Founding Partlow Center was the third mental health facility to open in Alabama. The first was
Bryce Hospital, initially known as the Alabama Insane Hospital. It was proposed to the state Legislature in 1836 by
Dorothea Dix, a pioneering reformer in the treatment of mental illness, and accepted its first patient in 1861. Dix had traveled the country urging the creation of a system of humane care to replace practices such as locking away the mentally ill in jails with felons or the unregulated and underfunded system of towns contracting with individuals to provide housing—a system rife with abuse. Searcy Hospital opened in 1902 to serve the mentally ill in the southern part of the state. Partlow, which opened in 1923 to care for the intellectually disabled, was located about two miles away from Bryce Hospital in Tuscaloosa, Ala., and was under the supervision of the superintendent of Bryce although it had a separate board of trustees. As the Alabama Home for the Feeble-Minded, Partlow began operations in 1919 with William Partlow as the superintendent. Its final facility opened in 1923. Only two months after opening, the institution was full of people that had been transferred from
poorhouses,
jails,
orphanages, and other institutions. In 1925, Partlow had 277 patients. In 1927, the school was renamed the Partlow State School for Mental Deficients, after eugenicist William D. Partlow. The case became much more about patient rights than about employee rights and the scope of the case grew to encompass Mount Searcy Hospital and Partlow State School. At Partlow, the conditions were dire. Jack Drake, one of the plaintiffs' attorneys, has discussed the conditions at Partlow:Mr. Drake investigated a gruesome incident in which a boy with developmental disabilities had a garden hose inserted in his rectum, filling it with water and rupturing his spleen and killing him. Other examples of atrocious incidents presented to the court included a resident who was scalded to death as well as a resident who was restrained in a strait jacket for nine years to prevent hand and finger sucking.
Long Road to Compliance The case of
Wyatt v. Stickney came to a conclusion after 33 years, through the tenure of nine Alabama governors and fourteen state mental health commissioners, the longest mental health case in national history. The case was finally dismissed on December 5, 2003, with the finding by Judge
Myron H. Thompson that Alabama was in compliance with the agreement. In response to the closure, Jeff Ridgeway, president of the
self-advocacy group People First of Alabama, said, "This is a great day for people with intellectual disabilities because it makes the statement loud and clear that we are people with abilities and we want to be integrated into society rather than segregated into an institution." Paul Davis, who witnessed the conditions at Partlow in the 1960s, said, "It was awful in so many ways. It was a place where humans became 'things,' things that didn't matter. A hellish place that never belonged in a humane society." There is also a cemetery where residents of the state school were buried. ==References==