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Part Three: Crazy Castles, Palatial Nuthouses & Other Frightful Tales












Chapter 3: Insane Asylums of the 19th/20th Centuries (Some still in use today . . .)


If one thing is questionable, then it all bears questioning and scrutiny.


Once again, I am simply presenting information here and a few random observations. Feel free to use it or ignore it as you see fit. Do your own research and draw your own conclusions.


Trans-Allegheny Asylum

An easy place to get in, almost impossible to get out . . .



This is precisely the type of warm, inviting structure a sane person or society intent on healing the mentally ill or otherwise sick, or housing the poor, would construct, isn’t it? But I guess it's what's on the inside that counts, right?




Here are some interesting articles on 19th century psychiatry:

Psychiatry in Descent: Darwin and The Brownes



Surviving the Lunacy Act of 1890: English Psychiatrists and Professional Development during the Early Twentieth Century


Madness, Suicide and the Victorian Asylum: Attempted Self-Murder in the Age of Non-Restraint

Asylum provision and the East India Company in the nineteenth century

Colonial Psychiatry in South Asia, 1800–58





Sticking with the Johnny Cash motif from the previous chapter, here’s a great song to get us in the mood to be a captive audience:


Or how about a little Patsy Cline?



Here’s a fascinating article: Reasons for Admission to Insane Asylums in the 19th Century

A list purportedly documents the myriad reasons or symptoms behind patients' being admitted to insane asylums back in the 1800s.









This is what happens when you send my Mama to the insane asylum, all you nasty people . . .

HAHAHAHAHA!!!!




Rock 'n' Roll Part 2, Gary Glitter




Here’s an excellent new posting from Jon Levy (posted 12/20/20)

Human Warehouses


Public comment: I grew up outside of Boston. The area is littered with humongous old gothic, castle-like “insane asylums”. Until recently, I thought they were to house the schizophrenic Irish who had immigrated to Boston from the old country from 1840 to 1930. My lineage is 100% Irish from both sides of my family, so understanding this phenomenon was important to me. From what I’ve read on the subject, apparently the Irish are more vulnerable to schizophrenia than others, due in part to diet, work conditions and paternal reproductive issues. Now, I’m beginning to think that maybe it was more that the Irish immigrants from the 1840s to the 1930 were not towing the party line and wouldn’t shut up about the true history... So they were committed to these insane asylums...



Wow, again. Even more effective than prisons, what a frightfully easy tool for the so-called powers to use to subjugate, silence and disappear anyone basically . . .


Perhaps this is where they locked up this generation’s truthers and conspiracy theorists—along with apparently vast numbers of the mentally ill and feeble-minded, the indigent, the tuberculosis-infected, traumatized veterans, unwanted orphans and other miscellaneous undesirables. At least those who still recalled the last great reset, perhaps.


The Masonic Widows and Orphans Home, Louisville KY

The Masonic Widows' and Orphans' Home was formed in 1867 due to a discussion on November 23, 1866 pondering what to do with the number of widows and orphans of Masons caused by the American Civil War; the 1867 founding makes Kentucky's Masonic Widows and Orphans Home the oldest Masonic home in North America. It started when a group of Louisville Freemasons on November 23, 1866 gathered with an intention of creating such a home. The Kentucky General Assembly chartered the organization in January 1867. The initial starting funds for starting the home was $30,000, with additional funds totaling $20,000 and $12,000 separately. The cornerstone of the original home, located north of Avery Street between First and Second Street in what was previously a cornfield, was laid in 1869, with the first resident admitted on April 7, 1871. The building was completed in 1873. A tornado on June 2, 1875, damaged the roof and center walls of the original building, but no one was injured.[2][3][4][5]

World War I and the Spanish influenza outbreak during and immediately after the war caused overcrowding. Thus, the decision was made to construct a larger orphan's home than the original in Louisville, to the present-day location in Louisville/St. Matthews on Frankfort Avenue, at the cost of $9,400,000. Construction began in 1925 on the 176-acre (0.71 km2) location, and the residents moved to it on August 15, 1927. Louisville daily newspaper The Courier-Journal called it "Little City Beautiful". The largest concentration of orphans at the home was 632 in 1930. The last orphan left in 1989, resulting in the home being solely for senior care.[3][4][5][6][7]




It is quite remarkable. So many lunatic asylums for a relatively modest-sized population in this era. For what it is worth, the U.S. Census of 1850, the seventh census of the States, determined the resident population of the United States to be 23,191,876—an increase of 35.9 percent over the 17,069,453 persons enumerated during the 1840 Census. The total population included 3,204,313 slaves. New York was by far the most populated state, with just over 3 million. N.Y. was followed by Pennsylvania (over 2 million), Ohio, Virginia, and Tennessee, each with over 1 million. Rounding out the top ten, Massachusetts, Indiana, Kentucky, Georgia, and North Carolina with Illinois just missing the cut.





Here’s an interesting perspective on the issue of where all these insane people came from in odd proportion to the general population, not only in America but around the world:


Sneak Peak ~ One World Tartarians ~ Ch. 20 Insane Insane Asylums. Burying/Burning the Bodies

The overall question is “Did the NWO take over Tartarian buildings and then use them to kill off the people of Tartary around the world after committing them to converted insane asylums. The evidence appears conclusively likely! Remember, that according to Mr. Fomenko, his-story does not begin until the beginnings of the elimination of Tartary in 1200 AD.





Haunting Photos Taken Inside Mental Asylums Of Decades Past





Can you imagine the cost of heating and cooling these palatial institutions? They probably didn’t bother, which is at least one reason why so many didn’t make it out alive, all the inhumane treatment, starvation, grisly medical experimentation, torture, and all the rest, notwithstanding.

This is an informative site for all insane asylum fanatics:


Here’s another disturbing one, especially if it’s true: 16 TRUE INSANE ASYLUM STORIES | My Uncle Worked at an Insane Asylum



Top Ten Horrifying Mental Asylums:



Here is an excellent, deep-diving paper by Emily Clark, Mad Literature: Asylums in Nineteenth-Century America. file:///C:/Users/mrfre/Downloads/18589-29965-2-PB.pdf


And what investigation into insanity and mind control would be complete without watching this:




Who said Mind Control???



















But first read the novel by Anthony Burgess, upon which Stanley Kubrick’s film was based.



And here is a quick bit about the remarkable Nellie Bly:



  • NYC Lunatic Asylum (1841-?) Currently a high-end apartment complex, The Octagon, this asylum was made infamous by journalist Nellie Bly who checked in to get the story of a lifetime.


Here’s a fascinating paper: Through the Agency of Words: Women in the American Insane Asylum, 1842-1890


Takayoshi, Pamela. (2020). Rhetoric of Health and Medicine, Spring 2020, University Press of Florida.


Description:

In his "Encomium of Helen," Gorgias asserts that "Speech is a powerful lord, which by means of the finest and most invisible body effects the divinest works: it can stop [...] Between 1842 and 1890, 23 women wrote 33 memoirs about their time spent incarcerated in American insane asylums. While a handful of these memoirs have been studied, there has not been a recognition of how many asylum memoirs exist and their significance as a collective body of work. Grounded in an inductive analysis of the collective 33 works, this article begins a process of recovering a mostly forgotten moment in time when former patients took agency over their experience, ethos, and rhetoricity to break down the institutional wall of silence and give the public the first patient-centered memoirs. I argue that these women rhetors did this by foregrounding their own identity as patient and by creating a rhetorical position from which their readers would feel the trauma of asylum life. Both rhetorical moves countered institutionalization's dehumanizing effects by placing the patient experience at the center of understanding the asylum experience. KEYWORDS: history, mental health, patient perspective, memoir



Here’s another:


Benjamin Reiss, Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-Century American Culture. Chicago, IL and London: U of Chicago P, 2008. isbn 978-0226-70963-5 hbk 237 pp. $50.00


Benjamin Reiss's fascinating book explores the development of what was known as "moral treatment" (4) for mental illness in asylums in the nineteenth-century United States. The moral-treatment movement originated in Europe in the eighteenth century, practised usually by lay (i.e. non-medical) figures who believed that loving care within a disciplined framework was the most efficacious provision for those committed to asylums. As Reiss argues, and as has been widely researched in recent years, causes of madness were believed to be diverse: "One could go mad from a blow to the head, from the inhalation of poisonous vapors, from indigestion, from masturbation, from hereditary disposition, or from another disease" (4). As if this were not enough, other sources of madness included: "excessive study, religious enthusiasm, anxieties over work, and even 'blowing Fife all night,' 'reading vile books,' and 'extatic [sic] admiration of works of art'" (4). Faced with all these potential causes it seems surprising that there was anyone left sane enough to supervise the asylums: in a reading of Edgar Allan Poe's "The System of Dr Tarr and Professor Fether" (1844), Reiss shows Poe playfully enjoying the conceit that it was not always possible to distinguish between supervisor and inmate. But apparently there were figures who could undertake these jobs.





Revisiting this one, here’s a disturbing and fascinating documentary on human zoos, so popular at World’s Fairs:




So many of these amazing ancient-looking structures still exist today, surprisingly, although many in ruins. A countless number of them really, all purportedly constructed in the mid to late 1800s or early 1900s, most reportedly in a year or two, almost defying belief or reason. An unbelievable number of them erected in New York state, alone. Just take a moment to imagine the sheer amount of resources, money, building materials, logistical wizardy, architectural and artistic skill, masonry expertise, manpower, etc. it would have taken to build all these magnificent castle-like structures across the United States and much of North America. Yet story after story, easy-peasy, lemon-squeezy . . .



Have we been programmed (or dare I say brainwashed) into believing that this is what a state hospital or insane asylum should look like? I wouldn’t doubt it for a second. And were there really that many insane people in the 1800s? Where did they all come from? Where did they all go?


Here’s an interesting place in Canada:

Provincial Lunatic Asylum, originally. Asylum for the Insane (1871).

Presently Ontario Hospital, Toronto.


Clearly, lunacy is not an American phenomenon.




By the way, everyone should watch this film and read the novel by Ken Kesey, if they haven’t already.







Here's a fascinating article about Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters from Miles Mathis:



Here are some more interesting readings on the subject:

The Architecture of Madness by Carla Yanni


Mad House: The Hidden History of Insane Asylums in 19th-Century New York 1st Edition by Michael T. Keene


Insane Asylums in America by Sean Mosley



And in these old images and photographs, if we are to believe they are authentic, so many of these old structures appear rather ancient, oddly weathered, hardly brand new at all. The same can be said of countless other buildings and structures purportedly erected in this era—courthouses, government buildings, cathedrals, public attractions, old factories, private mansions, bridges, canals and more, as truth investigators Jon Levi, Michelle Gibson and others have pointed out.


