history
Capital City Psychopathic Institute sits on approximately 100 acres and was first founded in the year 1848. It was the first institution devoted to the mentally ill established in its respective state, and was created after much urging from Dorothea Dix, a pioneer in the field of mental health. She was very attached to this hospital and thought of it as her very own child. In fact, she spent her final days living in te dome of the Kirkbride, passing in 1887.
The buildings on the sprawling campus include the main hospital, a cafeteria, a laboratory, a powerhouse, a gatehouse, residences for the Superintendent, the Commissioner, 12 doctors and a nurse's dormitory. All of these buildings are protected by the state Historic Preservation Office, and though they cannot be torn down, they are suffering from a great deal of neglect.
Before this hospital was built, mentally ill had been kept in jails, poorhouses, cellars, attics....just about anywhere people could find to stash and hide them. The hospital gave the mentally ill a place to live under humane and fair conditions. "Moral treatment" was practiced, a school of thought popular during this time period in mental hospitals. It was believed that a structured schedule and life coupled with beautiful architecture and serene surroundings would calm the angered mind.
Dr. Henry Cotton took over as medical director in 1907 and made many changes to patient treatment at the institution. Mechanical patient restraints were a thing of the past. Daily staff meetings were held to discuss patient progress. Unfortunately Dr. Cotton also had unconventional beliefs about mental illness that caused many patients to lose their lives. He believed mental illness was caused b some sort of sickness or infection in the body. Countless patients were forced to go under his knife and lose organs such as their appendix, spleen, gall bladder, teeth....countless body parts, until the patient either "recovered" or died from infection due to surgeries. Antibiotics had yet to have been developed at this time, and so infections from surgeries often turned deadly. This left Capital City with a marred reputation for many years after Dr Cotton's death. Eventually hydrotherapy, occupational therapy, and insulin came into use, and in 1940 electroshock treatments and psychosurgery in 1947 were added as well.
Suddenly in the 1950s new tranquilizing drugs appeared in the market, and now patients who normally might have spent their entire lives in an institution could now live out in the world on carefully supervised medications. The process of deinstitutionalization began.
Capital City had 4,237 patients under its care in 1954. By 1968, there were only 2,800, and today there are only 376 beds in the entire hospital.
Capital City was the first hospital to be built utilizing the Kirkbride Plan of architecture. Unfortunately today that exact building has been marred by the gears of progress. Most of the decorative architectural elements ave been ripped from its facade, including cupolas, and the entire center administration section, including the dome Dorothea Dix stayed in, has been demolished and replaced by an emotionless glass rectangle of a building. The outer wings are connected to this center portion, and the end result is rather ugly.