As some of you know ,most of the Asylums where run by some doctors that didn't care in the late 40's early 50's .there been so many reports from paranormal teams and investigators of children entity's maybe there is some truth to this .
Its sad to see how they where left to pretty much die by some of the staff .
shouldn't some body be brought on charges for this in justice to these people .
Saturday, June 30, 2012
SHOCK TREATMENT
Psychiatry
- A form of aversion therapy, such as:
- Electroconvulsive therapy, or electroshock, a psychiatric treatment in which seizures are electrically induced in anaesthetized patients for therapeutic effect
- Insulin shock therapy, a form of psychiatric treatment in which patients were repeatedly injected with large doses of insulin in order to produce daily comas
Friday, June 29, 2012
A ASYLUM IN MOTHER RUSSIA
As you can see that it run down and not well taken care of .As you can also see some of the files from this ASYLUM .
Essex County Hospital Center
n 1896, a large portion of land was purchased by the City of Newark, New Jersey; the land was bought to build a new hospital to relive pressure in the overcrowded Newark Hospital. During the late 1800s and early 1900s, many buildings were built that housed patients and other facilities, such as a power house, laundromat, and theater. According to Weird New Jersey, in the winter of 1917, the hospital suffered a major catastrophe with the failure of the hospital's boilers and a number of patients freezing to death in their beds. In the mid 1920's, the tri-state mental correction board bought the land and converted Overbrook into a mental institution. The Overbrook asylum ran on, adding several add-ons and new wards until its abrupt close in the winter of 1975. It has been claimed that over 10,000 patients have died before it was closed. A large mental institution such as Overbrook would be kept out of public view and knowledge, because official few books, articles and maps have been found. In 2008, the hospital was featured on the paranormal reality TV shows Ghost Adventures and Ghost Hunters.
[edit]New hospital
In late 2006, the new Essex County Hospital Center 40°51′07″N 74°14′03″W opened just down the road from the site of the original Overbrook Hospital. This hospital center houses chronically ill psychiatric patients in need of longer lengths of stay than are available in community hospitals and medical centers. The new hospital center takes a cutting edge approach to behavioral health care, and its layout and programs stand in stark contrast to the hundred year old facility it replaced. The new hospital is located at 204 Grove Avenue in Cedar Grove.
The Essex County Hospital Center is a defunct psychiatric hospital that is located in the Township ofCedar Grove, New Jersey. The hospital was used as a normal hospital then converted to house mentally illpatients that were in need of care. Located at the edge of the Hilltop Reservation and designated a Conservation Easement in 2001 by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, the site now is part of the Essex County park system
SIDE NOTES:
Many paranormal teams have come
to investigate these old Asylum .
There been reports of shadow people ,voices,being touched .
on a scale of 1 to 10 i would give it a
8 for paranormal activity .so if you are in new jersey,stop by this place and say hello to some of it ghosts .But as always please don't trespass check with your local police dept first .
Thursday, June 28, 2012
THE HISTORY OF PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL
The story of the rise of the lunatic asylum and its gradual transformation into, and eventual replacement by, the modern psychiatric hospital, is also the story of the rise of organized, institutional psychiatry. While there were earlier institutions that housed the 'insane' the arrival at the answer of institutionalisation as the correct solution to the problem of madness was very much an event of the nineteenth century. To illustrate this with one regional example, in England at the beginning of the nineteenth century there were, perhaps, a few thousand 'lunatics' housed in a variety of disparate institutions but by 1900 that figure had grown to about 100,000. That this growth should coincide with the growth of alienism, later known as psychiatry, as a medical specialism is not coincidental.