Here we have some of the most notorious insane asylums of early America. And this is just the short list:

v Topeka State Hospital, Kansas (1872-1997)

v Waverly Hills Sanatorium, Louisville, Ky. (1910-1961)

v Overbrook Insane Asylum (Essex County Hospital), Cedar Grove, N.J. (1896-1975)

v Willowbrook State School, Staten Island, N.Y. (1947-1987) Here reportedly countless resident children were purposely fed the hepatitis virus during insidious testing methods supposedly in search of a cure.

v Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, Weston, W. V. (1864-1994)

v Byberry Mental Hospital, Byberry, Pennsylvania (1907-1987)

v Bloomingdale Insane Asylum, Morningside Heights, NYC (1821-1880)

v Pilgrim Psychiatric Center, Brentwood, N.Y. (1941-Present)

v New Jersey State Lunatic Asylum (Trenton State Hospital) (1848-?)


The papers of that era suggest that the investigators were focused on the microbes that caused infection rather than on the immune system's responses to those microbes. The latter was the line of investigation taken up by Henry A. Cotton, who worked at the New Jersey State Hospital at Trenton, originally named the New Jersey State Lunatic Asylum. In pursuit of this "focal infection theory" in the early 1920s, Cotton started a controversial program of radical surgical pixxxduiies in an attempt to rid psychotic patients of infections that were the putative source of toxins affecting tlie brain. His surgeries started with the extraction of teeth, but tlnen extended to removal of tissues such as the cervix, ovaries, seminal vesicles, and colon, among others. In 1923, negative results from a carefully controlled study using Cotton's methods finally put this barbaric approach to rest

What insane asylums taught us

Source:

USA Today (Magazine). July, 2012, Vol. 141, Issue 2806, p62, 3 p.

Publisher Information:

Society for the Advancement of Education, 2012.



v Greystone “Gravestone” Park Psychiatric Hospital, Morris Plains, N.J. (1876-Present) Here they treated soldiers suffering from PTSD and other patients, including the legendary Woody Guthrie (suffering from Huntington’s Disease) from 1956-1961.


Here’s an interesting little Woody Guthrie story:

In 1955, an FBI agent tasked with keeping tabs on Guthrie and his affiliation to the Communist Party recommended that, given the folksinger’s rapid deterioration, he be taken off the bureau’s “Security Index.” After all, he would soon be incapacitated, and therefore no longer pose any credible threat. The bureau obliged by removing him from the Security Index, but they kept tabs on him in the Communist Index. “Guthrie, in other words, remained an active candidate for detention as a communist,” writes Leonard, “despite being afflicted with a fatal neurological disease.”

While a patient at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey, Guthrie was visited by friends Lee Hayes and Fred Hellerman. When his friends asked how he was faring, Guthrie replied:

Oh yeah, the food’s fine. Everything’s okay. Besides, this is the freest place in America. You don’t have to worry about me. I can jump up on the table and shout “I’m a communist!” and all they’ll say is “Oh he’s crazy.” You try doing that anywhere else in America. . .






Free Association w/ Woody Guthrie


Ingrid Bergman, written by Woody Guthrie (sung by Billy Bragg)



















Gaslight (1944): A Scotland Yard detective (Joseph Cotton) attempts to figure out why a schizoid Victorian (Charles Boyer) is trying to drive his wife (Ingrid Bergman), an aspiring opera singer, insane. (Adapted from Patrick Hamilton’s play, Gaslight. Hamilton also wrote Rope, later made into the famous film by Alfred Hitchcock.)


Gaslighting: An elaborate and insidious technique of deception and psychological manipulation, usually practiced by a single deceiver, or “gaslighter,” on a single victim over an extended period. (Brittanica.com)

Urbandictionary.com: When a fat little idiot tries to manipulate you by making you question your existence, perception or memories.


Rope (1948): Two men attempt to prove they committed the perfect crime by hosting a dinner party after strangling their former classmate to death.


The films of Alfred Hitchcock and sociological/psychological themes:

The 39 Steps (1935): Espionage, sexual entrapment, assassination, murder

Suspicion (1941): Paranoia, gaslighting, mind control.

Shadow of a Doubt (1943): Murder, shadow self

Spellbound (1945) : Satanism, the occult, psychopathology, phobias (The story of the new head of a mental asylum who isn’t at all what he seems to be.)

Notorious (1946): Espionage, romantic entrapment, murder, manipulation, shame (Starring Cary Grant (real-life “Romeo” British spy), Ingrid Bergman)

Strangers on a Train (1951): Psychopathology, disassociation, murder, the shadow self.

Dial M for Murder (1954): Infidelity, revenge, murder (Grace Kelly)

Rear Window (1954): Voyeurism, deviance, alienation, murder, the surveillance culture. (Starring real-life spy, Jimmy Stewart, Grace Kelly)

Vertigo (1958): Mind control, PTSD, doubling, voyeurism, entrapment (Jimmy Stewart)

North by Northwest (1959): Espionage, sexual entrapment, mind control, Cold War politics (Cary Grant)

Psycho (1960): Dissociation, psychopathology, the serial killer

Marnie (1964): PTSD, phobias, blackmail, dissociation, pedophilia

Frenzy (1972): Bondage, Serial killers


Hitchcock, British Intelligence, The Tavistock Institute and Hollywood






















Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick: The Irony of Feeling



Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964)

Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1999)



Strait Jacket (1964) Strait-Jacket is a 1964 American horror film directed and produced by William Castle, written by Robert Bloch and starring Joan Crawford. Its plot follows a woman who, having committed a double-murder of her husband and his lover decades prior, is suspected of a series of axe murders following her release.



Woody Guthrie~ All You Fascists Bound To Lose




Back to the insane asylums:




v Laconia State School, N.H. (late 1800s to Present) Still utilized as a state prison in part

v Buffalo State Asylum (Richardson-Olmsted Complex), Buffalo, N.Y. (1880-1974)



v Middletown State Homeopathic Hospital, Middletown, N.Y. (1874-Present)

v Hudson River State Hospital, Fairfield, N.Y. (1871-2010) Many “difficult” patients were chained to the walls to prevent them from “acting out.” Eventually destroyed by several fires, presently abandoned.

v Willard Asylum for the Criminally Insane, Ovid, N.Y. (1869-Present) Currently still in use by the N.Y. Dept of Corrections.

v Rolling Hills Asylum (Poorhouse), E Bethany, N.Y. (1826-?)


v Utica State Hospital, N.Y. (1841-1978) A massive Greek Revival structure, presently abandoned.

Credit: Joni Mayhan is a paranormal investigator and author. Her chilling paranormal books Bones in the Basement, Devil’s Toy Box, and The Soul Collector can be found on Amazon.com


v Hart Island Lunatic Asylum, Long Island Sound, NYC. (1869-1976) A former prison for Confederate captives, this interesting place has served as women’s lunatic asylum, a missile base, a tuberculosis, hospital, a quarantine zone during the yellow fever epidemic, and the nation’s largest tax-funded cemetery.




v Bloomingdale Insane Asylum, NYC (1821-?) Currently a building on the campus of Columbia University


v Bellevue Homeless Shelter/Psychiatric Hospital (1931-1998) The oldest public hospital in the United States.



v Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center, NY (1924-1994) The buildings have some distinctive architectural details with Gothic, Romanesque and Moorish influences


v Renwick (Smallpox) Castle Ruins, Roosevelt (Welfare) Island, NYC (1856-1886) The structure was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1972 (becoming the city’s only landmarked ruin), and plans were made to restore it. Not much progress has been made as the ruin currently sits behind a fence on the grounds of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park.

v Tioranda (Zelda Fitzgerald’s Abandoned Sanitorium), Beacon, NY (1915-2004)

This is a curious place.

Once built for the Civil War officer General Joseph Howland in 1859, and called Tioranda, the gothic house was turned into America’s first privately licensed psychiatric hospital in 1915. Closing its doors 16 years ago, it has lain abandoned ever since. Bordering the forests of the highlands overlooking the Hudson River, the hospital was surrounded by over 60 acres, including a now deserted swimming pool, gymnasium, and golf course. Today, rooks nest in the empty spires, disturbed by no one. Once reserved for the very wealthy, this is the sanatorium where a desperate F. Scott Fitzgerald took his beloved wife Zelda in search of a cure. Frances Seymour, wife to Henry Fonda and mother to Jane Fonda, committed suicide here, cutting her throat with a razor in one of the turrets in 1942. Rosemary Kennedy was sent here after her controversial lobotomy when she was just 23 left her with the mental age of a two year old.



v Danvers State Hospital, MA. (1878-1985)

Most of the buildings on campus were connected by a labyrinth of tunnels. Despite being included in the National Register of Historic Places in 1984, the majority of the building was demolished in 2007. On April 7, 2007, four of the apartment complex buildings and four of Avalon Bay's construction trailers burned down in a large fire visible from Boston, nearly 17 mi (27 km) away. Damage was confined mostly to the buildings under construction on the eastern end, but the remaining Kirkbride spires caught fire due to the high heat.[6]

In popular culture[edit]

· The hospital was the setting for the 2001 horror film Session 9.[4] The asylum was also featured in the 1958 film Home Before Dark.

· In the book Project 17 by Laurie Faria Stolarz, the plot involves six teens breaking into Danvers to investigate.

· In the game Painkiller, one of the levels, called Asylum, is based on the central administration section. While the outside is a faithful reproduction, the inside is not.

· The Danvers State Hospital is believed by literary historians to have served as inspiration for the infamous Arkham sanatorium from H.P. Lovecraft's "The Thing on the Doorstep". (Lovecraft's Arkham, in turn, is the inspiration for Arkham Asylum, a psychiatric hospital within the Batman universe.) It is referenced by name in the short story "Pickman's Model"[8] and in The Shadow over Innsmouth.[9]



v Northampton State Hospital, MA (1856-1993)


v Fernald State School, or Experimental School for Teaching and Training Idiotic Children, Boston, MA (1848-2015?)

Originally a Victorian sanatorium, it became a "poster child" for the American eugenics movement during the 1920s. It later was the scene of medical experiments in the 20th century. Investigations into this research led to new regulations regarding human research in children.


In the 1950s, researchers at M.I.T wanted to learn how the body absorbs ions. In order to do this they decided to experiment on children at the school. They fed the children breakfast cereal laced with radioactive materials. The children were not told what they were actually eating. So in 1998, M.I.T agreed to pay out almost 2 million dollars to the survivors. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, other universities did shockingly similar experiments on mental patients. In return for this abuse, the 57 test subjects were given extra food and trips to baseball games. The school is actually still open today and has about 12 residents. Despite it being described as a state school, it wasn’t really. Many asylums were described as schools even know they were not.


v Metropolitan State Hospital, MA (1913-1992)

Metropolitan State Hospital was opened in 1913 and is located in Massachusetts, USA. On the hospital grounds was a children’s hospital for mentally disturbed young people. This children’s hospital was notorious for excessive use of sedation and for the strict punishment for any breech of their rules. The hospital is also notorious for the accidental poisoning of several patients in the 1960s. In the 1970s, Anna Davies was brutally murdered by fellow patient Melvin Wilson. It was only 2 years later that he led authorities to the 3 places where he buried her chopped up body. They grew suspicious of him after they found her teeth in his possession. This earned the site it’s famous nickname “The Hospital Of Seven Teeth.” It was closed in 1992, remaining one of America’s most notorious asylums.







