The Kings Park Psychiatric Center is an abandon mental hospital that is located in Long
Island. The Hospital was built in 1885. The Hospital constituted of 150 different buildings. When the hospital was built it was basically its own little village. It was a community that did farming, build their own property and even had railroads to get to the location. The way the hospital was built was to keep people busy and created this community like environment as part of mental health therapy. This location is significant because the hospital was once one of the biggest mental hospitals in the United States and at one point housed over nine thousand patients. During this time mental health was dealt with differently in the United States and researching how this hospital treated thousands of patients and how the decline of the hospital led to it’s closing in 1970, is important to understand its history.
The colony that was built was part of the therapy in the hospital. Patients took care of the field and grew their own food. For the hospital this was the best type of therapy the patients could receive, before actual medicine was available. With NYC being busy and over crowed all the time, doctors thought it was a great therapy to have patients leave the busy and stressful city and approach life differently at the colony. The patients will receive fresh air and open space. This method of treatment was so popular the hospital got very overcrowded. Kings Park mental hospital was so over crowed that according to the state report in 1893” the buildings were unsuitable and unhienic, facilities inadequate, clothing insufficient and poor quality, food often unit for human consumption.
Another type of therapy used during this era and in the hospital to treat mentally ill patients was shock therapy. Shock therapy was often conducted on epileptic patients dealing with depression and after seeing a successful improvement after the seizure the therapy was used very often. According to the article “ Kings Park, Building 93” By Will Ellis “ The procedure aimed to replicate these benefits by inducing a seizure through electricity or insulin injection”. According to the same article the pain patients went through during these procedures was terrible, sometimes the convulse for up to fifteen minutes and by being strapped to a bed they often forced to fracture or break bones.
Lobotomy was another treatment that was used during this time. Lobotomy was probably one of the most crucial was to treat a patient dealing with mental illness. According the article “ Kings Park, Building 93” by Will Ellis The procedure consisted of “ interesting a metal tool through the eye socket into the skull cavity, and wrenched around to sever the connections of the pre-frontal cortex from the rest of the brain”. This procedure left patients like zombies and sometimes patients forget whom they were. After watching a documentary about a former patient named Lucy Winer, you could see how terrified she sounds just speaking about the hospital. In the documentary she states that her stay was “ harrowing and terrifying”.
Thousands of patients were mistreated in the hospital and unfortunately due to the lack of how to treat mental ill patients these treatments were conducted with no choice. The hospital continued to grow. A 13-story building was even built (still stands today) known as building number 93. By the 1950s the complex consisted of more than 100 buildings, among these buildings there was fire stations recreational facilities and even power plants. A lot of the patients that were emitted to the hospital were not even sick. According to Luck Winer’s documentary, many patients were emitted because they were homeless or immigrants. She states that the hospital was similar to a prison.
By 1970 the hospital was not doing to good. The population declined. A big part of the decline in the population was how the medical community found treatments that included medication and could be treated at home. Other treatments eventually grew popular like holistic treatments. A lot of the patients in Kings Park were relocated and moved to other hospitals or group homes. The hospitals poor planning a lack of good administration led to its official closing. Today the remains of the hospital remain. Many of the building have been torn down but a few stand like building number 93. This massive location is just a few minutes away from the city and it is amazing to understand how much history took place in this location and the different life style that was lived just a few minutes away from the busy city.
