Word: wellmet
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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That first year was the roughest. Neither Harvard nor Radcliffe would let students live with the patients, and the house mysteriously burned down. But more funds were raised, the house at 11 Marie Avenue was bought, and first Radcliffe, then Harvard, capitulated. The students moved in, and Wellmet began to have a past and a future...
Visitors to Wellmet find a homey place strewn with ashtrays, records, clothing, and people. Despite the diversity of accents and ages, the occupants seem to have the chaotic cohesiveness of a family. Numbers fluctuate, as does everything at Wellmet, but usually there are six students and eight residents. The house parents, an ex-minister who teaches at Newton High School and his wife, live with their two children in the two first-floor bedrooms. The residents have the second floor and the third is reserved for the students...
What makes the place different from other halfway houses are the patients who live there. Contrary to the usual practice of taking people who have been in the mental hospital only a short time, Wellmet accepts people whom the hospital has given up as hopeless and whose families have forgotten them. Jean Carmel, the vibrant, charismatic executive director of Wellmet--herself a former director--says that most families with a mentally ill member have struggled so long with the problem that the patient's incomprehensible tantrums and truculence have become "a living thorn in their sides." Therefore when the patient...
...recovery almost irrevocably gone, these patients are doomed to years of lonely rotting under custodial care unless a volunteer or social worker takes an interest in them. Jean Carmel describes with pride one such woman who spent her days lying on the floor. During her first month at Wellmet she refused to leave her room except for meals, and then only after great coaxing. Eight months later she got a job and not long afterwards moved...
Such a metamorphosis is no more dramatic than the change patients face in leaving the hospital behind to enter the "total environment" of Wellmet. Some are terrified. As Mrs. Carmel says, "They've been out of this world for years." All social contacts are nerve-wracking, and there is the constant threat of regression into old problems. The residents, mostly in their 30's and beyond (but lately younger), usually receive no real therapy, the reasoning being that it's best to leave capped what they have capped. But the house has a psychiatrist and a psychologist as consultants. They...