Middle Tennessee Mental Health Institute

In 1845, the patient Green Grimes wrote the book A Secret Worth Knowing, extolling the hospital.

[1] After visiting Tennessee's first mental health facility, the Tennessee Lunatic Asylum, in November 1847, Dorothea Dix urged the state legislature to replace the unfit facility.

[2] The new facility, named Central State Hospital for the Insane, opened in 1852 in southeast Nashville, Tennessee on the southwest corner of Murfreesboro Road and Donelson Pike.

[3] In 1963, the Tennessee Neuropsychiatric Institute was formed by Vanderbilt University and its research facility was located at Central State.

In 1995, the hospital moved to new facilities on Stewarts Ferry Pike.