Summary Of The Documentary Lost In Laconia

In the United States there are many laws protecting the rights and freedom of individuals with disabilities. Many of these laws state that a person with any type of disability should be granted the same treatment and services as if a person who does not have a disability, if the person needs extra services, they should be guaranteed these accommodations. Also, these individuals are considered to be active members of our community and they do not have any boundaries of where they are allowed to go. However, these laws and rights were not always in place and the treatment of people with disabilities were much different in the past. In the Documentary lost in Laconia it gives viewers and idea of what the treatment use to be for these certain individuals.
In the Documentary “Lost in Laconia,” it features an old state school for
the disabled.
These state schools were better known as institutions and at one time there were several of these institutions all over the country, but this particular State school was located in Laconia, New Hampshire. In this documentary it explains the treatment that these individuals endured while attending this school and the factors that led up to the type of treatment they got. All the residents, which were in all different age groups, were placed in these establishment not under their own free will. While they were here they were treated with abusive and neglectful care.
The reason they had this care is because in the early to mid-1900’s society considered these individuals as a danger to the society and were labeled feebleminded. Many thought these individual were incapable of learning and feeling. Doctors told parents, there was no hope of these individuals to live
a normal life and they were better off segregated. So, since many believed they were incapable of many things, they were treated as such, with little public knowledge of the treatment. For example, many people at this establishment had their teeth ripped out with no anesthetic to prevent them from acting out, or others were sterilized from having children without their consent. Not only did they endure these types of treatments, they also lived in dirty overcrowded rooms, with little staff and little to do every day and all day. Although, this documentary features this one state school, all across the country in this particular time, all these individuals who lived in these other state schools had the same abusive and neglectful treatments because they were considered nothings to society. For instance, The Fernald State school in Massachusetts used the individuals as test subjects “During a stretch between the late 1940s and early 1950s, Robert Harris, a professor of nutrition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, led three different experiments involving 74 Fernald boys, aged 10 to 17. As part of the study, the boys were fed oatmeal and milk laced with radioactive iron and calcium; in another experiment, scientists directly injected the boys with radioactive calcium. The Fernald students’ experiment was just one among dozens of radiation experiments approved by the Atomic Energy Commission.”