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Saturday, August 08, 2009

Ind. Gov't. - Photos of Logansport State Hospital and other closed mental hospitals nationwide featured in new book

Kevin Lilly reports in the Logansport Pharos-Tribune:

Photographer Christopher Payne spent much of his spare time the past seven years traveling around the country snapping shots of the architecture, the artifacts and long-discarded farming operations of about 70 state hospitals.

Included on his trip was the Logansport State Hospital, from which he captured the image that made the front cover of his book, “Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals.”

The artifact, a straightjacket now on display at Longcliff Museum on the hospital grounds, intrigued Payne. In a phone interview from his New York City residence, he explained his interest in the straightjacket, as well as his desire to record these historic facilities. * * *

“Each time you go to one and you see this city that’s just been abandoned, it just kind of makes you go, ‘Wow!’ to think about the thousands of people that lived there, worked there, the resources it required to build such enormous institutions,” Payne said. “I just thought it was a compelling story that needed to be told.”

For his self-funded project, Payne wanted to emphasize the positive aspects of the institutions, especially the notion of self-sufficiency in an age that he considers society far removed from the items people eat and use. In Logansport, he discovered a treasure trove.

The Longcliff Museum, which is hosting an open house free to the public today, contains hundreds of photos that show the daily life of patients when they worked on the state hospital farm growing vegetables and milking cows. There is also medical equipment, paintings by past patients and the hospital’s own TV studio. * * *

Payne complemented Logansport’s hospital staff for the effort to save so many artifacts when other hospitals have let them deteriorate.

“They have an incredible museum where it seems they have saved almost everything from the hospital,” Payne said. “There aren’t many places that have done that.”

According to a news release, Longcliff Museum has been open to the public since August of 1999, when many employee volunteers crawled through basements and searched for artifacts to save before buildings were demolished. The museum illustrates the hospital’s story from 1883, when the legislature approved the building of the state’s second mental hospital, to the present.

Payne said the items, some of which he had not seen elsewhere, have been preserved well. As for the straightjacket, he called it an iconic image.

“There was something about that which was unique because each hospital would manufacture their own straightjackets so you’d see lots of different versions,” said Payne of the jacket, which has the word Logansport stamped on it.

The book, titled “Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals,” will be published this fall by MIT Press, with an introduction by Dr. Oliver Sacks.

I've linked to the Amazon site, from which you can view several photos from the book. I can attest to the fascination of these now-closed, but at the time quite self-sufficient, institutions, from my days in the early '70s as the state budget analyst for the department of mental health.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on August 8, 2009 10:30 AM
Posted to Indiana Government