Right out of a Stephen King novel . . . Perhaps he's been here? . . .


v Augusta Mental Health Institute, Maine (1840-2004) Over 11,000 deaths. No traceable paperwork of the deceased buried on the grounds.


v Rhode Island. State Asylum (1844-1917)

At the Asylum for the Insane, he describes how a “twelve foot high, tight, board fence enclosed the area, and because of this the institution was called ‘the sheep pen’”. Inside, the “hard, straight backed, long settees, where the patients sat all day, were placed back to back, and the attendant patrolled the ward like a sentry on his beat.”

“There was no dearth of attendants then,” he continues, who “brought with them the arts of subduing patients without bruising or marking them up…. Towel strangling, rubber hose beating and other refinements of cruelty were surreptitiously used.”


v Medfield State Hospital, MA (1896-2003)

Another convenient burial site on the grounds claiming over 800 graves. A plucky group of boy scouts worked to match the anonymously numbered graves to their rightful names, apparently.


v Forest Haven Asylum, Washington, D.C. (1925-1991) Hundreds of former patients are buried in a mass grave.


v St. Louis County Lunatic Asylum (State Hospital) (1864-Present)


With probably even more to discover, the New York/New Jersey region certainly appears to be the epicenter of super-creepy insane asylums thus far, doesn’t it? No doubt every state, and every country for that matter, certainly has its fair share.

v Pennhurst Insane Asylum, Spring City, PA (1908-1987)


v Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane (Institute of the Pennsylvania Hospital) (1841-1997)




Let’s head South, shall we?

v South Carolina State Hospital, Columbia, S.C. (1827-2015)






















The Terrifying Georgia Mental Asylum With 25,000 Unmarked Graves

v Central State Mental Hospital, Milledgeville, Ga. (1842-2010)

Few realize there are actually thousands and thousands of unclaimed bodies similarly rotting just below the surface of this sprawling estate.

Here’s the story behind the 25,000 unmarked graves at this abandoned asylum.


v Florida State Hospital for the Insane, Chattahoochee (1876-Present) Original site of the Apalachicola Arsenal, and Florida’s first penitentiary.

Notable inmates[edit]

· Victor Licata, axe murderer, whose slaying of his family in 1933 influenced the idea that marijuana causes criminal insanity

· Ruby McCollum, was a married African-American woman convicted of shooting and killing a prominent white doctor, C. Leroy Adams in Live Oak, Florida; she said he forced her to have sex and to bear his child. Her conviction was overturned on appeal by a technicality, and she was ruled mentally incompetent to go to a second trial. She was committed to the hospital in 1954 and released under the Baker Act in 1974. In the 21st century, at least three new books have been published about her case, and two documentary films have been made, one in 2013 and one in 2014.

· Chris Calhoun, A Korean War vet who suffered from posttraumatic stress disorder. The film Chattahoochee was made about his experiences at the Florida State Hospital.

· John William Clouser, the "Florida Fox," was a former police detective who appeared for a time on the FBI Most Wanted List. Clouser escaped FSH in 1967 after having previously been committed in the wake of a kidnapping and armed robbery. He turned himself in to authorities 1974.

· Devon Arthurs, An 18-year-old convert to Salafist Islam who killed two of his Neo Nazi roommates for disrespecting his conversion.

· Jesse Delbert Daniels, disabled man who was accused of a rape in Tavares before being committed to the state hospital for 14 years without ever standing trial before finally being released on appeal.[12]



v Sunland Mental Hospital, Orlando, FL.

Torn down 1999, only admin building remains.


Sunland Hospital refers to a chain of defunct mental health facilities located throughout the state of Florida. The hospitals were located all over the state of Florida, including Tampa, Lantana, Marianna, Tallahassee, Miami and several other cities in south Florida.

Originally named the W. T. Edwards Tuberculosis Hospitals, the facilities were later remodeled into "Sunland Centers" with services for the mentally and physically disabled, specializing mostly in children. A large majority of the centers were shut down by 1983 for various health and safety reasons.



Sunland, Tallahassee, Florida.

















v Charity Hospital, New Orleans, LA (1736 w/ numerous additions-?)

v New Orleans Adolescent Hospital (U.S. Marine Hospital) (1931-2009)


v East Louisiana State Hospital, Jackson (1848-Present)

v Central Louisiana State Hospital, Pineville (1906-Present)


v Insane Hospital of North Carolina (Dorothea Dix Hospital), Raleigh. (1856-2012) Features a Roman-esque main building.


v Searcy Hospital, Mr. Vernon, Ala (1902-2012) Originally Mt. Vernon Arsenal. Today, more than 30 historic buildings are rotting where they stand, including those that housed, at differing times, the Apache warrior Geronimo, a Civil War militia, Dr. Walter Reed and African American mental patients when it was the Mount Vernon Asylum for the Colored Insane.


v Eastern State Hospital, Williamsburg, VA (1773-Present)

Between 1937 and 1968, all of Eastern State's patients were moved to a new facility on the outskirts of Williamsburg, Virginia, where it continues to operate today.

In 1985, the original hospital was reconstructed on its excavated foundations by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.




v Central Kentucky Lunatic Asylum (Central State Hospital), Lyndon, KY (1869-?)

v The Kentucky Lunatic Asylum (Eastern State Hospital), Lexington. (1817-Present) Another on-site mass graveyard for unknown patients.

v Western Lunatic Asylum (Western State Hospital), Hopkinsville, Ky (1854-Present)


v Nashville State Hospital (Middle Tennessee Mental Health Institute), TN (1840-Present). Original building demolished.





v East Tennessee Hospital for the Insane (Lakeshore), Knoxville (1886-2012)

On June 30, 2012 after 126 years of operation, Lakeshore Mental Health Institute officially closed as part of a $25 million budget reduction measure. Not much later, in the spring of 2013, a former employee found patients' records laying in one the buildings, which contained case numbers, dates of birth and Social Security numbers. All buildings have been demolished, except for the administration building of the Kirkbride. The property is now a city park. http://www.asylumprojects.org/index.php/East_Tennessee_Hospital_for_the_Insane



v Western State Hospital, Bolivar (Memphis), TN (1889-Present)

The institution once had a connection with Georgia Tann, who operated the Tennessee Children’s Home Society, an adoption agency in Memphis, Tennessee. Tann used the unlicensed orphanage as a front for her black market baby adoption scheme. Children born to patients at the asylum would be placed for adoption with a false background for as little as $7. Many children were sold to pedophiles or for slave labor. Over the course of thirty years, as many as 5,000 families were displaced due to Tann’s adoption practices. Backed by local judges and politicians, Georgia Tann made millions from the 1920s to 1949 https://abandonedsoutheast.com/2016/11/01/mental-asylum/



v Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum, Jackson (1855-1935)

As many as 7,000 coffins lie beneath a 10-acre patch of undeveloped land on the campus of the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson. The people buried in those coffins lived and died at what was once known as the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum. In 1935, the Mississippi State Hospital opened in Whitfield, just east of Jackson. It remains in operation to this day.


v Alabama Insane (Bryce) Hospital, Tuscaloosa. (1852-Present)

v Arkansas Lunatic Asylum (State Hospital), (1883-Present)

v Kansas State Insane Asylum, Osawatomie (1890-1910)

v St. Joseph State Lunatic Asylum, Missouri (1874-2004) Visitors can still check out the Glore Psychiatric Museum to learn about its history.

v Fulton State Hospital, Missouri (1851-Present)

The oldest public mental health facility west of the Mississippi River also holds some of the most dangerous and criminally insane patients.


v Farmington State Hospital (Number 4), Missouri (Currently the Farmington Correctional Center) (1903-Present)

v Marshall State School, Missouri (1901-Present)

v Missouri State Hospital (Lunatic Asylum #3), Nevada. (1887-)

v St. Vincent’s Sanitarium, Normandy, MO (1858-1980s) Current home of Castle Park Apartment. The subject of the infamous 1949 St. Louis Exorcism once resided there

Show me some more insanity, Missouri . . .

v Odd Fellows Insane Asylum, Liberty (1888-?) Originally the Reed Springs Hotel, destroyed by fire in 1900 and rebuilt. Might never have been a bona fide insane asylum. Most recently a nursing home, before abandoned . . .

v Athens, Lunatic Asylum, Ohio (1868-1993)

the Athens Lunatic Asylum is shrouded in mystery. This is mostly due to the secrecy surrounding it. No matter how hard you look, very little information is available on any patients who were treated here. Asylums like this housed some of the most deranged and dangerous criminals in America. Women could be send here for treatment just for showing sexual desire.



v Northern Ohio Lunatic Asylum (Cleveland State Hospital) (1852-1975) https://case.edu/ech/articles/c/cleveland-state-hospital


v Central State Asylum, Indianapolis, In. (1848-1994) 5 miles of underground tunnels . . .

Here’s an interesting paranormal video on Central State in Indiana:


From Wikipedia, here’s an extensive list from Illinois alone.




v Peoria State Hospital-Bartonville Asylum, Bartonville, Il. (1902-1973)

v Chicago Home for Incurables (late 1800s-1959) Currently part of the University of Chicago

v Chester State Hospital, Chester, IL (1891-?)

v Elgin State Hospital, Elgin IL (1872-Present)

v Chicago State Hospital (1869-1971) Demolished






From Wikipedia: The Cook County Insane Asylum[edit]


The constantly increasing number of insane cases in the wards of the poorhouse soon made manifest the necessity of providing separate and suitable quarters for this class of county charges. Accordingly in 1870 the insane asylum was built. This institution was erected on the county far, a little over a block northeast of the infirmary, on the ground dotted with forest trees and gradually sloping to an artificial lake. L. B. Dixon, of Chicago, was the architect.

The asylum building had a frontage to the east of 272 feet and was divided by a center building, in which the offices were situated; the two wings were divided into wards. Each ward was 116 feet long from north to south. The central building had a frontage of 50 feet. At each extreme end of wings was a projection 20 feet to the rear for bathroom, water closets and stairs to the yards. The building was of brick, with cut stone trimmings, and was three stories high above the basement. Each wing had a center corridor 13 feet wide, with three windows on each end. The patients' rooms were on each side of the corridors. Especial pains were taken to secure a thoroughly efficient system of warming and ventilation. The heating was by high pressure steam, and ventilation was forced by two double-bladed iron fans, eight feet in diameter. The water closets were at the end of each ward. The bathrooms were adjoining at the end of each wing. There was a soiled clothes drop from each bathroom to a room in the basement. There were two bathtubs and three water closets on each floor. Each wing had a dining-room on each floor with attendants' each room adjoining. A dumb waiter extended to the basement from each dining-room. There was a linen room for each story of each wing near the attendants room. At the end of each wing there was a separate stairway with separate exits into yards for inmates.



