10. Numerous Patients Were Crammed Into Every Room
Despite being grand and massive facilities, the insides of state-run asylums were overcrowded. Thanks to the relative ease of involuntarily committing someone, asylums were full soon after opening their doors. Viewing the mentally ill and otherwise committed as prisoners more than patients also led to a general disinterest in their well-being. The culmination of these factors was cramming countless patients into small rooms at every turn.
At the Oregon facility, sleeping rooms were only 7 feet by 14 feet, with as many as ten people being forced to sleep in each room. Nellie Bly described sleeping with ten other women in a tiny room at a New York institution. Patients were often confined to these rooms for long hours, with dumbwaiters delivery food and necessities to the patients to ensure they couldn’t escape. While the facades and grounds of the state-run asylums were often beautiful and grand, the insides reflected how the society of the era viewed the mentally ill. The interiors were bleak, squalid and overcrowded. The beauty and grandeur of the facilities were very clearly meant for the joy of the taxpayers and tourists, not those condemned to live within.