During its operation, the hospital provided services to a variety of patients including Civil War veterans, children, and those declared mentally unwell.

Today, The Ridges are a part of Ohio University and house the Kennedy Museum of Art as well as an auditorium and many offices, classrooms, and storage facilities.

After the hospital's original structure closed, the state of Ohio acquired the property and renamed the complex and its surrounding grounds The Ridges.

Some of Haerlin's other landscape designs are seen in Cincinnati's Spring Grove Cemetery and the Oval on the campus of Ohio State University in Columbus.

Although not a wholly self-sustaining facility, many Kirkbride Plan asylums functioned as cloistered communities, and for decades the hospital had livestock, farm fields and gardens, an orchard, greenhouses, a dairy, a physical plant to generate steam heat, and even a carriage shop.

The availability of psychoactive drugs for the treatment of mental illnesses, as well as the increasing prevalence of psychological therapy, allowed for most patients to be treated without the need for internment in a prison-like institution.

By the early 1990s, many of the original buildings had fallen into disrepair, following a similar pattern of decline and neglect among Kirkbride Plan asylums.

As the mental healthcare industry transitioned away from large, centralized institutions, the will to support sprawling hospital complexes diminished.

Because the asylums were typically located on a hill outside of the nearest municipal center, their degradation was able to occur out of sight and out of mind.

Under private ownership, abandoned Kirkbrides often languished unmaintained and unsecured, slowly being reclaimed by nature, as with Hudson River State Hospital in New York.

In 1993 the Athens Lunatic Asylum's property was deeded over to Ohio University in a land swap with the state's Department of Mental Health.

The old tubercular ward, "Cottage B", which sat on a hill separated from the other buildings, was demolished by Ohio University in 2013 due to the large number of college students exploring the dangerous structure.

Cottage B was designed to early 1900s fireproofing standards and incorporated copious asbestos lining inside the walls, making it difficult to remediate.

Members of the Athens, Ohio, chapter of NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, have worked to restore the three graveyards located on the grounds of The Ridges.

As one prisoner carved on their sandstone windowsill 'I was never crazy,' today the Ridges reminds intrepid souls of the honest horrors of mental health gaslighting, politics, and past practices.

General "ill health" accounted for the admission of thirty-nine men and forty-four women in the first three years of the hospital's operation.

In the hospital's first three years of operation, according to the annual report of 1876, eighty-one men and one woman were diagnosed as having their insanity caused by masturbation.

Records from the asylum document some of the now-discredited theories of the causes of mental illness, as well as the practice of harmful treatments, such as lobotomy.

Most disturbing is the documentation of hydrotherapy, electroshock, lobotomy, and early psychotropic drugs, many of which have been discredited today as extremely inhumane ways of treating a patient.

With special permission and filling out paperwork that is required by the state of Ohio, some of the information can be accessed, however, those interested in finding out about the patients that walked through the doors of the Asylum can satisfy their curiosity by looking to the cemeteries.

Besides helping replace grave stones and keeping the grounds in proper condition, in 2005, the Ridges Cemeteries Committee has been organizing Memorial Day Ceremonies for the many veterans buried at the asylum.