Although Bay State governors were eager to close the asylums, they hadn't figured out where the former residents would go. Some seemingly didn't care. Luckily the story does not end there, although few have followed its twists and turns since. In the old days, a halfway house was just what it sounds like, a stopover between the hospital and community, and it came in just one flavor. Today there is a potpourri of approaches, from urban settings like South Boston to outlying ones like Winchendon.
Residents stay a year or less in some, permanently at a few others.
In 1950, there were no mental patients in group homes or comparable settings in Massachusetts. A late afternoon visit to a group home in Jamaica Plain finds some residents helping cook dinner, one playing the piano, while others sit and talk about their day. After years of going in and out of mental hospitals, Delois Howell said she cherishes the support and freedom of her current home. Anthony Ferrara is one of them. He started hearing voices when he was 13, telling him to steal a car, and he wielded a screwdriver against a policeman who stopped him.