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A new Massachusetts state law passed in November 2025 will make records from state institutions for people with intellectual or developmental disabilities or mental health conditions accessible for the first time. Generations of disabled people lived and died in those institutions beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. Many experienced horrific abuse, and their histories have long been obscured.

“Our estimate is that we’ve opened more than 10 million records with this law,” Alex Green, a disability justice advocate who worked on the legislation and is also the author of A Perfect Turmoil: Walter E. Fernald and the Struggle to Care for America’s Disabled, told Truthout. “The argument is that family members have a right to see that information, know it, and safeguard it. And eventually the public does as well, so that it can understand the enormous atrocity that has occurred.”

Massachusetts operated more than two dozen schools, hospitals, and other residential facilities where individuals with intellectual or developmental disabilities and others labeled “feeble-minded” were warehoused, beginning when the institution later known as the Fernald School opened in 1848. That institution was the first public school of its kind in the Americas, and it only closed in 2014.

Tales of abuse at Massachusetts’s Walter E. Fernald State School and other state-run institutions, such as Pennsylvania’s Pennhurst and New York’s Willowbrook, helped drive a movement for deinstitutionalization in the 1950s and 1960s. Willowbrook was the subject of a historic civil rights lawsuit after a television exposé revealed to new audiences that the adults and children with intellectual and developmental disabilities warehoused there were beaten, experimented on, and deprived of fundamental rights.

Following the lawsuit and loudening demands for deinstitutionalization, Congress signed the Developmental Disabilities Assistance and Bill of Rights Act in 1975. Many institutions closed soon after, and the people who were once incarcerated in them, as well as younger generations of disabled people, have since had greater support to live in their communities.

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But advocates for disability rights and justice warn that progress could be fleeting, as the harmful misconceptions and dehumanizing language about disabled people that allowed institutionalization to flourish have begun returning to the mainstream.

Recently, people in positions of power in pop culture and politics have made an effort to resurrect the “R-word,” long used as a slur against people with developmental or intellectual disabilities. The term was coined as a medical one to diagnose those warehoused in institutions like the Fernald School.

Since returning to office, President Donald Trump has matched that language with action. He has slashed funding for programs that support community living options........

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