you could be a vegetable. You were a happy cabbage.”

He believes that if the precisely right section of the frontal lobe could be located and severed, doctors might have been more successful. In the early 1930s and 1940s, “They didn’t know what they would get,” he said. He tells a story of one patient’s post-lobotomy behavior.

“I heard he was absolutely happy and no longer a danger. After being home a few days, the parents couldn’t find any money in the house,” he said. “They found him and he was handing out money on the streets. You never know.”

Morbid Misconceptions

Buying into the purported horror stories of patient torture, frightening dementia, and debilitating or painful procedures may come from a person’s need to be entertained, Mr Schofield suggested.

He also said he sincerely believes that people who have known patients “are less likely to accept stories as fact.”

Western Connecticut State University Professor of Sociology Steven Ward suspects that certain locations acquire characteristics and become “sacred places,” he said. Describing what he sees as a cultural phenomenon, he said, “Places become special, either positive or dark and haunted.”

Reflecting on mental illness, he found a brighter strain of perception, saying, “it was not always frightening but could have meant a person had special insight or powers.” He then referenced a different era.

“Prior to the Age of Reason, [disturbed] people were simply allowed to be,” Dr Ward said. “They were just a little variety of humanity.”

He believes that “many pieces shape people’s perception of mentally ill.” Describing the advent of psychiatry he said, “people had to be rounded up and cordoned off, sort of like criminals in some way because they were a threat,” he said.

“With modernity was an emphasis on reason and rationality. It was at that time that you saw a rise in mental health institutions in the early 19th Century.”

(Former Fairfield Hills staff, patients, or those with insight on this story are encouraged to contact reporter Kendra Bobowick at  426-3141 or Kendra@TheBee.com.)