I had a residency classmate at my training program some 40 years ago who eventually served as medical director of this huge old state hospital. I visited it once long after he had worked there for a stint and was overwhelmed by its size and vastness of its campuses. I had never seen such a massive mental hospital facility and was not prepared for its size.
It had its share, or more than its share of scandals and periodic tales of abuse for decades and did many such state hospitals especially early in their histories before the era of modern treatment with advent of effective medications, movement beyond just ECT, or electroshock therapy for out of control mania and truly treatment resistant long-standing depressions and the addition of all the behavioral and cognitive therapy, art therapy (and that really is valuable stuff speaking as someone who in my younger stupider days, thought it was not very relevant [I was a dummy young Turk type then to some extent], music therapy, DBT [Dialictal Behavioral Therapy which is wonderful stuff], psychodrama [which is sadly not practiced in enough hospitals] and so on.
What I am leading up to in my habitual meandering style is pointing the reader(s) to a post I somehow discovered one night recently, on a sort of mixed text and wonderful pictorial history of Milledgeville State Hospital [latter called Central State Hospital in recent modern days before it closed in 2016] that is so well done I had to do this post and highlight/publicize it by offering its URL so readers could read it and marvel at this institution, its history and dilapidated kind of grandeur. I know there are those that would rankle at having the term ‘grandeur’ applied to state hospital that personally represented horrors to them or their extended families, and I understand and completely accept that sentiment as all state hospitals had their sins, tragedies, and horrors to say the least and were in ways certainly ignoble chapters in our nation’s history.
But anyway, here is the URL to the extremely well-done website that shows an enormous amount of artistic photographic effort and historical research that I think many will enjoy and as I said above, marvel at. URL: Milledgeville State Hospital in Georgia.
The Mental Health Reform Blog 