Medieval era
In the Islamic world, the Bimaristans were described by European travelers, who wrote on their wonder at the care and kindness shown to lunatics. In 872, Ahmad ibn Tulun built a hospital in Cairo that provided care to the insane.[2] Nonetheless, medical historian Roy Porter cautions against idealising the role of hospitals generally in medieval Islam stating that "They were a drop in the ocean for the vast population that they had to serve, and their true function lay in highlighting ideals of compassion and bringing together the activities of the medical profession."[3]
In Europe during the medieval era, a variety of settings were employed to house the small subsection of the population of the mad who were housed in institutional settings. Porter gives examples of such locales where some of the insane were cared for, such as in monasteries. A few towns had towers where madmen were kept (called Narrentürme or fools' tower). The ancient Parisian hospital Hôtel-Dieu also had a small number of cells set aside for lunatics, whilst the town of Elbing boasted a madhouse,Tollhaus, attached to the Teutonic Knights' hospital.[4] Other such institutions for the insane were established after the Christian Reconquista, including hospitals in Valencia (1407), Zaragoza (1425), Seville (1436), Barcelona (1481), and Toledo (1483).[citation needed] The Priory of Saint Mary of Bethlehem, which later became known more notoriously as Bedlam, was founded in 1247. At the start of the fifteenth century it housed just six insane men.[5] The former lunatic asylum Het Dolhuys from the 16th century in Haarlem, the Netherlands is now a museum of psychiatry with an overview of treatments from the origins of the building up to the 1990s.
18th century
In the United States, Virginia is recognized as the first state to establish an institution for the mentally ill.[6] Eastern State Hospital, located in Williamsburg, was founded in 1773. Along with the first institution in America, Virginia also founded the first Colored Asylum in 1870.[7] Their land was given to them by the House of Burgessesin 1769.[6]
Phillipe Pinel (1793) is often credited as being the first in Europe to introduce more humane methods into the treatment of the mentally ill (which came to be known as moral treatment) as the superintendent of the Asylum de Bicêtre in Paris.[8] A hospital employee of Asylum de Bicêtre, Jean-Baptiste Pussin, was actually the first one to remove patient restraints. Pussin influenced Pinel and they both served to spread reforms such as categorising the disorders, as well as observing and talking to patients as methods of cure. Vincenzo Chiarugi in Italy may have banned chains before this time. Johann Jakob Guggenbühl in 1840 started inInterlaken the first retreat for mentally disabled children.[citation needed]
Around the same time as Pussin and Pinel, the Quakers, particularly William Tuke, pioneered an enlightened approach (moral treatment) in England at the York Retreat which opened in 1796. The Retreat was not a psychiatric hospital, and in fact the medical approaches of the day were abandoned in favor of understanding, hope, moral responsibility and occupational therapy.[9] The Brattleboro Retreat and the former Hartford Retreat were named after it.
19th century
In 1817, William Ellis was appointed as superintendent to the newly built West Riding Pauper Asylum at Wakefield. As a Methodist, he had strong religious convictions. With his wife as matron, they put into action those things they had learned from the Sculcoates Refuge in Hull which operated on a similar model as the York. After 13 years, as a result of their highly regarded reputation, were invited to oversee the newly built first pauper asylum in Middlesex called the Hanwell Asylum. Accepting the posts, the asylum opened in May 1831. Here the Ellises introduced their own brand of humane treatment and 'moral therapy' combined with 'therapeutic employment.' As its initial capacity was 450 patients, it was already the largest asylum in the country and subject to even more building soon after. Therefore, the immediate and continuing success of humane therapy working on such a large scale encouraged its adoption at other asylums. In recognition of all this work he received a knighthood. He continued to develop therapeutic treatments for mental disorders, always with moral treatment as the guiding principle.[10]
In Lincoln (Lincolnshire, England) Robert Gardiner Hill, with the support of Edward Parker Charlesworth, developed a mode of treatment that suited 'all types' of patients, whereby the reliance on mechanical restraints and coercion could be made obsolete altogether - a situation he finally achieved in 1838.[citation needed]
