1,830 Comments for Buffalo State Hospital

motts, can you recall what is written on the right wall?

this has to be one of the best sites.photo's are mint.

This place is certainly very old. I'd say probably built in the 1850's or 1860's. Motts can you give some more details on the age?

Jessica...For your information, this place was hell for the unfortunate souls that lived here.

It looks like an early version of the resporator that they use to help you breathe.

I drove around it a few months back for the first time, and it was the scariest thing that i have ever seen. I totally felt like I was being watched by someone in the towers. I kept looking through the windows expecting to see a ghost or something. Such a scary place.

I may sound like a freak but I would die to just see what it looks like in that hospital. I love all this haunted asylum stuff. It fascinates me...

i simply think it reflects good photagraphy. the photos, in my opinion, hardly reflect the true mystery of which most people are searching for in such pictures, but the artfulness of it leaves me in the mindset that whomever took these were very skilled. however they fail to emphasies any of these buildings ghostly features, but they are attractively dark.

Turned up the brightness on my screen. I think it is just reflecting light...though if I'm wonr, thats even better!

I agree with Lynne that it looks like a basement storage area, with a door that locks--could have been for potentially hazardous cleaning supplies or old records. The wall closest to us doesn't look solid enough for anything other than a storage space. The more I look at it, the harder it is to decide whether we are inside the room looking out, or we are in the hall looking into the room.

Some guesses at what the safe might have stored: original documents related to the construction and opening of the institution (deeds to the property, surveys, blueprints, licenses, etc.) the fund from which petty cash was distributed to the various departments, once or twice a month the institution's payroll funds (in the days before paychecks and direct deposit, when employees were paid in cash), perhaps life insurance policies of patients who had them, legal record of bequests made to the hospital, the hospital's own insurance policies, perhaps especially valuable jewelry or other items held for patients (although I doubt if many patients had anything of that nature)...but I doubt if any clinical records or drugs were there.

People with mental illness do not live "short and pointless lives" any more than any other category of people does. Nor are psychiatric care facilities "prisons for the damned." Statements like this seem to be a back-handed jab at mental health workers as "jailers of the innocent," but really they project the very attitudes they appear to be condemning in others--that people with mental illness are less valuable, that mental illness is somehow the person's own fault. I hope I have misunderstood the earlier comment and read into it something that was not intended.

keywords...no particularly good ones here, but a funny story about mental health work. Back in "ancient times" when the Internet was only a few years old, a co-worker and I (both totally new to the Internet) tried to look up information regarding treatment for a new resident who had mental health issues, as well as developmental disabilities, and also had been charged with a sexual crime. We entered "sex offenders" in the search box,j and up came a site called "(state name) House of Porn." It shocked us so much that for a long time we stared at the screen. Later we learned that we should have started with a keyword like "mental illness" and from there narrowed the search to "forensic" and our person's specific issues.

I would be grossly inaccurate if I described any of the people with mental illness that I have known as "lifeless shells." Very rarely, heavy sedation was needed for a few hours after an especially severe psychotic episode, but this was never the person's "normal" (baseline) state. Like everyone else, they were people with opinions, dreams, fears, memories, imaginations, pet peeves, skills, jokes, etc.--all the components that make up a personality. Some of what are called the "negative symptoms" of schizophrenia--lack of interest, flat affect, unresponsiveness--are not due to psychotropic drugs but to the illness itself. Yes, some psychiatric medications do have side effects that are found intolerable for some patients and those patients choose to not take medications because of that. Most patients find the side effects an acceptable price to pay for the relief of symptoms of mental illness. One of the most difficult medication-related experiences I remember was when Clozaril was first introduced. For many long-term patients for whom other neuroleptics had already failed, it really was a miracle drug. It gave them back what mental illness had taken from them. What was so sad was when one of the patients who had exhibited such a dramatic improvement with the drug developed a blood condition called agranulocytosis (a dangerously low, life-threatening, level of blood white cells). When that happened, the drug's protocol required that it be stopped immediately.

Maybe, instead of the evil staff picking the color that would make a patient even sicker, the person who used this room happened to really like the color and was allowed to choose it for the room's walls.

"Places like this" certainly did not make people "even more insane for the insurance money" because there was no insurance money to be had. A patient with insurance would go to a private hospital, not a state facility.