Asylum on the hill
Subtitle: history of a healing landscape
By: Katherine Ziff ; foreword by Samuel T. Gladding
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Athens
Language: eng
Number of pages: 220
ISBN-13: 9780821419731
Subjects: Athens Lunatic Asylum (Athens, Ohio); Empathy; Mental Disorders; Psychiatric Hospitals; History, 19th Century; Therapy; Psychiatry; Professional-Patient Relations; History
Description: "Asylum on the Hill is the story of a great American experiment in psychiatry, a revolution in care for those with mental illness, as seen through the example of the Athens Lunatic Asylum. Built in Southeast Ohio after the Civil War, the asylum embodied the nineteenth-century "gold standard" specifications of moral treatment. Stories of patients and their families, politicians, caregivers, and community illustrate how a village in the coalfields of the Hocking River Valley responded to a national impulse to provide compassionate care based on a curative landscape, exposure to the arts, outdoor exercise, useful occupation, and personal attention from a physician. Although ultimately doomed by overcrowding and overshadowed by the rise of new models of psychiatry, for twenty years the therapeutic community at Athens pursued moral treatment therapy with energy and optimism. Ziff's fresh presentation of America's nineteenth-century asylum movement shows how the Athens Lunatic Asylum accommodated political, economic, community, family, and individual needs and left an architectural legacy that has been uniquely renovated and repurposed"--Provided by publisher.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.