By the following year of 1839 Sergeant John Adams and Dr. John Conolly were so impressed by the work of Hill, that they immediately introduced the method into their Hanwell Asylum, which was by then the largest in the kingdom. The greater size required Hill's system to be developed and refined. This was necessary as it was beyond Conolly to be able to supervise each attendant as closely as Hill had done. Even so, he bid a pair of extra soft slippers made so that he could walk around the building at night without his foot falls warning the attendants of his imminent approach. By September 1839, mechanical restraint was no longer required for any patient. For years, this day was remembered at the Hanwell asylum by a celebration on its anniversary.[citation needed] Conolly also was a very accomplished communicator who wrote and lectured widely about his work in mental health.[citation needed] [11] [12]
Reformers, such as American Dorothea Dix began to advocate a more humane and progressive attitude towards the mentally ill. Some were motivated by a Christian duty to mentally ill citizens. In the United States, for example, numerous states established state mental health systems paid for by taxpayer money (and often money from the relatives of those institutionalized inside them). These centralized institutions were often linked with loose governmental bodies, though oversight and quality consequently varied. They were generally geographically isolated as well, located away from urban areas because the land was cheap and there was less political opposition. Many state hospitals in the United States were built in the 1850s and 1860s on the Kirkbride Plan, an architectural style meant to have curative effect.[13] States made large outlays on architecture that often resembled the palaces of Europe, although operating funding for ongoing programs was more scarce. Many patients objected to transfers from private hospitals to state facilities. Some Brattleboro Retreat patients tried to hide when state officials arrived to transfer them to the new Waterbury State Hospital. This decline in patient census led to the collapse of many private institutions, which still accepted indigent patients even when state reimbursement for private hospitals dropped in the face of rising state hospital costs.
20th century
[edit]Radical politics
In February 1919, the first soviet in the British Isles was established at Monaghan Lunatic Asylum, inMonaghan, Ireland. This led to the claim by Joseph Devlin in the House of Commons that "that the only successfully conducted institutions in Ireland are the lunatic asylums"[
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
" ASYLUMS ARE THEY ALL HAUNTED "
As a teenager i visited Danvers State Hospital ,So you all know my uncle Thomas Berry was the barber for the Asylum .As a teenager after visiting this place i fell in love with Asylums .Do you think that all old Asylums are haunted?I have to visit a few,Watch a ball move around a room by it self . A lot of people and paranormal teams check out these old Asylums and get all kinds of evidence from these reported haunted location .Is it our imagination that makes us think that these places are really haunted or are they really haunted .You go to these places with led paint .and these building are also in poor conditions .I love these old buildings and i will always jump to investigate a old Asylum.
Eric Perry
Founder and lead investigator
Central NH Paranormal Society .
june ,27.2012
Eric Perry
Founder and lead investigator
Central NH Paranormal Society .
june ,27.2012
PENNHURST SCHOOL AND ASYLUM
History
[edit]Overview
In 1903, the Pennsylvania Legislature authorized the creation of the Eastern State Institution for the Feeble-Minded and Epileptic and a commission was organized to take into consideration the number and status of the feeble-minded and epileptic persons in the state and determine a placement for construction to care for these residents.
This commission discovered 1,146 feeble-minded persons in insane hospitals and 2,627 in almshouses, county-care hospitals, reformatories, and prisons and were in immediate need of specialized institutional care.
Birds Eye View of Campus, 1934
The legislation stated that the buildings would be in two groups, one for the educational and industrial department, and one for the custodial or asylum department. The institution was required to accommodate no less than five hundred inmates or patients, with room for additions.
Construction and Design
[edit]Building Designation
From 1903 to 1908 the first buildings were constructed on 633.913 acres (2.56535 km2) of Crab Hill in Spring City, Pennsylvania, Chester County on what was referred to as the lower campus. Out of the first few buildings constructed, 'F' was the Girl's Dining Room, 'G' was the Kitchen and Store Room, 'H', 'I' and 'K' were a Cottage for Girls, 'N' was the Boys' Dining Room, 'P' was the Teachers Home, 'Q', T', 'U' and 'V' were a Cottage for Boys, 'R' was a School, 'W' was Laundry and Sewing, and 'X' was the Power House.