Here’s a site on Haunted Hospitals of Illinois:


v Sunnybrook Asylum, Ingleside, IL Burned down, currently a subdivision.


v Dunning (Cook County Poor Farm) Jeffersonville, IL (1851-1970)


“Chicago residents at this time, young and old, were terrified of the very name, Dunning . . .”

“Patients . . . were sent by a special streetcar as well as a Minneapolis & St. Paul Railroad car from the Cook County Detention Hospital to Dunning. It was a hospital car with a doctor and a couple of nurses aboard. The train car was called the ‘crazy train’ and had a security guard at each exit so inmates couldn’t escape.”



v Manteno State Hospital, Manteno IL (1930s-?) More underground tunnels here.

v Illinois Eastern Hospital for the Insane (Kankakee State Hospital), (1879-Present) Presently houses developmentally disabled patients only. More underground tunnels.


Heading back North now . . .

v Michigan Asylum for the Insane (Kalamazoo Regional Psychiatric Hospital) (1859-Present)



v Eastern Michigan Asylum for the Insane, Pontiac (1878-1997) Demolished 2000.

v Northern Michigan Asylum, Traverse City, MI (1895-1989)

v Wisconsin Hospital for the Insane (Mendota MHI) (1860-Present) Original Main building destroyed.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendota_Mental_Health_Institute

v Sheboygan County Insane Asylum, WI (1876-1940)


These sound like fun places . . .





v Lake Julia Sanitarium, Puposky, MN (1916-1953)

v Minnesota Security Hospital, St, Peter. (1866-Present)

A fire destroyed the men’s ward in 1880. The original structure was demolished but the hospital was rebuilt and remains active.


v San Haven Sanitorium, Dunseith, ND (1912-1989)

v Office of Indian Affairs (Hiawatha) Insane Asylum, Canton, SD (1898-1934)



v Independence State Hospital, Independence, Iowa (1883-Present)

v Iowa Lunatic Asylum (Mt. Pleasant MHI), (1861-2015)

Like most asylums of its time, it had a gruesome and dark history. Remnants of this are the graveyard, hydrotherapy tubs and lobotomy equipment. It was the first asylum in Iowa and was built under the Kirkbride Plan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Pleasant_Mental_Health_Institute


v Cherokee Mental Health Institute, Iowa. (1902-Present).

Most of the south wing, also known as CCUSO, or the Civil Commitment Unit for Sexual Offenders, is surrounded by prison-grade fencing. It also holds criminally-insane and violent patients.



v Clarinda Lunatic Asylum, Iowa. (1884-Present) Currently a juvenile detention center.

v Nebraska State Hospital for the Insane, Norfolk (1888-?) Demolished 2016.

v Hastings State Hospital, Nebraska (1889-2005)

n July, 1963 the Hastings State Hospital was re-organized into two Unit Hospitals, psychiatric and alcoholic. The south end of the campus was converted into a minimum security prison in 1987. This facility was turned over to the federal government as an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Detention Center in 2002 and was subsequently closed in 2005. Today the facility is currently operated by the department of health and human services & houses the Hastings Juvenile Chemical Dependency Program. Only a few buildings remain on the property. In 2016 the legislature approved the building of a new facility and 2 living units. Money was also allocated for the demolition of vacant buildings.


Here’s an interesting story in an interesting year for fires, 1871.

Burning of State Asylum

The burning of the Nebraska Asylum for the Insane on April 17, 1871, destroyed the locus of a fledgling state institution and had ramifications well beyond the destruction of a single building. The loss seemed typical of the gloomy year of 1871, when poverty gripped the state. Prices for agricultural products were low, markets were distant, and business conditions were further depressed by impending industrial panic in the East. "Official peculation and factional strife," according to the Morton-Watkins History of Nebraska (1913), had demoralized the populace.


· The institution today: Lincoln Regional Center The Lincoln Regional Center, a 250 bed, Joint Commission-accredited state psychiatric hospital, is operated by the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services. It serves people who need very specialized psychiatric services and provides services to people who, because of mental illness, require a highly structured treatment setting.




v Ridges Asylum, Athens, Ohio (1874-1981)


v Ohio State (Mansfield) Reformatory (1896-1989) Here’s an interesting place.

Built between 1896 and 1910, the Ohio State Reformatory served as a detention centre for young, petty criminals. The first inmates were admitted in 1896, and they helped construct the building. Several violent episodes occurred there, including the execution-style slaying of a superintendent and his family at the hands of two former inmates. One form of punishment at Mansfield Reformatory was to send prisoners to solitary confinement in “the hole”—a dark and claustrophobic room—for an indeterminate amount of time. The reformatory was closed in the late 1980s. The old superintendent’s office, where disembodied voices are heard, is widely believed to be haunted by the ghosts of Helen and Warden Glattke. In the basement, the ghost of a 14-year-old boy who was allegedly beaten to death has been reported. Visitors often experience strong feelings of dread, anger, and fear throughout the former reformatory.



Here’s another fascinating site:

18 Abandoned Psychiatric Hospitals, and Why They Were Left Behind

Explore the ghosts of mental-health history.






Insane Asylums of the West


v Texas State Lunatic Asylum (Austin State Hospital) (1856-Present) The oldest in the state of Texas.

v Terrell State Hospital, TX (1885-Present?)

Southwestern Insane Asylum/San Antonio State Hospital, (1892-Present)


v San Antonio Asylum, abandoned (1915-?)

The Bexar County Juvenile Home for Boys. The facility was built in 1915, as The Home for the Aged, also known as a “poor farm.” It replaced an older poor farm from the 1860s. A short time later, the property became the location for the juvenile home. The site was eventually abandoned, possibly due to asbestos.



v Cherokee Orphan Asylum, Oklahoma (1872-?)

v Ridge Home, Aravada Colorado (Denver) (1909-2005?) Demolished.


v Pueblo Insane Asylum (Colorado State Hospital), Colorado (1879- Present)



California


v L.A. County Poor Farm (Hollydale Mental Hospital) (1888-1980s) Also a WWII Army base.


v Camarillo State Mental Hospital (1936-1991)

v Metropolitan State Hospital, Norwalk (1916-Present) Marilyn Monroe’s mother was treated here.

v Patton State Hospital, San Bernadino (1893-?)



v San Francisco Foundling Asylum (1868-1948)

The names of the hundreds of children who passed through the doors of the San Francisco Foundling Asylum are mostly lost. Some never really had names; babies dropped at their door were often given arbitrary names by the staff.



The Orphan Trains of the Old West


The Orphan Train movement in the United States was an ambitious, sometimes controversial, social welfare effort to relocate orphaned, abandoned, or otherwise homeless children from crowded cities on the East Coast to foster homes in the rural Midwest. Between 1854 and 1929, some 250,000 children were transported to their new homes aboard special trains

  • The movement was created in 1853 by Protestant minister Charles Loring Brace, founder of the Children’s Aid Society of New York City.





Supposedly 250,000 orphans or more. 30,000 from NYC alone. What happened to all the parents?



Riders on an Orphan Train (David Massengill) Sung by Amy Speace.



By: Fred W. Lorch

American Literature, Vol. 7, No. 4 (Jan., 1936), pp. 453-455

Duke University Press



THE ORPHAN AMONG US: AN EXAMINATION OF ORPHANS IN NEWBERY AWARD WINNING LITERATURE by April A. Mattix B.A., Saint Francis University, 1997 M.I.A., University of Pittsburgh, 1999 M.A.T, Chatham University, 2003


From Folktales to Fiction: Orphan Characters in Children’s Literature MELANIEA. KIMBALL



Orphans in Literature


Oliver Twist, 1837, Charles Dickens

Les Miserables, 1862, Victor Hugo

The Prince and the Pauper, 1882, Mark (twin)Twain

Peter Pan in Kensington: The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, 1906, J. M. Barrie

Snow White and Rapunzel, 1812, The Brothers Grimm

Mowgli, 1893, Rudyard Kipling





Carriere, J. M. (1981). John and Mary, or the girl with the chopped off hands. In Iti good to lellyou: Frenchfolktalesfrom Missouri (pp. 133-138). Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Carrikre,J. M. (1981). John the bear. In It’sgood to te1lyou:Frenchfolktalesfiom Missouri (pp. 21-28). Columbia: University of Missouri Press


Carter, A. (1990). The market of the dead. In Old wives fairy tale book (pp. 16G169). New York



A Social Worker’s Perspective of Disney Characters





v State Hospital for the Insane, Stockton. (1863-1996)


v Sonoma State Home. (1891-2018)

Dating back to the late 1800s, the Sonoma State Hospital was California’s main institution for the “feebleminded." It was one of two homes for the "feebleminded" that served as counterparts to the state's eight psychiatric hospitals. Over the years, thousands of patients, sometimes for a few months and sometimes for decades, lived there. Patients’ ages ranged from​ newborn to 102,​ and the facility housed​ ​​women, men, and children. From the 1920s to the 1950s, while under the medical superintendence of Fred O. Butler, Sonoma implemented the most far-reaching eugenic sterilization program in the country, sterilizing more over 5,400 people, many against their wishes.





Totally Tartarian???














v Napa State Hospital, (1875-Present)

Once upon a time, a hospital castle was Napa Valley’s centerpiece


A sprawling 138 acre complex. The original castle was torn down after WWII.


Notable patients[edit]

· Edward Charles Allaway - Mass murderer[3]

· Eddie Machen - Boxer admitted for threatening suicide

· Earle Nelson - Serial killer

· Scott Harlan Thorpe - Spree killer[4]



v State Hospital for the Insane, Warm Springs Montana (1877-Present)

v Wyoming State Insane Asylum/State Hospital, Evansville, Wyoming (1887-Present)

v New Mexico Hospital for the Insane, Las Vegas NM (1889-Present)


v Sandia Ranch Sanitorium, Albuquerque, NM (early 1900s-?)

A local urban legend, now in ruins . . .



v Territorial Insane Asylum (Utah State Hospital), Provo. (1885-Present)


v Idaho Insane Asylum, Blackfoot (1886-Present)

It’s called the State Hospital South Cemetery, and nearly 1,000 men, women and children are buried here. It’s right next to the state-owned psychiatric hospital, which has been around for over 130 years.

“Most people don’t even know there is a cemetery here,” says Blackfoot South Clinical Supervisor Jim Sessions. “People oftentimes don’t want anything to do with things associated with mental illness because it’s just something that’s hard for them to deal with and understand.”


Let’s revisit Arizona.


Territorial Insane Asylum Caused Tension Between Cities

v The Arizona State Hospital, Phoenix (1886-1899)

“Pima County, Tucson in particular, wanted the insane asylum. It was what they called the plum of the legislature pie. It was a $100 thousand appropriation larger than the university or the teacher’s college,” Southard said.



v Western State Hospital (Old Western State Mental Hospital), Lakewood, WA (1871-Present)

v Northern State Hospital, Sedro-Woolley, WA (1913-1973)

As seen on Ghost Hunters.




v Oregon Hospital for the Insane, Portland, (1859-1863)

v Oregon State Hospital, Salem (1862-Present)


v Morningside Hospital, Portland, Oregon (1883-1968)



This is a fascinating story in itself, The Lost Alaskans.

