August 02, 2007

Where's Molly? is a documentary about one man's search to find his sister, who'd been institutionalized nearly 40 years before. At the time, families regularly institutionalized children with a variety of disabilities on the advice of doctors and other 'experts.'

Now the filmmaker has joined together with The Arclink, a group that advocates for people with mental disabilities, to help other families reconnect with institutionalized members, launching the FindFamily Registry. (The Arclink site has a bunch of interesting links on it.) Here's the documentary's official site.

posted by meredithea 16 years ago
  • Cool FPP. Looking forward to watching this.
  • How cruel people were in the name of medicine.
  • Great post, m! I bet lots of us have experience of something related to this, some degrees removed. I sure do.
  • I worked for one of those institutions for a year or so in the early 1960s. Most of the patients were profoundly retarded,or had been in the system for so long that they were severely damanged. (The scandals about patient care in California state hospitals in the late 50s had caused the state to fan out those affected to newer hospitals. They also fanned out the "care takers" who had treated those patients horribly, and not much changed for several years, though I think things eventually did get better.) The care was best on the wards for the most affected. I worked one where the only way we could give the patients a (hopeful) change of scenery was to put them on the floor while we changed their beds, and give them diluted juice to heep them hydrated. Two patients still haunt me today. One was a ten year old boy who had the body of a 2 month old infant, and the mentality of a newborn, at best. The other was a girl suffering from untreatable hydrocephalus. She had been able to talk and function reasonably well, but when I knew her, she had lost all that, but could still smile when I picked her up and lowered her to the floor. Her head was about a foot and a half in from chin to skull, and was very heavy, so it was pretty scary to do that. I also spent some time on a ward for moderately retared girls. There was one success story when a darling Down Syndrome patient was placed with a family. But, another child, quite beutiful, asked me to write a letter her her parents. She wanted them to visit her and bring her a doll. They never responded.
  • How sad, path. What's the institution's policy on "anonymous drop-offs"? (i.e. Someone left this for you - don't know who")
  • From what I understand, this was quite common in Quebec as well, where mentally disabled children were placed in the care of the state, or the nuns. Along came the '80s and '90s, with the attendant pressures to cut government spending, and many of those places were shut down, to send the children, now middle-aged adults, 'back to their families'. The government used the guise of admitting that it was wrong to remove these children as a basis to cut them loose. As a result, a fair number of these people wound up on the streets. Walk Ste. Catherine, and you'll see that a great many of the homeless are all of a certain age, and with serious mental disabilities.
  • They should have just given her a Pepsi like she wanted.