Comments

The sign reminded me of when I was involved in planning the community placements of the last individuals in a state institution for people with developmental disabilities. I had several parents tell me they didn't want their child moved to a group home until the staff had the facility's keys in their hand and the state had shut off the lights.

I am constantly floored by your perspectives on these once magnificent buildings and grounds. The simplest photo can be so thought-provoking. You take these neglected giants and make them awesome, beautiful again. I am grateful for your visions for finding beauty in urban decay.

Lynne, actually I just read that some places did perform ice baths. I imagine that most of the time they were used to subdue a patient who was particularly "unruly". So it isn't an urban legend. Maybe Manteno State Hospital didn't use the method, but there were some places that did.

DSH - you think?......

O2 is the molecular formula for oxygen...and yes this is a valve for it

coming in to reclaim long forgotten souls I'd say

sad words from a long lost soul never to be heard with human ears or given the true help the poor soul really needed

such a tragic waste in a world that need not waste what little we have left

motts dear you must one day tell me of this fascination with chairs.

It's a tray dispenser with silverware compartments for a trayline food service system. I work in a nursing home and we have a similar looking one for our trayline

I'm still wondering why the NAACP would have been so interested in this place....maybe if you said the ACLU I would believe it. :-)
The argument about it being illegal to "lock people up" or "keep people against their will" should be very interesting to everyone in jail. I guess we won't be needing jails anymore, if it's *really* illegal to lock people up!

We may consider them "torture" now, but at the time, insulin shock and lobotomy were considered legitimate treatments. Electroconvulsive therapy is still used in cases of intractable depression. The old treatments were not considered torture. There was no other treatment available then, and these were attempts at getting people to a more functional condition so that they could be discharged and return home. As soon as medical knowledge increased and psychotropic medications became available, insulin shock and lobotomy ended. How do you think we get any drug? There are tests on human subjects. The main problem in the past is not that drugs were tested on patients or that some of the drugs were not helpful. That still occurs today. The problem was the lack of informed consent (of course, if a person is being treated for mental illness severe enough to require hospitalization, how capable is s/he of giving informed consent?). Most of the psychiatrists who worked at state hospitals did so because of genuine concern for the patients. They would have earned much more in private practice.

I am currently a nursing student and i am doing a placement on severalls hospital, Lovely ground gets that spooky feeling, shame most of its closed now :(

I actually live in the neighborhood right next to Paul Dever. Kids have been vandalizing that place for years - obvisouly, from the looks of the pictures. It's just really upsetting to me that all of those records were left out. When I was in high school a girl brought in an old patient file and was showing it all of her friends. The patient was a young girl that had ran away from the facility. She thought it was sooo funny (but not to the rest of us it isn't) Also, on a different note, a movie was just filmed there over the summer, I think it's starring Bruce Willis? But anyways....

I would imagine that Creedmore is still open because there is still a need for inpatient psychiatric treatment, just not a need for the number of beds and facilities that existed in the past. Improved medications and community-based treatment and support greatly reduced the number of inpatient beds needed. Community treatment costs less than inpatient care and doesn't have the overwhelming operating costs of the huge institutions. Today you will probably hear more complaints about a *lack* of needed psychiatric hospital beds than about abuse in psychiatric hospitals. The days of "getting anyone committed with just a signature" are long gone, as they should be. There are still people for whom a hospital is the only safe place due to their mental state. I worked with far more people who had been discharged to the community *before* their condition had been adequately treated than with people who were "locked away" too long (referring to individuals who were hospitalized for the first time, or for a relapse of a pre-existing condition, after about 1988). Too-early discharge often leads to a failure of community placement and rapid return to the hospital (the "revolving door" effect).