96 - Pennhurst State Hospital: Pennsylvania's Dirty Secret

Timesuck with Dan Cummins

Dan Cummins

True Crime, Society & Culture, Religion, Conspiracies, History, Biographies, Education, Adult Humor, Comedy, Dark Humor, Conspiracy, Cults

4.7 • 21.6K Ratings

🗓️ 16 July 2018

⏱️ 102 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Billed now as the Pennhurst Haunted Asylum, Pennhurst was never an asylum. It wasn't a home for the mentally ill when it first opened its doors in 1908. It was a home for epileptics and the intellectually disabled, then called "idiotic" and "feeble-minded". And then it became a home for basically everyone society either didn't want to take care of or didn't know how to take care of. And it soon became severely overcrowded. And then it became both overcrowded and underfunded. And then it became a nightmare for it's "children" (the term its patients were given, whether they were six months old or sixty). Understaffing lead to squalid conditions where people were living and dying covered in their own feces and in wounds given to them by either themselves, other patients, or, in some cases, staff members. The government, after numerous lawsuits, shut Pennhurst down for good in 1987. And today, we look at why things got so bad they felt compelled to do so. And, we examine life for the mentally handicapped today in America. Have things gotten any better? What, as a society and culture, are we supposed to do for and with those who can do for themselves? How do we take care of each other? A lot of hard questions are asked in a thought-provoking edition of Timesuck. My new free Behind the Bit Pandora station with Chad Daniels talking about our favorite bits! https://www.pandora.com/station/play/3978690913982414208?ag=17920720304261509 Timesuck is brought to you today by The Great Courses Plus! Do yourself a HUGE favor and get a month of SO MUCH amazing, interesting, and informative content for FREE: https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/timesuck Timesuck is also brought to you be Leesa! We love Leesa! Get $160 off when you go to Leesa.com/timesuck Merch - https://badmagicmerch.com/ Want to try out Discord!?! https://discord.gg/tqzH89v Want to join the Cult of the Curious private Facebook Group? Go directly to Facebook and search for "Cult of the Curious" in order to locate whatever current page hasn't been put in FB Jail :) For all merch related questions: https://badmagicmerch.com/pages/contact Please rate and subscribe on iTunes and elsewhere and follow the suck on social media!! @timesuckpodcast on IG, @timesuckpodcast on Twitter, and www.facebook.com/timesuckpodcast Wanna be a Space Lizard? We're over 2500 strong! Click here: https://www.patreon.com/timesuckpodcast Sign up through Patreon and for $5 a month you get to listen to the Secret Suck, which will drop Thursdays at Noon, PST. You'll also get 20% off of all regular Timesuck merch PLUS access to exclusive Space Lizard merch. You get to vote on two Monday topics each month via the app. And you get the download link for my new comedy album, Feel the Heat. Check the Patreon posts to find out how to download the new album and take advantage of other benefits. And, thank you for supporting the show by doing your Amazon shopping after clicking on my Amazon link at www.timesuckpodcast.com

Transcript

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0:00.0	In 1968, local channel 10 Philadelphia television reporter Bill Baldini, which is 26 years old.
0:07.1	The first time he set foot on Penhurst property. He'd heard from numerous viewers that the
0:12.1	local mental health facility, the Penhurst State School and hospital located just a quick 30 minutes
0:18.3	northwest of Philly and Spring City, about 30 miles away was a chamber of horrors. He decided to
0:25.0	check it out and promised himself that if one tenth of what people told him they saw inside Penhurst
0:29.6	was actually happening, he would do an investigative story on the abuse, committed there and expose it.
0:35.9	Baldini was able to get inside Penhurst through a membership with the JC's of Philadelphia.
0:40.4	Nice to have a JC sucks subject doing some good this time. John Wayne Gacy, a real big into the
0:46.9	JC's if you will recall. Once inside Baldini was horrified by what he saw, he said, I was never so
0:52.5	shocked and surprised in my life. He recalled telling his boss what he had seen in this Boston
0:56.8	believement first. He begged to do a story that ended up becoming a five part news report for WC
1:03.4	a U channel 10 that shocked the people of Delaware Valley. Baldini showed the people in and around
1:09.6	Philadelphia what life was like at Penhurst and they were disgusted and outraged. They had 80 infants
1:15.8	in one ward. Baldini said there were 80 metal cribs standing against the walls inside those
1:21.1	cribs were children anywhere from six months to six or seven years old abandoned to psychologically
1:27.3	rot in the facility. His news director and executive producers actually cried when they watched the
1:33.0	footage. Usually back then you got one and a half minutes for a story Baldini would later explain
1:38.0	the first story on Penhurst was seven minutes. Baldini's story eventually led to our government
1:42.5	investigating the treatment of the patients at Penhurst which led to the institution being shut down
1:47.9	and I think Baldini's story led to a lot of people taking a closer look at themselves.
1:52.5	Now that they knew this was going on you know what should be done with members of society
1:56.4	less fortunate than they were. It's a question many of us are still asking. We take a hard look at
	...

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