One is a small museum in the hospital's former train depot. The hospital's grim history remains in plain sight in at least two places. Wild vines smother the brick walls and sunlight streams through the exposed ceilings of the Walker Building, where new patients waited as long as a year before getting psychiatric treatment. Pine saplings sprout from the red-tile roof of the once-majestic Jones Building, where surgery was sometimes performed without a doctor present.
#MENTAL LADU ESCAPE HOSPITAL N GA WINDOWS#
Many of the 200 buildings on the 2,000-acre campus have become ghosts of their own pasts: windows shattered, porches sagging, roofs collapsed. In its last days, though, Central State seems far less imposing. "When we were growing up in Georgia, they used to say, 'If you don't behave, we'll send you to Milledgeville, ' " Fricks said recently. Across the nation, large institutions such as Central State, where abuse and neglect killed or injured hundreds, perhaps thousands, across the decades, are giving way to programs that treat patients in their communities.Ĭlosing most of Central State, once the nation's largest psychiatric hospital, is "a huge symbol" of changing attitudes about people with mental illnesses, said Larry Fricks, a longtime patients' advocate.
The state is shutting down the rest - massive buildings that once warehoused 13,000 patients at a time - to comply with a federal mandate to overhaul the way it provides psychiatric services. Only now, after 170 years, is the cycle breaking.īy the end of the year, Central State will operate only one hospital unit: a 184-bed secure facility that evaluates and treats criminal defendants who are mentally ill. That history played out in a seemingly endless cycle: good intentions, not enough money, poor psychiatric and medical treatment, too many patients with too few caretakers, abuse and neglect, expose and scandal, and, eventually, high-minded but fleeting reforms. Tilman Barnett, described as violent and destructive, diagnosed as a "lunatic, " never left.īarnett, a 30-year-old farmer from Bibb County, died six months later of a malady termed "maniacal exhaustion." Thus he became not only the first patient but the first casualty in the long and often dark history of one of the nation's most notorious mental institutions, known now as Central State Hospital. 15, 1842, chained to a horse-drawn wagon. MILLEDGEVILLE - The first patient came to Georgia's first insane asylum on Dec. By the end of 2013, only a secure facility for mentally ill criminal defendants will remain. Department of Justice opens an investigation.Ģ010: The state announces it will close most of Central State. The downsized Milledgeville facility becomes Central State Hospital.ġ997: Mental-health advocates begin restoring Central State's cemeteries, where 25,000 patients were buried, many in graves no longer marked.Ģ007: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports on the suspicious deaths of 136 state hospital patients, 42 at Central State. Georgia had sterilized 3,284 people, three-fourths of them psychiatric patients.ġ967: Georgia begins opening regional psychiatric hospitals. Census counts 283 patients in the asylum.ġ864: With 30,000 federal troops occupying Milledgeville, William Tecumseh Sherman spares the state hospital from destruction.ġ897: The hospital is renamed the Georgia State Sanitarium.ġ929: The facility gets another new name: Milledgeville State Hospital.ġ937: The hospital begins involuntary sterilizations for patients deemed mentally defective.ġ940s: Electroshock therapy becomes routine as the hospital population grows to 10,000.ġ951: Doctors begin performing lobotomies, using long metal picks to sever fibers that connect the frontal lobes to the rest of the brain.ġ959: The Atlanta Constitution exposes horrific conditions at Milledgeville, the nation's largest psychiatric hospital with almost 13,000 patients.ġ963: Forced sterilizations are discontinued.
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