“It Went All the Way Down to the Shoes”: Experiences of Institutionalization in the Danish Special Care System for the Intellectually Disabled, 1933–1980

It is difficult to imagine being institutionalized in a mental hospital or asylum without having experienced it yourself. While we have a wealth of institutional source material on the system and formal practices, we only have a few scattered sources describing the experience of living in an institution. In this chapter, we try to get a deeper view of institutional placement in the Danish care system for the intellectually disabled in the period between 1933 and 1980. We use interviews with former inmates (and staff) and the few voices of the institutionalized that emerge from the system’s own archive materials to draw an overall picture of the experience of placement. The interviews and data collection are based on an investigation made for the Danish Ministry of Social Affairs in 2020–2022. We find the key experiences to be a lack of autonomy, the feeling of institutionalization as a way of life, stigmatization, ruptured family relations, and a fear of violence. The chapter also addresses methodological challenges in analyzing experiences of institutionalization. First, there is the problem of the generalization of experiences on the individual level. Second, the existing source materials (both interviews and written sources) are potentially biased. We know that the institutions caring for the intellectually disabled also included persons with very limited cognitive and communicational resources, who typically are silent in the existing sources.