The story of Morningside Hospital is a civil rights story. Prior to statehood, there were no services available in the Territory of Alaska for individuals who experienced mental illness or developmental disabilities. At the time, mental illness was considered a crime. Alaskan adults and children were arrested, convicted of being insane, and sent by the federal government to live at Morningside Hospital in Portland, Oregon. They were taken from their families and communities by dog sled, train and boat. In the end, at least 3,500 Alaskans were sent to Morningside between 1904 and the 1960s, when Morningside was finally closed. Many were never heard from by their families again. These are the Lost Alaskans.


· The story of Morningside Hospital is a civil rights story. Prior to statehood, there were no services available in the Territory of Alaska for individuals who experienced mental illness or developmental disabilities. At the time, mental illness was considered a crime. Alaskan adults and children were arrested, convicted of being insane, and sent by the federal government to live at Morningside Hospital in Portland, Oregon. They were taken from their families and communities by dog sled, train and boat. In the end, at least 3,500 Alaskans were sent to Morningside between 1904 and the 1960s, when Morningside was finally closed. Many were never heard from by their families again. These are the Lost Alaskans.

The Lost Alaskans: The Morningside Hospital History Project is an effort by volunteer researchers to document the history of Morningside through territorial court records, national and state archives, vital statistics, genealogical and burial records, and interviews. Our goals are to have the Morningside story recognized as an important part of Alaska history and to provide information to families still searching for loved ones who disappeared decades ago.



By Ellen | November 12, 2015

By Julie Stricker ( jstricker@newsminer.com) Jun 10, 2015

FAIRBANKS — Back in Alaska’s territorial days, it wasn’t uncommon for a gold miner to go berserk in a lonely, remote cabin. A woman on an isolated homestead might fall into severe, debilitating depression, becoming catatonic. The territory also had its share of violent, sometimes mentally ill residents. At the time, mental illness was considered a crime.




v O’ahu Insane Asylum (Territorial Hospital of Hawaii), Honolulu. (1866-Present)

In 1930 all patients were transferred to a new site in O’ahu.


v Colonial Mental Asylum, San Juan, PR (1854-?) Turned into a military complex under the Department of the Army.




21st Century Mental Asylums (from Psych Search)

Colin Taufer (September 2017)

The three largest mental institutions in America are the Los Angeles County Jail, Rikers Island Correctional Institution in New York City and Cook County Jail in Chicago, the latter being the largest in the United States. This fact may come as a surprise to many.

But to the men and women who work on the front lines of law enforcement and mental health care, this is the stark reality of the world they live in. They see first-hand the cycle of human destruction psychiatrists have created: Psychiatrists cast the mentally ill out onto the streets uncured. These former patients return to society with their senses numbed, their moral compasses shattered, and each one hooked on addictive and powerful mind-altering drugs. In this brain-addled state they run afoul of the law and find themselves in jail where psych drugs flow in (paid for by tax dollars) and profits to Big Pharma flow out.

Prisoners become captive psych drug consumers. In confinement and without effective care, their mental illnesses are further exacerbated while doses increase and Big Pharma’s profits rise.

And all the while sheriffs, prison wardens and compassionate advocates are left trying to make the best out of the rotten hand they’ve been dealt by the psychiatrist.

Recently PsychSearch reached out to specialists in these fields and asked them for their opinions and experiences on the incarceration of the mentally ill and the troubling consequences this has for society. The feedback we received was voluminous and overwhelmingly dire. All respondents, from sheriffs to corrections officers to mental health care defenders, painted the same picture of a flawed system destroying lives on a massive scale with a combination of dehumanizing confinement and debilitating psychiatric drugging.

Psychiatric drugs are the most common “treatment” for prisoners and jail inmates. Facilities across the country spend millions every year on psychotropic drugs to medicate (and tranquilize and numb) inmates. Just one example is Bexar County (San Antonio) where the sheriff laments they spend $2.2 million annually on psychotropic drugs to treat people with mental illnesses in their jail, nearly 60 percent whom have been arrested five times or more.

Peter Kehoe, Executive Director of the New York State Sheriff’s Association told PsychSearch:

“Obviously, closing the mental institutions did not result in a miraculous cure of the mentally ill. The mentally ill are still mentally ill, and for the most part have been dumped out into a setting where they are unable to cope. That leads to trouble with the law, and what are the police to do with them? The mentally ill end up in our jails and prisons, which do not have the ability to serve their mental health needs.”

That’s proof that psychiatrists have no cure.

When confronted with their lousy handiwork psychiatrists always whine that making it all better requires “more funding”.

Get real. Turn that spigot off.

Fake Science. Real Harm.

Colin Taufer




No inquiry into the world of insane asylums would be complete without a quick peek at Bedlam, in London England.


Bedlam, the film (1946.)


Bethlem Royal Hospital (1247-Present)

Number one on the list of notorious asylums is Bedlam. Bedlam, in London, was infamous for its cruelty and violence. It was back in the 16th century that Bedlam was first used to house what they then called “Mad Folk.” They could have been seriously schizophrenic or just have had some kind of physical deformity. In fact, anyone could be taken to Bedlam – including political prisoners. The hospital was notorious for it’s harsh treatments. The doctors believed that lunacy what caused by evil spirits. Their solution was essentially to torture the patient until the evil spirit would decide to leave them. They would attempt to beat it out of them, or shock it out of them with freezing cold water. Or have leeches suck it out of them. They also used rotational therapy. Invented by Charles Darwin’s grandfather, rotational therapy was when a patient was spun around on a suspended chair. The logic behind it was that vomiting was seen as therapeutic. Physical restraints were the building blocks of bedlam. It was more of a prison than a hospital. By far the most notorious aspect of Bedlam was the fact that it was open to the public. Ordinary people could pay a small fee to walk the halls of Bedlam. If they were to pay extra money they would be allowed to “poke the freaks with a stick” – and that’s a direct quote. A great deal of the asylums income came from them treating it as a bizarre Zoo for humans.hthttp://eskify.com/10-most-notorious-asylums-ever/tp://eskify.com/10-most-notorious-asylums-ever/

Too bizarre to be true? Probably not.




Here’s a documentary on modern-day care for the mentally ill, Bedlam.

As you can see, we’ve really come a long way.






















Of course, any investigation into the insane would be remiss if it missed this, painful as it is to watch.



To be continued, as always. . . .


In the meantime, here’s an appropriate musical interlude from the Beatles. https://youtu.be/wbxTlxuECJA





Eleanor Rigby . . . Where do they all come from? . . .



Thanks for your time and attention . . .








Addendum


Here’s an interesting place in Australia:

Mengele on Milson Island

AUSTRALIA’S ‘LUNATIC ASYLUM’ HORRORS: ‘IT WAS ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST IN REALITY’ Megan Palin, news.com.au, 6 December 2015.

IF the walls of the abandoned ‘lunatic asylum’ on Peat Island could speak they would tell of the horrors experienced by patients, including children, on a site plagued by death and despair. The eight-hectare island on the Hawkesbury River was established as an asylum for ‘inebriates’ in 1911 before it was reopened as a psychiatric hospital, just 50kms north of Sydney… Both media and government departments reported torture, multiple drownings and unexplained deaths of men and little boys. According to reports, ‘Ward 4’, was where the most brutal treatment took place. The mysterious deaths of child patients repeatedly made headlines over the years of the facility’s operation. Among them was the case of Robert Bruce Walker, 8, who was found floating off the island after he had been ‘put in the pen’, a caged compartment, as punishment, in 1940… In May 1950, 11-year-old Robert Blackwood was found asphyxiated in a linen bin made of iron after only five months at the institution… Many other unexplained deaths also took place on the island. At least 300 patients who died at the institution were buried in unmarked graves at the nearby Brooklyn Cemetery. 322 Reports of sexual and physical abuse, torture and a lack of thorough investigations also spilt out from under the closed doors of the site. One of the most shocking incidents made headlines across the country in 1983. ‘A retarded youth’s 10 fingernails were torn out while under temporary care in a psychiatric institution,’ the Daily Telegraph reported in 1983. ‘In a 39 page report the NSW deputy ombudsman Darryl Gunter, criticised the Health Department for not investigating the matter adequately. Mr Gunter’s report stems from complaints by the youth’s parents. They left their 17-year-old son at the Peat Island Hospital on the Hawkesbury River on January 10, 1981. When they collected him on January 28, he was without his fingernails. The parents rejected reports from doctors that a 12-year-old patient was responsible.’

Peat Island and its close neighbour, Milson Island, served as MK-ULTRA/ MK-NAOMI research facilities. Milson Island is larger and accessible by boat only. Both islands featured hospitals. The Milson Island hospital was used by the military during WWII, and it contained a system of hidden doors for nurses to hide from violent patients. Milson Island psychiatric residents were transferred to the Peat Island hospital in the early 1970s, just after MKULTRA was exposed in the USA and moved to Australia. Great secrecy surrounds Milson Island which was recently demolished and developed into a recreational camp for children. Milton Island hospital is the only remaining building, and it looks like the hospital I was taken to where I again encountered Mengele.




Item 6: Prisons of the 1800s

“The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.”

--Fyodor Dostoevsky

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky











Sugar House Prison, Salt Lake City, Utah

Sugar House Prison, previously the Utah Territorial Penitentiary, was a prison in the Sugar House neighborhood of Salt Lake City, Utah, United States. The 180-acre (73 ha) prison housed more than 400 inmates. It was closed in 1951 due to encroaching housing development, and all of its inmates were moved to the new Utah State Prison in Draper. The site is now occupied by Sugar House Park and Highland High School.[


Jon Levi

Jon Levi talks about Sugar House Prison






ROSE HEICHELBECH

Sing Sing was once the talk of the nation, featured in many old movies and novels. It was a notoriously harsh place to serve one’s time- for both men and women. The first structure of Sing Sing prison was completed in 1828 though male inmates who arrived before that date had to deal with a distinct lack of housing. And, for decades thereafter the rule at this facility was that the prisoners were to keep completely silent at all times on pain of punishment. Later systems of prison management were more humane, but for the better part of a century this was one of the toughest maximum security prisons in the U.S.

10 Historic and Famous Prisons


Alcatraz



History of United States prison systems



Escape from Alcatraz (1979)























Speaking of Alcatraz, The Rock (1996): Threatening to nuke S.F., again. Demonizing the disgruntled Vietnam Vet (Black Sunday, Taxi Driver, Rambo, Jacob’s Ladder, Dead Presidents, Thou Shalt Not Kill . . . Except, Billy Jack) who unwittingly discovers the government’s pandemic secrets, lies and deceptions.


Birdman of Alcatraz 1962


California prisons

Pelican Bay, Crescent City

Men’s Central Jail and Twin Towers, L.A.

