Asylum architecture in the United States

About 300 psychiatric hospitals, known at the time as insane asylums or colloquially as “loony bins” or “nuthouses,” were constructed in the United States before 1900.

The doctors who promoted the establishment of mental hospitals used the same rhetoric as social reformers and park enthusiasts: that nature was curative, exercise therapeutic, and the city a source of vice.

[3] Early psychiatrists assumed that mental derangement was caused by environmental factors, particularly the tensions present in the individual's current domestic or social environment,[4] which in turn suggested that a changed setting might alleviate psychic pain.

Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride devised a widely applicable set of planning principles that ensured classification by type of illness, ease of surveillance, short wards for good ventilation, and clarity of circulation.

Professional medical journals were replete with articles on architecture, a constant preoccupation for the asylum superintendent, and architects ventured opinions about the proper classification of patients.

These cottages were to be arranged in a village, an homage to the Belgian town of Gheel, where citizens looked after mentally ill people who for centuries gathered there to worship at the shrine of St. Dymphna, the patron saint of lunatics.

Dr. John Galt romanticized this medieval model as an ideal setting for the cure of the disease, thus causing a rift among the self-named “brethren” of asylum superintendents.

[9][10] At the peak of the success of the Kirkbride plan, these hospitals were technological marvels that demonstrated advanced fireproof construction, state-of-the-art heating and ventilation, and fresh water delivery systems; some had their own railroads.

[11] The complicated decline of the large-scale insane asylum was caused partly by overcrowding and neglect, but also by massive changes in the practice of psychiatry.