3,664 Comments for Greystone Park Psychiatric Center

This shot is framed perfectly!
If it were in a portrait orientation it would
be a great wallpaper!

They somewhat resemble augers.

Your prologue was a good read Motts.
I agree it will be interesting to see this place again
and note the changes.

You are a superb photographer Mr. Motts.

Still looks like an emergency restraint cradle.

Looks like a restraint cradle of some sort.

Used for occupational therapy I bet.

Yeah, I thought it was a steam cabinet too!

Heckuva way to treat VD--heat lamps and arsenic compounds. Oy!

Well said Roy. Well said.

Long long days, nights, weeks, months, years, we were there, in all the hospitals in all the places in the world, while families ate meals at home, and people were at ball games, and while elections were held and wars waged, we were day by day every day in these institutions either giving aid and support to the wretched and suffering, or receiving the care. We were not one, but ten thousands, not just unhappy, but devastated, often feeling more abandoned than this empty place. We left an air of melancholy on the walls. Lives were lived out in these halls, lives twisted into shapes sometimes unrecognizable but human lives, and to the patients, and staff and supporters such as maintenance men, cooks, ward nurses and boiler room men, an army worked, and works, to care for the forgotten and pushed aside people who happen to suffer with the most dreadful of afflictions. In the most ordinary places acts of great compassion and devotion were carried out in private exchanges of human kindness. There were screams, and times of violence, but the main atmosphere of the psychiatric hospitals was that of hard arduous work to keep the wheels of daily life rolling for these burdened souls. One day a man who served food to patients and staff for one month on a job in a psychiatric hospital greeted me, an old retired social worker, 40 years later on the street, saying hello and remembering that we exchanged a pleasant word and a smile in the cafeteria line 40 years before. Small kindnesses, large efforts, now, as then continue. It's hard for the patients, and it's hard for the staff. It's an arduous and crushingly real world. These old places, well, they're not that far in the past.

I began work in a psychiatric hospital in 1968. I retired in 2005 from the same hospital where I'd first began. I was not there all those years, but worked in various institutions for psychiatric, forensic, and other locked-up populations. These are the images that were our daily reality, only the paint was newer, less chipped, and the halls were buzzing with people. However, there was always this haunted feeling. Many thought it was truly a presence, but so much human suffering in a place leaves it's mark. The people and their struggles are not a mass of nameless debris like produced by oil spills, but an infinitely varied and rich blend of fantastic individuals, some being heroic in the midst of their sufferings. The number of compassionate workers, too, if often overlooked because the bad news spread, the daily thousand and one kindnesses to the afflicted were unnoticed except by the souls deep inside these places. Now, growing old, I wish I were strong and able to go back into the fray, to offer support and encouragement to the afflicted. God knows they are the forgotten. When they were in these buildings, THEY felt this sense of abandonment long before the buildings were abandoned. I remember my first day at work walking down a hall like this, thinking, "I'll die here!" I did not, but I cannot ever leave these halls, ever.

Probably was Army equipment then if there was a fallout shelter there. Great find! Thanks for the info...

Simply gorgeous!

Yay! A new gallery!! And great picture of you!

great photo