Folsom State Prison

San Quentin State Prison


US Penitentiary, Fremont County, Colorado


Angola, Alcatraz of the South


An 8,000-acre plot of land between New Orleans, Louisiana and Natchez, Mississippi was purchased in 1880 by Confederate Major Samuel James. It was named Angola for the country of origin of the slaves that worked the land shaped by the Mississippi River. Once the existing prisons in New Orleans and Baton Rouge became old and overcrowded, Louisiana State Penitentiary was established.



Angola is the largest maximum-security prison in the United States[10] with 6,300 prisoners and 1,800 staff, including corrections officers, janitors, maintenance, and wardens. Due to these large numbers, it has been given the nickname "a gated community." Located in West Feliciana Parish, the prison is set between oxbow lakes on the east side of a bend of the Mississippi River, so it is surrounded on three sides by water. It lies less than two miles south of Louisiana's straight east-west border with Mississippi. The 18,000 acres (73 km2) of land the prison sits on was known before the American Civil War as the Angola Plantations and was owned by Isaac Franklin. The prison is located at the end of Louisiana Highway 66, around 22 miles (35 km) northwest of St. Francisville.


US Penitential Pollock, Grant Parish LA

Orleans Parish Prison


Holman Correctional Facility, Escambia County, Alabama



Kentucky State Penitentiary, the Castle on the Cumberland

July 2016 author Steve E. Asher published Hauntings of the Kentucky State Penitentiary, a book of accounts of paranormal activity at KSP.





Any subject they make this many films/shows about warrants investigating.


The Longest Yard (1974), another prison classic.














Oz (HBO) 1997-2003


Brawl in Cell Block 99 2017


Get the Gringo 2012

Bronson 2008


The Experiment 2001


Animal Factory 2000


Tonight's flight will be special, Con-Air 1997


Shawshank Redemption 1994


In the Name of the Father 1993


Malcolm X 1992


Bad Boys 1983


Midnight Express 1978


Papillon 1973.

Starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman


Cool Hand Luke 1967 Paul Newman


The Defiant Ones 1958


Jailhouse Rock 1957 Elvis Presley


Stalag 17 1953


La Grande Illusion 1937



The Bonus Army (post-WW1)

The Bonus Army was a group of 43,000 demonstrators – made up of 17,000 U.S. World War I veterans, together with their families and affiliated groups – who gathered in Washington, D.C. in mid-1932 to demand early cash redemption of their service certificates. Organizers called the demonstrators the "Bonus Expeditionary Force", to echo the name of World War I's American Expeditionary Forces, while the media referred to them as the "Bonus Army" or "Bonus Marchers". The demonstrators were led by Walter W. Waters, a former sergeant.

Many of the war veterans had been out of work since the beginning of the Great Depression. The World War Adjusted Compensation Act of 1924 had awarded them bonuses in the form of certificates they could not redeem until 1945. Each certificate, issued to a qualified veteran soldier, bore a face value equal to the soldier's promised payment with compound interest. The principal demand of the Bonus Army was the immediate cash payment of their certificates.

On July 28, U.S. Attorney General William D. Mitchell ordered the veterans removed from all government property. Washington police met with resistance, shot at the protestors, and two veterans were wounded and later died. President Herbert Hoover then ordered the U.S. Army to clear the marchers' campsite. Army Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur commanded a contingent of infantry and cavalry, supported by six tanks. The Bonus Army marchers with their wives and children were driven out, and their shelters and belongings burned.



Thank you for your service!







MK Ultra in the 1900s

Top Psychologist’s Personal History of MK-ULTRA: “The CIA-LSD Story in Retrospect”

SPOTLIGHT, 7 Mar 2016

24 Feb 2016 – The article below was written as a presentation by Professor Leo Goldberger at a conference, “Medical Science Without Compassion,” held in Cologne, West Germany, September 28-30, 1988. It is reprinted here with special permission of the author. It was first published along with other contributions from the conference in monograph form in 1991.

I am publishing Prof. Goldberger’s essay in full. The endnotes, typographical marks, and emphases are all from the original essay. Bracketed material represents editorial insertion. This is a long essay. For readability sake online, I have broken up some of the longer paragraphs. In addition, I have added some subheads, both to make the article easier to read, and to help orient the reader in finding content. I have tried to keep the subhead titles empty of editorial comment.

An actual PDF of the original essay is available at this link, or see embedded document below.

There has been a dearth of historical work done on the actual work of psychologists and other behavioral scientists on the various CIA mind control and interrogation programs. To this day, there is no academic examination of the full extent of the MK-ULTRA and similar CIA programs, even though much of the relevant material was released years ago. The failure of both the academic world, and civil society in general, to deal with the crimes undertaken by the CIA and Pentagon in relation to these types of programs led directly to the use of experimental torture programs by the U.S. government after 9/11.

In particular, it is very rare that a participant scientist would speak out on his participation, witting, or as in Prof. Goldberger’s case, unwitting, in the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program. I am posting this material here as a public service, and with the aim of encouraging others to step forward and contribute what they experienced. At another time, I will attempt a critical review of Prof. Goldberger’s work. I am very grateful to him for having the courage to step forward and talk about what he experienced.

For those looking for a view from the other side, so to speak, see my review of Karen Wetmore’s book, Surviving Evil – CIA Mind Control Experiments in Vermont, written from the standpoint of an MK-ULTRA experimental subject; or see her guest post written for this blog, “Fifty Years of Secrecy: Investigating CIA Mind Control Experiments in Vermont” (April 2015).

Professor Goldberger wrote to me last year to amplify his feelings about his contributions to CIA research during the Cold War.

“In retrospect, I still find it abhorrent that so many others and I were unwittingly hoodwinked to engage in research at the behest of the CIA and that our findings were often so blatantly extrapolated and used to further unethical aims. Unlike the basic requirement for obtaining “informed consent” (in accord with the Nuremberg Code of medical and research ethics) established back in 1947, we as the research investigators were not given the respect and trust to be fully informed and asked for our consent.

“Those dark years were truly a shameful chapter in American history!”

****************************************

The CIA-LSD Story in Retrospect

by Leo Goldberger [Professor Emeritus, Psychology, New York University] It is not a pretty story, but then the very mention of the CIA conjures up nasty business – concerns far removed from the Ivory Tower of Science. Yet, as we know only too well, the world of science does intermesh with the world of affairs, politics and power, and more often than not these worlds may collide in terms of their implicit and all too frequently unexamined assumptions and value systems. This was obviously the case in the USA when, during the 1950s and 1960s, some major breaches in the conduct of human experimentation occurred.

These breaches were not limited to the administration of LSD and other psychoactive or unproven drugs to unsuspecting persons (soldiers, college students, and psychiatric patients) as guinea pigs, but involved a long list of other macabre interventions, such as radiation, harassment substances, and paramilitary devices and materials. In some experiments, certain drastic forms of sensory deprivation and immobilizing drugs, such as curare and Sernyl, were also used.

In other experiments, sensory deprivation was combined with so-called “psychic driving” techniques, the brainchild of Dr. Ewen Cameron, a prominent psychiatrist of his day, in which psychiatric patients were exposed to the intensive repetition (16 hr. a day for six to seven days or more) of prearranged verbal signals while receiving intensive electric shocks. Rather risky undertakings, based on harebrained, pseudo-scientific ideas and most certainly a clear breach of ethics. The use of various modes of indirect personality assessment procedures and invasive techniques was also highly questionable. Mercifully, some techniques, such as neurosurgery (for the purpose of exploring the pain center), were apparently ruled out as too dangerous.1

The guilty parties, who entered into a Faustian-like pact with the CIA, compromising their scientific credo, belonged to several distinct categories, categories that became less and less distinct with time. There were, first of all, the so-called CIA Technical Staff, scientists among them, which in the case of the behavioral sciences (a term I shall use to include a variety of disciplines in the life sciences as well as the social sciences and mental health fields) was very limited in number.

In fact, the person who quickly rose to become the head of the CIA’s Mind Control unit, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, a protégé of the CIA Director himself, Richard Helms, was a pharmacologist with a biochemistry doctorate who had served in the Technical Service Division’s chemical wing, working with germs and other unspeakable weaponry. But Dr. Gottlieb soon found a cadre of willing psychologists and psychiatrists as fully committed hired hands or, in some instances, as consultants, on call when the need arose. It was principally this more limited group that crossed the usually untraversed chasm between the CIA’s Technical Division and the Operational Division, the latter being the division whose agents are responsible for field operations, those who actually do the dirty work.2

The second category consisted of a sizable number of scientists, many of whom were, or at least claim to have been, blissfully unaware of their connection to the CIA. (One ought to note, for what it’s worth, that according to the CIA, one-fourth of the American scientists who were approached by the CIA agreed to work for it!)3 They were the recipients of grants from a few private medical research foundations, three or four in all, that served as secret conduits for research funding, by and large of the pure science variety, but research that held immediate or potential interest for the CIA.

Some scientists received grants for work that clearly had little if any CIA relevance; however, their projects and publications, which typically acknowledged the foundation grant, served as a cover. Their names added luster to the CIA front foundation, making the foundation’s work seem legitimate. This was so in the case of Carl Rogers, for example, the well-known founder of client-centered therapy; B.F. Skinner and Hans Eysenck, world renowned psychologists, are other examples.

Other scientists clearly knew whence the funding derived and, indeed, were in direct communication with CIA agents or became regular consultants. A few of them served as pipelines of information for the CIA. They kept the CIA posted on what was happening in the laboratories, journals, and scientific meetings that might be of potential interest. A sort of science spy network, as it were – all very, very secret, as “national security” was presumably at stake as well as the reputation of the CIA-associated scientists.

But I am getting ahead of my story. I ought first to indicate my own interest and role in this sordid business. I shall briefly describe how I fit in, while moving the more relevant story along. I was a graduate student in psychology at McGill University (Montreal, Canada) in 1952, when I was solicited to serve as a subject in an experiment which was to pay $1/hr and which required that I set aside several days. In need of money and with a virtuous impulse to help a fellow graduate student complete his dissertation research, I agreed.

The experiment, as I learned several years later, was the first of many – generically known as sensory deprivation. I was isolated in a small sound-proofed room and requested to lie as motionless as possible, in a supine position, wearing translucent goggles. No activity, no sensory stimulation except for an occasional test procedure over an intercom system to evaluate my mental functions. This went on, in my case, for 24 hours.

As I recall, it was a rather boring experience, broken by sleep and stretches of fantasy-filled reveries, but not an especially dramatic, stressful, or debilitating one. Though I had given my “informed consent,” I was not given much in the way of a satisfactory “debriefing.” I was only given a rather general rationale for the study – certain hypotheses concerning the relationship of the sensory system and cortical functioning were being tested – but certainly not told the whole truth, which as I was to learn later, was the exploration of so-called brainwashing techniques. The study was in fact a piece of contract work for the Canadian Department of Defense and was highly classified.4

The Human Ecology Program

In 1954, still a graduate student but now in New York, I was employed as a research psychologist at Cornell Medical Center – New York Hospital, within a unit named the “Human Ecology Program,” nominally housed in the neurology department and headed by a most eminent professor of neurology, Dr. Harold G. Wolff, known for his pioneering work on headaches, pain, and psychosomatic disorders. (Dr. Wolff had served as editor-in-chief of the AMA’s Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry and, in 1960, became president of the American Neurological Association.)

