In a separate facility, the Cook Building, the hospital houses 179 forensic patients (who have been found by courts to be not guilty by reason of insanity or incompetent to stand trial). One prison remains on the property today. Central State stopped accepting new patients in 2010.Īs the asylum’s buildings were vacated, four were converted into prisons. Supreme Court ruling in a Georgia case allows patients with mental health problems to choose community care over institutionalization if a professional agrees, and following a 2010 agreement with the federal government, Georgia will move all mentally and developmentally disabled patients to community facilities. Nonetheless, advocates do not support a return to institutions. In recent years, the AJC has reported unexpected or suspicious deaths in both the community and regional psychiatric hospitals. This approach has been riddled with its own tragedies, such as homelessness and drug abuse. A time capsule and a CD recording the names of the dead are buried beneath the angel. It was erected by members of the Georgia Consumer Council, some of them former patients, after they worked with volunteers to restore the overgrown cemetery beginning in 1997. A bronze angel serves as perpetual guardian of the dead at Central State. A decade before the national movement toward deinstitutionalization, Georgia governors Carl Sanders and Jimmy Carter began emptying Central State in earnest, sending mental patients to regional hospitals and community clinics, and people with developmental disabilities to small group homes. By the mid-1960s, as new psychiatric drugs allowed patients to move to less restrictive settings, Central State’s population began its steady decline. The state, which had ignored decades of pleas from hospital superintendents, began to provide additional funding. ![]() Asylum staff were fired, and Nelson won a Pulitzer. Yes, the patients were helping to run the asylum. ![]() Indeed, some of the “doctors” had been hired off the mental wards. In 1959, the Atlanta Constitution’s Jack Nelson investigated reports of a “snake pit.” Nelson found that the thousands of patients were served by only 48 doctors, none a psychiatrist. Cranford, the chief clinical psychologist at the hospital in 1952, wrote in his book, But for the Grace of God: The Inside Story of the World’s Largest Insane Asylum. Doctors wielded the psychiatric tools of the times-lobotomies, insulin shock, and early electroshock therapy-along with far less sophisticated techniques: Children were confined to metal cages adults were forced to take steam baths and cold showers, confined in straitjackets, and treated with douches or “nauseants.” “It has witnessed the heights of man’s humanity and the depths of his degradation,” Dr. Thousands of Georgians were shipped to Milledgeville, often with unspecified conditions, or disabilities that did not warrant a classification of mental illness, with little more of a label than “funny.” The hospital outgrew its resources by the 1950s, the staff-to-patient ratio was a miserable one to 100. It was a word of fear and mystery, a word that classified ‘funny’ people.” Parents routinely admonished misbehaving children with the threat, “I’m going to send you to Milledgeville!” Georgia novelist Terry Kay recalls that as a boy in the 1940s, “it was one of the few words with great power. ![]() But throughout Georgia, it was known solely by the name of the neighboring town: Milledgeville. ![]() A century after it opened, 200 buildings sprawled over 2,000 acres and housed up to 13,000 patients at what was then called Central State Hospital. B., and the institution grew into the largest insane asylum in the world. A long hallway in the 181,582-square-foot Powell Building provides a reminder of the vast number of patients once housed at Central State-up to 13,000 during its peak.Many more patients followed Mr. He died of “maniacal exhaustion” before the next summer. of Bibb County, arrived in December 1842. Five years later, the facility opened as the Georgia Lunatic Asylum on the outskirts of the cotton-rich town that served as the antebellum state capital.
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