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An Oral History of the West Seneca Developmental Center (1961-2011)
Civic Engagement and Public Policy Research Fellowship
Michael A. Rembis, Director, Center for Disability Studies UB Civic Engagement Research Fellow
Assistant Professor, Department of History
David A. Gerber, Director Emeritus, Center for Disability Studies Distinguished Professor, Department of History
Civic Engagement
Laura Mangan - UB 2020 Civic Engagement & Public Policy Research Initiative
Digital Humanities Small Research Project Funding
Kathryn Lawton – GRA
Douglas Platt - Museum Curator, MUSEUM OF disABILITY HISTORY
Doug Kane - External Experts
Christian P Marks - SBSIRB Administrator
Former Employees and Residents – West Seneca
WSDC Oral History Project - CE-PP
Why engage in oral history?
UC Berkeley's website on the Disability Rights and Independent Living Movement Temple University, Institute on Disabilities – “Visionary Voices” project
Schwler, Speak-easy: People with mental handicaps talk about their lives in institutions and in the community (1990)
Pelka, What We Have Done: An Oral History of the Disability Rights Movement (2012)
WSDC
“West Seneca Developmental Center opened in October 1962 for the stated purposes of relieving overcrowded conditions in other state
facilities and for serving Western New York State. In 1974, the name was changed from West Seneca State School to West Seneca Developmental Center to reflect a change in philosophy and
mission…” -KL
A (very) brief history of institutions…
1830s-1900
New York State Care Act of 1890
A (very) brief history of institutions…
1860s-1940s
Congress Responds
1946 – U.S. Congress passes the Mental Health Act
leading to the creation of the National Institute of Mental Health.
By the early 1950s… Spending on mental hospitals increases 100 percent
Mental hospital employee rises from 79,740 to more than 100,000
Shift in the philosophy governing most mental hospitals away from custodial care to intensive treatment and release
beginning of “de-institutionalization” in the United States
Still over 500,000 institutionalized people in the US
1949: The New York State Mental Health Commission was formed.
1949: The State mental health system included 27 facilities, and the state's inpatient census was the largest in the nation.
1955: New York’s inpatient population peaked at 93,600
Council of State Governors – mid-1950s
Congress Continues Reform and Research
1955 – U.S. Congress passes the Mental Health Study Act creating the Joint Commission on Mental Illness and Mental Health
1961 – Federal spending on mental health research increases tenfold to $100.9 million
1963 – President John F. Kennedy signs the "Mental Retardation Facilities and Community Health Centers Construction Act of 1963”
Public Law 88-164, 77 STAT 282, "to provide assistance in combating mental retardation through grants for construction of research centers and grants for facilities for the mentally retarded and assitance in improving mental health through grants for construction of community mental health centers, and for other purposes.” (10/31/1963) Speaking before Congress in February 1963, President Kennedy described community care as “a bold new approach.” Kennedy assured Congress that when the new plan was “carried out, reliance on the cold mercy of custodial isolation will be supplanted by the open warmth of community concern and capability (Quoted in Torrey 1988, 108).”
The End of Institutionalization?
1965 – U.S. Congress creates the Medicaid and Medicare programs
providing federal subsidies for care in nursing homes, but no such subsides in state mental hospitals.
Between 1965 and 1970, the population of institutionalized mental patients decreases by 140,000
with most of those patients going into nursing homes.
1972: Two new federal Social Security programs, Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI)
dramatically altered care, allowing them to live independently.
1980 – Census of U.S. state institutions sets the in-patient population at 132,164, down from 559,000 in 1955.
Willowbrook: the Last Great Disgrace (1972)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_sYn8DnlH4
In 1974, the name was changed from West Seneca State School to West Seneca Developmental Center to reflect a change in philosophy and mission…
The West Seneca oral history project…
Disability & Oral History
Disability is a powerful analytical concept for understanding some of the broad changes of the last five decades.
Disability is not simply the artifact of change; it is constitutive of those changes.
Interview Notes…
…the way many former residents prospered in the community was especially powerful evidence …of the necessity of ending the hold of the large residential institution [on] their understandings of not simply the welfare of the former residents, but the concept …of developmental disability, as it had been employed at the start of their careers.
They came to understand, by virtue of close observation of individuals under their care, the way in which residents acquired an institutional personality by virtue of institutionalization. Shed the institutional connection, the reasoning went, and new possibilities might emerge for these individuals.
The interviewees understand the irony of their careers what they learned in the case of their emerging understandings had the effect of diminishing their professional authority when measured against the assumptions that had guided them as professionals when they entered work in disability service provision…
The latter point is especially significant as a reflection of the emerging theme of skepticism about bigness and bureaucratic management
experience seemed to indicate that not only did the large institution not accomplish the goals they had brought to working within it, but instead worked against accomplishing the goal of assisting the residents.