My assignment was to participate in an interdisciplinary project studying the adaptation of 100 Chinese men and women to life in America. They represented a group of Chinese who had come to the USA on a temporary basis to pursue postgraduate work in a variety of fields. In consequence of the Communist take-over, our government decided to block the return of these men and women, most of whom were thus stranded in the USA without their families and faced with an uncertain future. I and the rest of the staff were investigating this “experiment in nature” – the stress of geographic dislocation and its adaptational consequences – in order to determine the “ecological aspects of disease,” in Dr. Wolff’s original phrasing. My role on the interdisciplinary team was to assess the Chinese by a fairly standard battery of personality and intelligence tests. The anthropologist and the sociologist interviewed them about cultural and kinship issues, while a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst plied their special types of probing questions. In return for their participation in our project, the Chinese received a complete physical – free of charge – something they very much appreciated. They were also motivated intrinsically by a desire to tell us about China and Chinese culture, in not about their own interrupted lives.

Little did I know then that my work with the Chinese had been designed by others for an entirely different end. Only in 1977, more than twenty years later, upon receiving a call from an investigative reporter who wished to interview me about my involvement with the Human Ecology Program, did I learn the truth. To my shocked surprise, I found out that the program I had been a part of had been totally financed by the CIA. The real aim of the Chinese project – and the reason for its generous funding, I now learned – was to ferret out potential agents for future assignments in China. (Incidentally, the Chinese project was duly replicated, using Hungarian Freedom Fighters of 1956, this time with the surreptitious aim of studying the characteristics of “defectors.”)

Subsequently it was revealed that only Dr. Wolff, and perhaps one or two of his staff and others high up in the university and hospital administration, knew of the behind-the-scenes role of the CIA. It seems that Dr. Wolff was a personal friend of Allan Dulles, then CIA Director. The lure of continuous, large-scale funding, which could be diverted to a variety of other and more traditional research projects under Dr. Wolff’s direction, must have been very attractive to this totally science-absorbed, emotionally detached, and ascetic workaholic. Of course, patriotic sentiment undoubtedly played a significant role given the temper of the times.

In 1955, in response to Wolff’s enthusiastic and grand vision of the “synergistic partnership between science and the CIA,” the Agency enlarged the CIA-funded study program into a research foundation (the money presumably coming from rich private donors and former patients, but actually from the CIA) which became known as the “Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology,” with Wolff as president. Through this CIA-controlled funding mechanism, Wolff extended his and his staff’s efforts on behalf of the Agency, efforts which now went far beyond Cornell. Wolff was expansive in his scientific dream, to say the least. For instance, he wrote the CIA that once he had figured out “how the human mind really worked,” he would tell the Agency “how a man be made to think, feel and behave according to the wishes of other men, and conversely, how a man can avoid being influenced in this manner.”5

In retrospect, there were several peculiar events during my two years with the Human Ecology Program that ought to have aroused my suspicion that things were not what they seemed. The first was an intense interest Dr. Wolff showed in my experience as a subject at McGill, something I had only casually mentioned once. He wanted every detail, and eventually he urged me to duplicate the experimental set-up at the hospital, using the more drastic stimulus reduction technique provided by water immersion. This was a technique developed by John Lilly, whose frontier brain research at NIH was of intense CIA interest, but who apparently had refused their approaches because he found secrecy inimical to the scientific process. Little did I know that Dr. Wolff’s desire to grill me about my sensory deprivation experience was triggered by his preoccupation with brainwashing techniques, of interest to the CIA, for whom he was preparing a comprehensive report.6

The Notion of “Brainwashing”

It was the notion of “brainwashing” that, in Marks’ phrase, helped Americans “pull together a lot of unsettling evidence into one sharp fear” and served as the starting point for the CIA’s involvement with the behavioral sciences.7 In the early 1950s, rumors were flying about various exotic, mysterious techniques (dubbed “brainwashing” in a 1950 Miami News article planted by Edward Hunter, a CIA agent with a journalist cover) supposedly practiced by the Russians, the Chinese, and the Koreans to extract confessions for public show trials. Just conjure up the picture of the bizarre public confession of Cardinal Mindszenty in 1949, who appeared zombie-like, as if drugged. The USA was in the midst of cold-war hysteria and propaganda battles were being fought around the globe. Anti-communism was at its highest pitch, and so was McCarthyism. No wonder the CIA was on the alert, trying to assess what was happening. They were trying to determine exactly how the Russians, Chinese, and Koreans interrogated their prisoners, how they extracted confessions. Were they using drugs, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, subliminal or extrasensory communication, stress techniques or some sort? If so, “our side” had to know for defensive and, ultimately, for offensive purposes.

This laid the seed for the CIA’s Mind Control program which, for Richard Helms, was actually a continuation of his earlier OSS work during WW2, in which drugs such as marijuana, and psychological ploys, had also played a role. In fact, several of the initial staff recruited for this CIA unit were former OSS staff members experienced in the derring-do of clandestine work and its science-fiction-like, imaginative, and sometimes lurid escapades.

The CIA’s Mind Control program, known at various points in the 1950s and 1960s by the cryptonyms BLUEBIRD, ARTICHOKE, MIDNIGHT CLIMAX, MK-ULTRA, MK-DELTA, among several others, eventually funded 185 non-governmental scientists at 86 institutions, some of the most prestigious universities and hospitals in the USA, at about $25 million. Its arena of interest, which began with the search for a truth drug or hypnotic method as an aid in interrogating enemy agents, broadened by leaps and bounds once “brainwashing” had become a focal concern. In a 1953 document, for example, Dr. Gottleib listed subjects he expected one contracting scientist to investigate with the $85,000 the Agency was paying him. Dr. Gottlieb wanted “… operationally pertinent materials along the following lines:

a. Disturbance of memory b. Discrediting by abhorrent behavior c. Alteration of sex patterns d. Eliciting of information e. Suggestibility f. Creation of dependence.”

A tall order to say the least.

A second potential clue that the Human Ecology Program was involved in some extraneous business was a meeting I attended in 1955, along with some 30 psychologists and psychiatrists, most of them quite prominent in their field. They were all recipients of some past or current grant money from the Society For Human Ecology for their research. The meeting was called to order by one of the administrators of the society (a psychologist and retired major-general), who alerted us to the confidential nature of the topics to be discussed and said that we were free to leave at any time if the matter held no interest for us.

In my own case, I left fairly early upon hearing the gist of the task at hand: we were asked to help prepare a manual on the interpretation of non-verbal behavior (signs, cues, gestures, etc.) for use by CIA agents in debriefing American visitors to the USSR (who might have met various high-ranking officials about whom valuable intelligence regarding health/illness status, personality, and attitudes could be generated indirectly). I left because I had no stomach for the preoccupation with the East-West conflict nor for clandestine work. But I also thought it was a foolish and unrealistic undertaking: what could we as psychologists validly and usefully deduce about another person by second-hand reports of external behavior? Better ask Gypsy palm readers, hypnotists, car salesmen, or their ilk – they are, I suspect, far better commonsense psychologists, superior “menschenkenner,” than the professionals in the behavior science field.

When in 1977 the New York Times carried a series of headline stories exposing the details of the CIA’s secret Mind Control program, I was not at all surprised to read that the CIA had, indeed, pumped headwaiters, fortune-tellers, prostitutes, hustlers, con artists, psychics, hypnotists, and others for their collective wisdom on how to assess and manipulate people. A magician apparently was also on the CIA payroll for the purpose of teaching agents how to slip LSD surreptitiously into someone’s drink at a party.8

“Unwitting CIA guinea pigs”

Administering LSD without informed consent was among the worst offenses perpetrated by the CIA-connected scientists – psychiatrists and psychologists among them. The CIA’s technical staff (that is, those scientists who worked for the CIA) certainly knew enough from the published LSD research to know that the variables of experimental set and setting play a major role in mediating the effects. They knew it was possible to predict the general effects of a certain dosage level for a given type of person under given laboratory conditions, but what about natural, field conditions? This had never been systematically investigated under prevailing standards of professional ethics. Nevertheless, the CIA scientists went ahead. They felt it was a sufficiently important question in light of national security considerations.

According to some accounts, as many as 50 people, including CIA agents themselves, several foreign agents, soldiers, and people deliberately picked up in bars and brought to a “safe house” by prostitutes, were given LSD or other hallucinogenic drugs without their knowledge, serving as unwitting CIA guinea pigs.9 Though the records of these surreptitious experiments were ordered destroyed by Richard Helms in 1973 – on the eve of the first Senate investigation – we do know that there were at least two suicides as a direct result of the mind distorting drug experience. A lawsuit by the family in connection with one of them is still pending [in 1991] as are at last four other lawsuits by former soldiers.10

One particularly gruesome experimental run was conducted by the research director at the Federal Drug Facility in Lexington, Kentucky, Dr. Harris Isbell. Here inmates were rewarded with either the drug of their choice – usually cocaine or heroin – or early release if they volunteered. He personally administered LSD in increasing dosages to seven men for some 70 days to test tolerance levels! He has never permitted any interviews.11 Incidentally, the pivotal figure in the CIA, Dr. Gottlieb, not only has refused any interviews, but, after the initial press attention and his resignation in 1973, he fled, living abroad for several years. He eventually returned in 1977 to testify in closed chamber before the Senates [sic] Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research, having been granted immunity from criminal prosecution.12

According to his colleagues, Gottlieb is a “tinkerer… he likes to fiddle with things…. He has never made a decision on his own… not a guy who would make waves with authority…. He has a singular talent, much needed within the CIA, the ability to take a complicated scientific problem and explain it in terms that his non-scientific superiors could understand.”13 It was obviously this talent that his patron, Richard Helms, a non-scientist, valued. One might also infer that it was Richard Helms, the boss, who gave the orders and Gottlieb, the tinkerer, who carried them out. As a tinkerer, in the tradition of the technician, he focused more on means than on ends. This same quality of “tinkering” was true also of the CIA’s chief psychologist, with whom I became personally familiar when he worked under cover on the Chinese project at Cornell.

What were the after-effects, if any, in the more than 1000 college students, prisoners, mental patients, and army personnel who were subjected to LSD or similar drugs under a variety of conditions, with varying degrees of informed consent or explanation of potential risk factors? We simply do not know. The army, which along with other military services conducted its own as well as CIA-inspired research on LSD, was instructed by congress to do a follow-up.14 The results have, to my knowledge, not become public yet.

