Northern Ohio Lunatic Asylum

Hawthornden State Hospital

A couple of years ago I wrote a blog entry about my first visit to a state run psychiatric facility. It was a harrowing experience that continues to influence my work as a psychologist in complex ways.

Recently someone left a comment on my original blog post. Shuko raised some interesting questions that I want to answer in more detail. That will have to wait for a future blog post since I've managed to get distracted (imagine that!). While you are waiting, check out Shuko's blog here. She has a great way of exploring the history around us in both images and words.

I visited Western Reserve Psychiatric Hospital every two weeks when I was a 23 year old case manager. The hospital has gone by several different names including Hawthornden State Hospital, Western Reserve Psychiatric Habilitation Center, and currently operates under the name Northcoast Behavioral Healthcare.

That's a whole lot of names. What surprises me is that there isn't a lot of information available on the internet about this hospital. It's especially surprising that the hospital hasn't been subject to any significant historical research. It seems that one of the precursors to Northcoast Behavioral Health Care found its way into a national magazine. The article was called Bedlam, 1946 and discussed the Northern Ohio Lunatic Asylum. We'll explore the Bedlam of Cleveland in a minute.

Here is an aerial view of Northcoast Behavioral Health (aka Hawthronden, aka Western Reserve Psychiatric Center) as it looks now.

Google Maps

Let's go back in time. The Ohio Department of Mental Health makes a single reference to the Hawthornden State Hospital. They write:

Hawthornden State Hospital, later known as Western Reserve Psychiatric Habilitation Center, operated as a farm for Cleveland State Hospital from 1922 until 1938. It was established as a separate facility in 1941. 

That's not a lot of information. The blurb however gives me an important clue. The property got its start as a farm for the Cleveland State Hospital. This means our first stop in exploring the history is a field trip.

Fenn College field trip, Special Collections, Cleveland State University Library 

It just so happens that in researching the Cleveland State Hospital, the first image I came across was an abnormal psychology class taking a field trip in 1946. Look at those eager young faces peering into a model of the brain and marveling at it's structure--and perhaps wondering what separated them from the patients in the asylum. Do you think as part of their field trip that they got to meet actual patients? I wonder what these young students thought about as they encountered those who were removed from society and kept for treatment in an asylum.

I also wonder if any of them were aware of the abuses that were going on at the hospital they were visiting. This class visited the same year that Life magazine published the article Bedlam, 1946. Look at the pictures in the article. The broken and abused people being "cared" for by the hospital in 1946 are far removed from the fresh faced college students pictured above.

I need to digress for a moment.

Looking at these students reminds me of a movie that I had watched around the same time I was making my visits to the Western Reserve Psychiatric Hospital. I had several friends at the time who would invite me over to watch hidden gems on VHS. Hombre Mirando al Sudeste (Man Facing Southeast) is one of those hidden gems.



This particular scene has lingered with me for almost twenty years. In this scene Rantes gently runs his fingers along the sulci and gyri of the brain and wonders the whereabouts of self within the brain. He plucks apart the brain and washes it down the drain. Where are the person's memories, hopes, and desires?

"Where is that afternoon where he first fell in love?"

Do you think those students on a field trip to the state hospital were thinking those thoughts too? Do you think any of these young people stopped to wonder the nature of the experience of the people living within the walls of this institution? Have you stopped to wonder?

If you happen to speak Spanish and want to watch the whole move click here. 

Now back to the Cleveland State Hospital.

Cleveland Hospital for the Insane

The facility was originally known as the Northern Ohio Lunatic Asylum and first opened on March 5, 1855. The original parcel of on land for the facility was donated by the family of future president James A. Garfield. The first hospital building was destroyed by fire in 1872. The state dedicated funds to rebuild a much larger hospital which opened in January 1875. The asylum, as were others in this time, was built with the purpose of providing people with mental illness a quiet place outside of the bustling city. The hope was that patients could be cared for in a moral environment that encouraged healthy living.

As with nearly all the asylums there was a significant drift from moral and healthy living. Overcrowding became rampant and conditions deteriorated in the 1920s and 30s due to that overcrowding as well as insufficient support from the state. In the mid 1940s an investigation of conditions at the facility found patients had been reported dead after being beaten with objects such as belts, key rings, and metal plated shoes.

The hospital continued it's decline and significant cutbacks happened in the early 1960s. The state began to phase out the hospital in 1972. The property was reinvented as the Cleveland Developmental Center in 1975 for people with developmental disabilities. That also was closed and the hospital properties were demolished in the late 70s eventually making way for a development of single family and cluster homes called the Mill Creek Development. (see here, here, here, here, here, and here for general descriptions about this history of the asylum.

I've put together a short YouTube clip with images chronicling the Northern Ohio Lunatic Asylum. Of particular interest are the images from the Civilian Public Service. The a group of conscientious objectors served our country in World War II by working at the insane asylum. The concerns they raised (and kept raising) helped bring attention to the horrors of the insitiution and brought about some meaningful change.



 I'll end this post today with a quote from the the article Bedlam 1946:

"An attendant and I were sitting on the porch watching the patients. Somebody came along sweeping and the attendant yelled at a patient to get up off the bench so that the worker-patient could sweep. But the patient did not move. The attendant jumped up with an inch-wide restraining strap and began to beat the patient in the face and on top of the head. 'Get the hell up...!' It was a few minutes -- a few horrible ones for the patient -- before the attendant discovered that he was strapped around the middle to the bench and could not get up."

It's stories like these that drive me to keep thinking and writing about asylums. So many people lost and thrown away. Each of their stories are worth finding, worth telling, and work knowing.

May 6, 1946, Life magazine published "Bedlam 1946