11. Workers Didn’t Wear Uniforms
While fiction has often portrayed asylum inmates posing as doctors or nurses, in reality, the distinction was often unclear. In a sadly true case of the inmates running the asylum, the workers at early 20th century asylums were rarely required to wear any uniform or identification. While this is scarcely imaginable now, mental health treatment and organized hospitals, in general, were both still in their relative infancy. This lack of uniform often led to patients and staff being indistinguishable from each other, which doubtless led to a great deal of stress and confusion for both patients and visitors.
A former inmate of the Oregon state asylum later wrote that when he first arrived at the mental hospital, he approached a man in a white apron to ask questions about the facility. It was only later, after he’d been admitted that he realized the man was a patient on the same floor as him. There had been no supervision of this man wandering the premises, nor were the workers dressed differently enough for this man to notice. He later concluded that the only way to tell the staff was that they tended to be marginally better dressed than the inmates.