The Mississippi State “Lunatic Asylum” opened its doors in 1855, right before the Civil War. That timing would shape the next 80 years of the old asylum’s life. Almost 30,000 patients would pass through its doors. We know some of their stories, but what about the old asylum’s? Episode 4 tells the history of Mississippi’s first state hospital, the promises that were made -- and why they were broken. And Dr. Jennifer Mack reveals that not everything that got buried in the Yazoo Clay stayed a secret.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What is the history of the Mississippi State Hospital?
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We're standing in a hallway at the Mississippi State Hospital at Whitfield, one of a handful of state-run residential mental health facilities still operating here. It's my first time really seeing the hospital, but I've heard about it my whole life. Everyone in Mississippi has.
It was the threat that your family always gave you. If you act crazy, you'll go to Whitfield.
Oh, yeah? People see you do that, you're going to Whitfield. If you don't behave, I'm going to take you to Whitfield.
Put you out. Whitfield. That's the informal name for the Mississippi State Hospital. It's been Mississippi's primary mental health facility since 1935, when the state shuttered the old asylum in Jackson and moved those patients out here. It's that place your mom says you'll go if you don't act right, the place your friend's neighbor got sent. It has mythic status in Mississippi.
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Chapter 2: Why was the old asylum in Mississippi considered infamous?
But standing here in a marble room full of outdated therapy equipment, Whitfield's not scary. It's quaint. at least in the museum. Hard to say how much of that is because of our tour guides, Donna Brown and Kathy Denton. These two have been here for decades and know everything about the place. Donna took the lead with Kathy chiming in.
I notice a black and white photo of a woman in what looks like a shower.
The lady in the shower, they had to pencil in panties and bra on her because that was pornography for 1938.
It's a quirky museum. There's a display of patient-run newspapers and literary magazines. And then, around the corner, posters for movies where Whitfield makes a cameo, including the Sandra Bullock classic, A Time to Kill.
The scene in the movie where she breaks into the psychiatrist's office was filmed in the building that you passed on the way to this one. In The Beast Within, you watch a lot of it on YouTube. But you're going to recognize very little of the hospital. There's a lot of screaming and running and dark.
Part of the museum is housed in one of Whitfield's old hydrotherapy units. Hydrotherapy basically means using water as medical treatment for physical or mental health. If you've ever taken a dip at a spa, you've had hydrotherapy.
Today, you can go to the spa. They'll wrap you in mud, sand, aloe gel, seaweed, coffee grounds, tea leaves, salt, sugar. The most expensive one I've found is Pink Indian Sand in New Orleans, $1,200, 45 minutes.
Back in the day, it was on the bleeding edge of mental health care. Woodfield's hydrotherapy unit consisted of several rooms of white marble from the floor all the way up to the ceiling. And the kind of porcelain sinks and claw-footed tubs that an HGTV host would kill for.
Hydrotherapy tubs, now this is by far the treatment of choice. Just a long soak in a big old bath.
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Chapter 3: How did hydrotherapy play a role in mental health treatment?
But other hydrotherapy practices were more brutal than relaxing.
This is a needle spray shower or a scotch shower. Each one of these nozzles control the jet of the water, cold here, hot here, back and forth. The doctor would literally write a prescription. The patient would come in, go to the center, hold on to the bars. She would start spraying the formula. See the petals? They're not here today, but that controlled the intensity of the water.
If you've seen one flew over the cuckoo's nest, it's easy to imagine a sadistic nurse ratchet gleefully blasting patients into submission. But the first antipsychotic drug wasn't introduced until the 1950s, nearly 100 years after Mississippi opened its original state asylum. Donna tells us that the doctors of that era really believed that this was an effective treatment.
Donna waved us toward another room. This one was almost like a grotto with a big slab smack dab in the middle, like an altar. That's where the patients would be placed.
This is a wet pack treatment. When he came, he was very manic, very fidgety. They wanted to calm him down. So they wrapped him in sheets as tight as they could, much like a swaddled baby. Got him on the table, hot and cold water faucets. They'd soak him down. Before we exit the hydrotherapy unit, Donna reads us a poem. Meditation and Hydrotherapy, Theodore Rothke.