'P' was used as a temporary Administration building until the institution's opening in 1918 along with the opening of ‘L’ and ‘M’ in 1919. In 1921, Whitman and Wilson I and II were constructed along with Penn Hall for employee housing; in 1929, the Assembly building was complete and functioned as the gymnasium and auditorium.
The buildings on lower campus are currently labeled with letters such as 'F', 'I', 'K', 'P', 'Q', 'R', 'N', 'U', 'V', 'T', 'W' and 'X' with names later assigned in the 1960's (see below).
In 1930, the first buildings on the upper campus, otherwise known as the Female Colony, were completed and named Pershing, Buchanan, Audubon and Keystone. Capitol Hall was erected after World War II along with Devon constructed on lower campus. Horizon Hall opened later in 1971.
[edit]Lower Campus Buildings
Administration, Philadelphia, Quaker, Rockwell, Franklin, Nobel, Union, Vincennes, Tinicum, Industry, Penn, Devon, Mayflower, Limerick, Assembly, Storeroom, Laundry, Whitman, Wilson I, Wilson II, Hershey, Dietary
[edit]Upper Campus Buildings
Pershing, Buchanan, Audubon, Keystone, Capitol, Horizon
[edit]Other Buildings
Power House, Treatment Plant, Director's House, Green House
[edit]Appearance
The older buildings, designed by Phillip H. Johnson, were two-storied, and made of red brick, terra cotta and granite trimmings. They were connected by fire-proof tunnels with walkways on top of the tunnels for the use of transporting residents with a parallel steam piping system, and were distributed on the 1,400-acre (5.7 km2) campus in the cottage plan formation. The buildings were designed to provide a large number of small rooms occupied by from two to three beds, a few small dormitories with from eight to ten beds, and a large exercising day room. George Lovatt was the architect for several of the buildings constructed post-1937.
The central Administration building has two side-porte-cocheres, a front portico and a copper cupola in the center of the roof. The hospital building, Whitman and Wilson I and II are not tunnel connected nor is Penn Hall and the Power House. The remaining cottage buildings are 'L' and 'I' shaped with the exception of Dietary which 'Y'shaped is and Devon Hall which is 'H' shaped.
[edit]Railroad
The Pennsylvania Railroad created a Pennhurst Station on its Schuylkill Division concurrent to accommodate Pennhurst. Coal and other supplies were delivered by rail for decades to operate the power house. Tracks are still visible under the pavement behind Dietary and Devon Hall, which allowed boxcars to be brought directly onto the main campus. The railroad tracks have been removed and are now part of the Schuylkill River Trail
The Superintendent reported to the Board of Trustees that:
It is without question absolutely wrong to place the feeble-minded and epileptic in the same institution. They are not the same; they are as different, one from the other, as day is from night. They are mentally, physically and morally incompatible, and require entirely different treatment.
The mission of the institution was clarified once again and only people with mental disabilities were to be admitted. Recreation of the train tracks has started and they are working to create a working train transportation system.
General Operation
[edit]Opening
On November 23, 1908, "Patient number 1" was admitted to the hospital. Within four years of operation, Pennhurst was already overcrowded and under pressure[who?] to admit immigrants, orphans and criminals.
[edit]Classification
Residents were classified into mental categories of imbecile or insane, into physical categories of epileptic or healthy, and into dental categories of good, poor or treated teeth when admitted.
[edit]Physical Condition of Children
Some of the sensorial and functional anomalies, vices of constitution and habit, and disorders of volition common to the feeble-minded admitted to Pennhurst were Strabismus, defective sight and/or hearing, mute, semi-mute, imperfect speech, paralytic, epileptic, blind, imperfect gait, imperfect prehension, deformity of face, head, limbs and/or feet, microcephalic or hydrocephalic head, and offensive habits.
[edit]Industries
The branches of industry which residents were assigned to were mattress making, shoe making and repair, grading, farming, laundry, domestic duties, sewing, baking, butchering, painting, and working in the store.
