Smoke on the Mountains Mental Health Center

*Number of Members: Dozens, most unwilling.
*Nature of Members: Staff - Therapists, doctors, nurses and service workers treating the emotionally and mentally disturbed<P>Patients - People who have been damaged by various encounters with the supernatural or hideous tragedies. People who have powers or qualities which have rendered them incapable of coping with life.
*Organization: A Medical Hospital.
*Game Role: A place for crazed PCs and NPCs to find safe harbor and perhaps treatment.
*World Role: A very quiet, safe place for people who have seen too much.
*Relative Influence: In the larger world little - Smoke on the Mountains is just another out-of-the-way facility holding people who cannot deal with life. In the world of Bureau 13, large - It will be a very rare agent who hasn't visited the place either seeking clues to an old case or as an out patient, or maybe as an in patient.
*Public or Secret?: The existence of the place is public and its function as a mental health facility are known. Its deeper function - pulling people back from the abyss is not not widely known.
*Publicly Stated Goal: To treat clients; ensuring their mental health and ability to cope with society.
*Relative Wealth: Large - Smoke on the Mountains MHC receives funding from several foundations and is a hidden Black Budget item.
*Group advantages: The best medical technology, the best therapeutic psionics and magics available.</p><P>The security Staff of the Smoke on the Mountains MHC are retired and disabled agents. They are liable to bitterly resent any chaos or crises which interrupts their quiet. Security is a must as some of the patients are serious threats if loose.
*Special Abilities: hidden among the Staff and patients of the Smoke on the Mountains MHC are telepaths, psionics and mages who seek to use their abilities in therapeutic ways.
*Group disadvantages: The Smoke on the Mountains facility cannot move, or hide, except by obfuscation.
*Special disadvantages: Sometime people and creatures have a very, very good reason for being mad....</P><P>Dangerous patients: Some of the people held there are extremely dangerous. The largest collection of Hannibal Lectors and like violently insane people you are going to find east of the Mississippi and south of the Mason/Dixon Line.
*Those who favor them: People who support mental health. Bureau 13 agents who like being more well adjusted.
*Those opposed to them: Monsters, villains and things that creep into the subconscious when you're not looking.
*Area of Operation: Cosby, Tn. -- Located just north of the Great Smoky Mountains, and well off the beaten path. 
*Headquarters Location: Cosby, Tn.
*Public Face: Gentle and professional guardians of mental health.
*Notable Members: Dr Zephyrus Drummond -- Founded the asylum on 1892. Directed it for the next 20 years. Drummond took a very Calvinist approach to mental health, insanity as a moral failing. He ran a Christian warehouse, but it was a warehouse.</P><P>Dr. Gary Parker 1933 to 1946. Introduced psychiatric medicine. Mental illness not moral failing. He started treatments not just a place to hide people. Early methods were nearly stumbling around in the dark, but it was progress.</P><P>Dr Dorthy Johnson Introduced the use of magic, and more modern psychiatric methods. Discharges started to comes close to admissions under Dr.Johnson.</P><P>Dr. Sliva Windchilde: Current director. She continues with the use of magic and has introduced Ane Healers.
*History of the Organization: Smoke on the Mountains Asylum was founded in 1892 with the avowed purpose of helping God's unfortunate. God's unfortunate came is some favors they didn't expect. By 1900 Bureau 13 was aware of the location and was taking it over in slow and peaceful sort of way. They worked in their special doctors and moved special patients there. It was the only facility outside of Arkham Asylum to send the specially insane and it didn't have history.</P><P>Unlike Arkham a serious effort was made to cure the mentally ill. Director Dr. Gary Parker brought in new methods and procedures to actively cure patients of their mental trauma. He introduced electroshock in 1939. He used new drugs and treatments as evidence was acquired they worked. His primary useful legacy was the lasting attitude that insanity was a illness, not a moral failing.</P><P>In 1964 the name was changed to Smoke on the Mountains Mental Health Center. The era of touchy feeling goodness it was felt that "asylum" was too harsh a word.</P><P>In 1977 Dr Dorthy Johnson brought the first magic into the facility. A Hoodoo healer by her Grandmother's training she didn't let medical school dissuade from from those things she knew worked. The recovery rate went way up.</P><P>Hoodoo remains a vital method of therapy at Smoke on the Mountains. Dr, Johnson's legacy continues. While some telepaths have been utilized once it was learned what Big Sur was doing they have remained closer to the magical roots.
==Other Facilities in the Bureau 13 network==
The Smoke on the Mountains Mental Health Center is not the only mental health hospital in the Bureau 13 network. Other facilities are:
*Arkham Mental Health Center -- Arkham, Massachusetts. -- Part of the medical school of Mystkonic University. North East operations and the really hard core cases east of the Mississippi.
*Big Sur Mental Health Clinic -- Big Sur, California. -- West coast center for the mental weird.
*Ring Lake Ranch -- Dubois, Wyoming. -- Handles matters in the northwest US. Cover as a woo woo new age retreat.
*The Woodlands Mental Health Center -- The Woodlands, Texas -- It is north of Houston. Serving the southwest. It is the newest member of the Bureau 13 network.
Category:Medicine
Category:Earth Gazetteer
Category:Bureau 13
Category:Mad Science
Category:Supernatural