Much of the published work on such topics as LSD or sensory deprivation was carried out under quite legitimate auspices, governmental and otherwise. Not everything in these areas of research was tainted by CIA moneys. In my own case, soon after leaving Cornell’s Human Ecology Program I conducted a series of 8-hour sensory deprivation studies at NYU’s Research Center for Mental Health that I believe were quite benign. The subjects were carefully pre-screened volunteers, college students, air force pilots, and unemployed actors, who were, of course, told they could terminate the experiment at any point if they so wished and that they would receive a full account of the purpose of the experiment and its results. Our research was of purely theoretical interest to us, exploring individual differences in response to perceptual and social isolation within a psychoanalytic perspective. The US Air Force, which funded some of the research, saw in it a useful space-flight analogue and used our findings as part of their over-all effort in selecting the initial batch of astronauts for the Mercury space program.15

Under a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health, we also did some basic work on individual differences in LSD effects as a function of personality dispositions. Again, we followed strict ethical guidelines, obtained informed consent, explained the risks, and had the necessary medical remedies (i.e., Thorazine) in the event a subject wanted to terminate the LSD effects quickly. Also, I should make it clear that we used a minimal dose – 100 micrograms. Like other researchers we were intrigued by the notion of a model, reversible psychosis, and thought we might learn something about the structure of abnormal thought processes.16

What motivated the scientists?

In considering the total body of classified research conducted by or for the CIA that had as its overriding aim the control and manipulation of behavior, two questions suggest themselves: what motivated the scientists to work covertly on questionable projects; and what, in the end, was the yield in knowledge of these studies?

To do full justice to the first question would, of course, require fairly intimate familiarity with the personalities of these scientists, and their motivational underpinnings, conscious as well as unconscious. A difficult task at best, especially as most of them have refused even an interview. Only one, to my knowledge, has acknowledged (in a legal deposition 26 years later) that what had done in his capacity as a CIA psychologist “was a foolish mistake. We shouldn’t have done it… I’m sorry we did it because it turned out to be a terrible mistake.”17

Were they men bent on evil? Decidedly no, in my view. Though we have no calculus of evil, my contention is that they were not deliberately out to cause harm or destruction, nor did they seem especially sadistic according to the available evidence. They certainly cannot readily be compared with those who participated in the unparalleled cruelty of the concentration camp experiments. They did not view their subjects as subhuman, as intrinsically inferior, or as persons whose lives were “unworthy of life.” When things went wrong, in the case of the first suicide in 1953, it was clearly an accident and was viewed as such. They lied, they deceived, they caused psychological harm, they violated basic interpersonal trust and affronted human dignity, but commit deliberate murder or other unspeakable physical injury – no.

Some were earnest, boy-scout-like patriots who consented to do something they knew was unethical because they were persuaded it would further national security. Or they were in it for the perverse thrill or excitement that, for some people, goes hand-in-hand with covert activity. Others, such as Dr. Wolff, Dr. Cameron, and Dr. Isbell were caught up in the world of scientific abstraction and professional career goals, having lost touch with day-to-day human encounters and emotions. For many scientists, including those in the behavioral fields, a process of “dehumanization” becomes almost inevitable: subjects become data points, adding to the sample size; detachment and perhaps even arrogance holds sway, certainly a lack of emphatic sensitivity.

Parenthetically, I might note that recently the normative paradigm of scientific inquiry, positivism, has come up for an increasing critical attack, especially by feminist philosophers of science, for example Sandra Harding, Genevieve Lloyd, and Evelyn Fox Keller. They argue that positivism, in its emphasis on control, manipulation, dispassionate objectivity, and decontextual analysis, promotes an illusion of distance or separation between the knower and the known. A process of dehumanization, in this view, is a by-product of strict adherence to dispassionate scientific method.18

The CIA-backed scientists undoubtedly were aware of the Nuremberg Code of 1947, which stipulates that medical research should be intended to improve the lot of mankind and should be conducted only on persons who consented after being informed of the nature and risks of the experiment. Although this code was adopted by the USA in 1953, the finer points of that code was yet to be fully disseminated and debated in governmental, academic, and research circles, and had in any case not filtered down from the purely medical realm to the socio-behavioral. Unlike the situation at the present time, characterized by strict federal and institutional regulations and in-house ethics boards, in general there were insufficient formal controls and consciousness-raising among scientists about ethical issues in all their manifold and complex ramifications. The basic issue requiring constant attention from all of us is, of course, the age-old question: when may a society, actively or by acquiescence, expose some of its member to harm in order to seek benefits for them, for others, or for society as a whole?19

What was learned

As for the second question I posed above: What, indeed, was learned from these experiments? Was the yield worth the cost? According to the CIA’s own verdict, very little, if anything, was learned that was of operational value. Whether marijuana, sodium pentathol, LSD, mescaline, alcohol, sensory deprivation, hypnosis, or stress – singly or in combination – the behavioral findings were found unstable, unreliable, and unpredictable in their specific manifestation. In a way this is, as Marks points out, the saving grace of the behavioral scientist. In this connection, Marks cites an apt piece of irony, voiced by Dr. Martin Orne, a long-time CIA consultant and a psychiatrist specializing in hypnoses research: “We are sufficiently ineffective so that our findings can be published.”

In my view, behavioral scientists fail miserably as Svengalians and should forever ban power (prediction and control) as their underlying philosophy of science goal. The goal of understanding ought to suffice, even if it does not carry with it the prestige of the natural sciences. There is today an increasing recognition of the bankrupt status of large segments of psychological and behavioral research, especially research conceptualized and conducted in the positivist tradition. It is clearly a tradition that has fostered a view of human subjects in experiments as external objects towards whom something is done; the subject is placed in a vulnerable and disempowered position, rather than as a partner in the joint pursuit of knowledge, in a truly transactional, essentially social process. If the debacle of the CIA-inspired research has led to the recognition of these and other philosophically-based issues, it will have served some value.20

When the American public was informed of the CIA’s behavioral science program, first by the media through persistent and courageous investigative reporting, then by various senate committee hearings, a loud outcry of outrage ensued, a sign that Americans have a healthy revulsion against being pushed around and controlled, especially by sneaks. Heads rolled at the CIA. Helms was fired. Gottlieb resigned and disappeared. Wholesale shredding of documents and attempts at cover-ups took place, with the names of the undercover scientists among the first to disappear – they had been promised anonymity! God only knows what was in those documents in addition to the revelation found in the 16,000 (albeit heavily censored) pages released under the Freedom of Information Act to investigative reporters. I experienced my own special outrage because I had unwittingly worked for them (on the Chinese project). My informed consent had not even been requested. An ironic twist for a psychologist, indeed.

Among the many colorful headlines and editorials in the New York Times that neatly summed up the American feeling was the one that simply stated: “Control the CIA, Not Behavior.”21 One can only hope that the centralized administration that was instituted subsequently within the CIA, and the tightening of Congress’s monitoring function of covert activities, as well as tighter rules adopted by many universities and research centers vis-à-vis classified research and human experimentation in general, will prevent any repetition of this sort of glaring infraction of human rights.

Finally, it is my fervent hope that researchers, whether in the natural or behavioral sciences, no longer concern themselves solely with the advancing [sic] their science. In their single-minded preoccupation with science, pure or applied, they tend to deny or, at least, underestimate the place of ends, goals, and values in their relationship to science. In this regard, I can only echo a point made by Carl Rogers in 1956 in his debate with Skinner on “the control of human behavior,” when he warned that without careful scrutiny of the ends, goals, and values that lie outside our particular scientific endeavors, we are all much more likely to serve whatever individual or group has the power.22

NOTES AND REFERENCES:

1. The best single background source for the CIA’s Mind Control program, its personnel and funding fronts is J. Marks, The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate” (New York: New York Times Books, 1979). Except where I rely on my own knowledge or cite other sources, I have relied heavily on Marks’ carefully documented book in preparing the present paper. John Marks, whose investigative work played a singular role in exposing the story, was affiliated with the Washington-based Center for National Security Studies, funded by the Civil Liberties Union and served as a watchdog group of the actions of American secret agencies. For a detailed close-up of Dr. Ewen Cameron, the man, his research, and a chilling portrait of the misuse of medical power and its victims, see Anne Collins, In the Sleep Room: The Story of the CIA Brainwashing Experiments in Canada (Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1988). See also A. Weinstein, A Father, a Son and the CIA (Toronto: James Lorimer & Co., 1988).

2. New York Times, 20 September 1977.

3. Szulc, “The CIA’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” Psychology Today, November 1977, p. 94.

4. Collins, op.cit., pp. 248-249.

5. New York Times, 2 August 1977; See also Marks, op. cit.

6. G. Wolff, & L. Hinkle, “Communist Interrogation and Indoctrination of ‘Enemies of the State,’” Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, 76:115-74, 1956. This is the published version of the report.

7. New York Times, 2 August 1977.

8.New York Times, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 14, 25, 27 August 1977; 3, 7, 21 September; 7, 9, 19 September 1977.

9. New York Times, 20 & 21 September 1977.

10. New York Times, 27 August 1977; 7 October 1977.

11. New York Times, 11 August 1977.

12. New York Times, 7 September 1977.

13. New York Times, 20 September 1977.

14. New York Times, 19 October 1977.

15. Goldberger, “Experimental isolation: An overview,” American Journal of Psychiatry 122: 774-782, 1966

16. L. Barr, R.J. Langs, L. Goldberger, R.R. Holt, & G.S. Klein, LSD: Personality and Experience (New York: Wiley Interscience, 1972). Our book gives a full account of the research protocol, nothing classified and nothing withheld, unlike the publications that came out of the CIA-tainted research.

17. Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta. Washington Post, 27 October 1985.

18. Harding and M. Hintikka, (eds.) Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspective on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and the Philosophy of Science (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1983z); G. Lloyd, The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); E.F. Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1985).

19. Katz, Experimentation with Human Beings (New York: Russel Sage Foundation, 1972).

20. G. Morawski, The Rise of Experimentation in American Psychology (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1988).

21. New York Times, Editorial, 5 August 1977.

22. Rogers, and B.F. Skinner, “Some issues concerning the control of human behavior: a symposium,” Science 124: 1057-1066, 1956.

_________________________________________

Valtin – I am a psychologist, living in Northern California. Over the years, I have written about torture, national security, civil rights and other topics. Most of my stories, including major investigatory pieces, some co-written with Jason Leopold, have been published at Firedoglake, Truthout, and The Public Record. A full backlog of my pre-Invictus writing, going back to May 2005, can be found at my Daily Kos page. E-mail me at sfpsych at gmail dot com.

Leo Goldberger is professor emeritus of psychology at New York University, as well as a former director of NYU’s Research Center for Mental Health. He has written many papers over the years, on personality, stress, LSD, and sensory deprivation. He was the editor-in-chief of the journal Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought. He wrote the book, The Rescue of the Danish Jews: Moral Courage Under Stress (New York University Press, 1987), and was co-author of LSD: Personality and Experience (New York: Wiley Interscience, 1972).

Originally published in Roland, Friedlander, Müller-Hill (Eds.), Medical Science Without Compassion: Past and Present, Proceedings of the Hamburger für Sozialgeschichte des 20. Jarhundert, 1991. Republished here by permission of the author. Copyright belongs to Mr. Goldberger.







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