[edit]Segregation and Eugenics
In 1913, the legislature appointed a Commission for the Care of the Feeble-Minded which stated that the disabled were unfit for citizenship and posed a menace to the peace, and thus recommended a program of custodial care. Furthermore, the Commission desired to prevent the intermixing of the genes of those imprisoned with the general population. In the Biennial Report to the Legislature submitted by the Board of Trustees, Pennhurst's Chief Physician quoted Henry H. Goddard, a leading eugenicist, as follows:
Every feeble-minded person is a potential criminal. The general public, although more convinced today than ever before that it is a good thing to segregate the idiot or the distinct imbecile, they have not as yet been convinced as to the proper treatment of the defective delinquent, which is the brighter and more dangerous individual.
[edit]Females
In 1916, the Board of Trustees initiated a plan to increase the capacity of the Institution by constructing cottages specifically for females to segregate them from the males, in part to prevent pregnancies.
[edit]Criticism
In 1968, conditions at Pennhurst were exposed in a five-part television news report anchored by local CBS10 correspondent Bill Baldini. "Suffer the Little Children".[3]
In 1983, nine employees were indicted on charges ranging from slapping and beating patients (including some in wheelchairs) to arranging for patients to assault each other.[4]
The Halderman Case, which resulted in the closure of the institution, also detailed widespread patient abuse.
[edit]Closure
A class-action case was filed against Pennhurst State School on behalf of its patients. The case was heard by U.S. District Judge Raymond J. Broderick, who in 1977 ruled that the conditions at the institution violated patients' constitutional rights. Pennhurst State School was ultimately closed in 1987. Its 460 patients were discharged or transferred to other facilities in a process known as deinstitutionalization that lasted several years, and included discussion of treatment plans with each patient's family.
[edit]Halderman v. Pennhurst State School and Hospital
The allegations of abuse led to the first lawsuit of its kind in the United States, a federal class action,Halderman v. Pennhurst State School & Hospital, 446 F.Supp. 1295 (E.D. Pa., 1977), which asserted that the developmentally disabled in the care of the state have a constitutional right to appropriate care and education. Terry Lee Halderman had been a resident of Pennhurst, and upon release she filed suit in the federal district court on behalf of herself and other residents of Pennhurst. The complaint alleged that conditions at Pennhurst were unsanitary, inhumane and dangerous, violating the fourteenth amendment, and that Pennhurst used cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the eighth and fourteenth amendments, as well as the Pennsylvania Mental Health and Retardation Act of 1966 (MH/MR). The District Court ruled that certain of the patients' rights had been violated. Ultimately, however, the U.S. Supreme Court vacated the judgment based on the Eleventh Amendment principle that federal courts cannot order state officials to comply with state laws. [5] As noted below, the institution was eventually closed pursuant to a settlement agreement that required that community-based services be offered to all of its residents.
[edit]Modern Day
After many years of determining what to do with Pennhurst, Congressman Jim Gerlach sought to establish a federal veterans cemetery at Pennhurst in 2003 but the VA rejected the proposal.
In 2005, the state adopted the Keystone Principles concerning the state's duties to maintain historic property and to consult with the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission before transferring the property into private hands. Local County officialssupervisors approved a private development and Pennhurst was sold to a developer, Pennhurst Associates, for two million dollars. The Pennhurst Memorial and Preservation Alliance (PMPA) was formed to advocate for certain uses of the site.
Pennhurst was added to the National Register of Historic Places and Pennsylvania's list of the most At-Risk Pennsylvania Properties as well as the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, a worldwide network of historic sites specifically dedicated to remembering struggles for justice.
In partnership with the Preservation Alliance of Greater Philadelphia, PMPA obtained a grant to complete a re-use design and feasibility study of the Pennhurst campus. As of 2010, Penn Organic Recycling LLC currently operates on four-and-a-half-acres of Pennhurst, offering tpping, composting and food waste services. The Department of Environmental Protection permitted the composting operation at Pennhurst to maintain no more than 25 tons.
Pennhurst was featured on the shows Ghost Adventures on Travel Channel, Ghost Hunters on SyFy andCelebrity Ghost Stories on BIO.
