Western State and Dejarnette Asylum

10/21/2019

The Western state hospital was open in 1828, and over 60 years, construction expanded the institution. The hospital was known for it's very interesting methods of curing mental illness like electroshock therapy, straight jackets and lobotomies. A new sanatorium nearby was founded by a Doctor Joseph Dejarnette, who was also director of Western State aswell, (the sanitarium was private for middle-income patients while Western state was a public institution). Dajarnette was a very respected doctor at the time and was a strong supporter of eugenics, and forced sterilization on patients. This sterilization was when he would do procedures to make females with mental illness not be able to have children without their consent so they won't be able to pass their mental illness to their children. Most of his victims of forced sterilization were poor and mostly African American and Native American, because Darjenette did not think "these kinds of people" should be able to reproduce. Here is a quote from Doctor Darjenette: “Germany in six years has sterilized about 80,000 of her unfit while the United States with approximately twice the population has only sterilized about 27,869 to January 1, 1938 in the past 20 years … The fact that there are 12,000,000 defectives in the US should arouse our best endeavors to push this procedure to the maximum.” In 1975 the Dejarnette sanitarium was acquired by the state in 1975, and become a children's hospital and part of Western state and was renamed Commonwealth Center for Children and Adolescents. The Western State Asylum is now a newly renovated "Blackburn Inn" named after a main architect of the buildings, Thomas. R Blackburn.