It isn’t easy for me to write about institutionalization because I’ve been through it. Though it’s been a number of years since I’ve experienced a locked facility, I still feel anxiety when I think of them. Even when visiting hospitals and nursing homes, I get anxious, as if someone will come up behind me and lock the door and I won’t be let out. But it’s this experience that has drawn me to try and explore my aunt’s history of institutionalization, though she had a developmental disability, not a mental health diagnosis, and our stories are very different.
When my aunt Cindy was born with Down syndrome in 1947, institutionalization in a facility like the Montana Developmental Center(MDC) in Boulder was almost certain. Many times, attending “doctors and fathers conspired” and told the mother the infant had died, rather than tell her the child had been born with Down syndrome. Given this context, my aunt Cindy was lucky. Her parents didn’t know she had Down syndrome until she was a toddler. The doctor who delivered her didn’t recognize the traits when she was born, and it wasn’t until she began missing developmental milestones that she was diagnosed. Even then, she wasn’t institutionalized. They kept her at home. If the doctor had recognized that Cindy had Down syndrome at birth, she could have ended up in an institution when she was a baby.
The Montana Developmental Center has been known by many names since it first opened at the end of the 19th century. Originally, it was the Montana School for Backward Feeble-Minded Children. It’s also been called the Montana State Training School, the Boulder River School, and in 1985 it was rebranded as the Montana Developmental Center. It’s listed on the National Parks Service website as a historic site, and is noted for its architecture, spanning Italian Renaissance Revival to Modernist. Its campus is situated in the Elkhorn Mountains. It is picturesque. It is isolated. And at its peak, it warehoused over 1000 people in a facility originally built for a few hundred. Although smaller in scale, MDC was like Willowbrook in the dehumanization of its residents and similarly notorious for its deplorable conditions, neglect, abuse — even rape — of residents, and overworked, underpaid, untrained staff. Per person, it’s the most expensive facility in the state, it’s mostly empty, and has been slated for permanent closure. At some time in the 1960s, my aunt Cindy was institutionalized there.
Although she excelled at making potholders, Cindy wanted to be a waitress at the Park Cafe in Anaconda when she turned twenty-one. But her twenty-first birthday came and went and she never did land that job. It wasn’t possible. There were no community-based services for people with disabilities. There were no job coaches to help people learn the skills they needed for employment. At the time, almost no one believed a person with Down syndrome could lead a “normal” life. Now, we know that’s not true. People with Down syndrome have jobs, own businesses and graduate from high school and college. When I asked my dad about her, he said he didn’t know much, but that as Cindy aged and nothing ever changed, she gradually lost her smile, as if a realization had dawned on her that she would never live the life she wanted. She became quiet. Depressed. That’s how I knew her.