The Sunday Story: Lost Mental Hospitals, Lost Patients

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🗓️ 23 June 2024

⏱️ 37 minutes

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Summary

A few hours north of Seattle, Washington, there's a kind of ghost town dotted with decaying barns and milking sheds, an old cemetery, and once-stately buildings that housed thousands. It was never an actual town, it was a psychiatric facility, Northern State Hospital—a place that contained deep contradictions. The gardens and farm fields were designed to provide residents work and fulfillment in a bucolic setting. But the medical treatments were often harsh.

Northern State closed in 1973. It was a time when states across the nation were shutting down their own mental institutions in favor of a new model of community care.

Today on The Sunday Story, a look at the move towards deinstitutionalization—what it's meant for people with mental illness and for the entire society.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Aisha Roscoe and this is a Sunday story.
0:05.0	If you drive a couple hours north of Seattle, you'll find a lush valley, miles of farmland,
0:12.0	gray mountains in the farmland,
0:13.0	gray mountains in the distance,
0:14.0	and the ruins of an old psychiatric hospital.
0:18.0	This hospital, Northern State,
0:20.0	opened more than a hundred years ago.
0:22.0	It once had a working farm and its own
0:25.0	power plant. Here's Sydney Brownstone, an investigative reporter with the
0:29.5	Seattle Times describing it.
0:31.3	Northern State was founded on this idea of occupational therapy.
0:35.4	This notion that if you are given work to do like on the farm or in the dairy in the
0:41.8	laundry you will develop better mental hygiene and then be able to return to society.
0:48.0	It was a very hopeful time.
0:50.0	Northern State is how psychiatric care used to look in the US, sprawling
0:55.6	campuses with armies of doctors and nurses employed by state governments.
1:00.3	The buildings themselves look like they could be Tuscan Villas or something.
1:05.0	So they have these beautiful terracotta tiles, these neatly manicured lawns.
1:12.0	This was done very intentionally for the purpose of healing, but you know some
1:17.4	historians and experts say that it had a double purpose. It also served to make people outside the institution feel better about what was going on inside of it.
1:28.0	States confined patients for years or even decades in hospitals like these. And doctors sometimes
1:36.3	use brutal methods to try to control their behavior, induce comas, lobotomies.
	...

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