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
TERMINOLOGY AND NAMES
history of the straight jacket
Who invented the straight-jacket?
The straight-jacket acquired a bad reputation in the twentieth century. With "chemical straight-jackets" like Haldol and Thorazine, the use of the cloth one seemed barbaric.Originally the straight-jacket was considered a humane advance over the chains that were used at the time to restrain dangerous patients. In a straight-jacket the patient could walk around freely without risking harm to himsellf or others. Furthermore, the anger generated by chaining people made them more dangerous and also distorted observations of their true clinical state. For anyone who is interested I might add that the straight jacket was invented in 1790 by an upholster named Guilleret at Bicêtre, an asylum for the chronically mentally ill near Paris. Known as la camisol de force it was a vest of strong cloth with long sleeves which could be attached to each other behind the back of the person one wanted to prevent from causing harm. [Funck-Brentano, F. & Marindaz, G. L'Hôpital Général Bicêtre, Lyon, 1928
DANVERS STATE HOSPITAL PART 2
Welcome to Danvers state hospital
pictures by DODIE DENIS CLAARHistory
Constructed at a cost of $1.5 million, with the estimated yearly per capita cost of patients being $3,000 the hospital originally consisted of two main center buildings, housing the administration, with four radiating wings. The administration building measured 90 by 60 feet (18 m), with a 130 feet (40 m) high tower. The kitchens, laundries,chapel, and dormitories for the attendants were in a connecting 180 by 60 feet (18 m) building in the rear. In the rear was the boiler house of 70 feet (21 m) square, with boilers 450 horsepower (340 kW), used for heating and ventilation. Middleton Pond supplied the hospital its water. On each side of the main building were the wings, for male and female patients respectively, connected by small square towers, with the exception of the last ones on each side, which are joined by octagonal towers. The former measured 10 feet (3.0 m) square, and were used to separate the buildings. The outermost wards were reserved for extreme patients. West side was male, east was female.
Over the years, newer buildings were constructed around the original Kirkbride, as well as alterations to the Kirkbride itself, such as a new gymnasium/auditorium on the area of the old kitchens and multiple solaria added onto the front of the wards.
Most of the buildings on campus were connected by a confusing labyrinth of underground tunnels, also constructed over the years. Many of the Commonwealth institutions for the developmentally delayed and the mentally ill at the time were designed with tunnel systems, to be self-sufficient in wintertime. There was a tunnel that ran from a steam/power generating plant (which still exists to provide service to the Hogan Regional Center) located at the bottom of the hill running up to the hospital, along with tunnels that connected the male and female nurses homes, the "Gray Gables", Bonner Medical Building, machine shops, pump house, and a few others. The system of tunnels branched off like spokes from a central hub behind the Kirbride building (in the vicinity of the old gymnasium) leading to different wards of the hospital and emerging up into the basements. This hub was also an underground maintenance area of sorts. Some nicknamed it "The Wagon Wheel" due to its design. These older brick and cobblestone tunnels were used in the production of the movie Session 9. The original plan was designed to house 500 patients, with 100 more possible to accommodate in the attic. However, by the late 1930s and 1940s, over 2,000 patients were being housed, and overcrowding was severe. People were even held in the basements of the Kirkbride.
While the asylum was originally established to provide residential treatment and care to the mentally ill, its functions expanded to include a training program for nurses in 1889 and a pathological research laboratory in 1895. In the 1890s, Dr. Charles Page, the superintendent, declared mechanical restraint unnecessary and harmful in cases of mental illness. By the 1920s the hospital was operating school clinics to help determine mental deficiency in children. Reports were made that various, and inhumane shock therapies, lobotomies, drugs, and straitjackets were being used to keep the crowded hospital under control. This sparked controversy. During the 1960s as a result of increased emphasis on alternative methods of treatment, deinstitutionalization, and community-based mental health care, the inpatient population started to decrease. On June 24, 1992, the hospital closed. After abandonment, the wards and buildings were left to decay and rot for many years until the demolition.
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