Six hours a day, I lay me down within this tub but cannot drown. Within this primal element, the flesh is willing to repent. I do not laugh. I do not cry. I'm sweating out the will to die. My past is sliding down the drain. I soon will be myself again.
I wish Theodore Retke were still around because I'd love to ask him about that last line. Is it sarcastic? Or did he really feel like an ice bath restored his sanity? Was he just hoping that it would? The more I've listened, the more I hear irony in I soon will be myself again. But maybe that's because of the place asylums have come to occupy in my or really in the American imagination.
It's a place of broken promises. You're supposed to get better, but in most stories I've read, most movies I've seen, the opposite happens. Maybe that's why there's such a popular setting for horror films. That may be the narrative we have today, but it's not the one the asylum started with. The promise of the old asylum was that it was a place for healing.
But over one-third of the patients who passed through the old asylum's doors died within them.
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Chapter 4: What was the Kirkbride Plan and its significance?
That's about $7 million in today's money. If this level of benevolence and generosity for Mississippians with mental illness seems out of character for a state government whose focus was keeping slavery legal, don't worry. The decision to build this asylum to look after, quote, less fortunate Mississippians does not buck the narrative you've come to know. Let's say it's the 1850s.
You're a Mississippi lawmaker trying to put a shine on an image badly tarnished by, I don't know, your refusal to stop treating humans like chattel. Maybe investing in this monument to those Enlightenment ideals of individual liberty, natural rights, and the social contract starts to seem like a good way to thumb your nose at all those Yankees crying about the immorality of slavery.
A sort of, see, we're not all bad.
Perhaps it's not so pointed in the institutional records, but you read between the lines and you say, you know, look at what we do for those unfortunates among us. They did not use the words that would be... that would be acceptable today. And this became something that they could point to. This was the most impressive structure in the state that remained after the Civil War.
This was sort of a monument to the goodness of Mississippi leaders.
And that's exactly what a nurse named Dorothea Dix was banking on. You've probably heard her name before, because Dix almost single-handedly created the first generation of state asylums. In the 1840s, Dorothea Dix turned Kirkbride's asylum plan into something of a roadshow, lobbying state legislatures in the North and the South to build these hospitals.
Reading about Dorothea Dix was very instructive to me on the relationships of mental hospitals in the South versus the North, in an environment of growing abolition.
She began her career as a teacher. But on March 28, 1841, the 35-year-old went to teach a Sunday school class at East Cambridge House of Corrections in Massachusetts. There, she found groups of women experiencing psychiatric conditions. They were chained in dirty, unheated cells. Many had never committed a crime but were locked up with violent felons.
They'd been starved, tortured, and sexually assaulted. From that day forward, she became a tireless advocate for better treatment for people with mental illness.
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Chapter 5: Who was Dorothea Dix and what was her impact on asylums?
And they had secrets of their own to share.
I'm Gilbert King. I'm the son of Jeremy Lynn Scott.
I was no longer just telling the story. I was part of it.
Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer. He's just straight evil.
I was becoming the bridge between a killer and the son he'd never known.
If the cops and everything would have done their job properly, my dad would have been in jail. I would have never existed.
I never expected to find myself in this place. Now, I need to tell you how I got here.
At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer.
Bone Valley Season 2. Jeremy.
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Chapter 6: How did the old asylum's legacy shape public perception?
While at the Whitfield Museum, my producer Rebecca and I came across a giant ledger, easily five inches thick with hundreds of pages. Each page was a list of names, then census details like gender, age, race, written in neat cursive, along with the reason each patient was admitted.
The assumption was tuberculosis.
Oh, ill health.
Menopause.
Yes. PMS is in here somewhere.
I can actually see that happening.
Okay. Grief and fright are a couple options.
Religion is one. There's religion down there, too. Yeah. Grief, fright, PMS, religion? These were some of the causes for institutionalization noted during patient intakes. With so many possible reasons for admission, maybe it's no surprise that the place got overcrowded.
Yes. So the Kirkbride Plan in general, and certainly the institution in Mississippi, was established for those people who could be cured. It was never meant as a place where people would live out their lives, but there were no other options. So what do you do with somebody who is having epileptic seizures all day long? What do you do with people who are never going to get better?
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