The Insane history of Tennessee | A history of Insane asylums in Tennessee.

[Music] welcome back to another episode of old history as you may have noticed the name of this channel as well as the facebook page is now called the old history project this change was made to make it easier for people to find my content if they are not subscribed speaking of please subscribe to the channel if you haven't already and hit the notification bell it's free and you can always undo this later before we begin i'd first like to thank the participants of the poll i created in the community section of the youtube channel for suggesting this video firstly secondly i like i'd like to say that i do have a patreon setup where you can support this channel to ensure that i keep bringing you top notch content on all forms of my media you can find the link in the description of this video firstly thirdly please go and give my good friend jason at the beard guy and friends co a look-see for all your beardly needs now this is also going to be a viewer beware some of the things mentioned in this video might not be suitable for the ears of young historians so as we all may or may not have learned at some point or another in times past the united states had insane asylums but the united states did not start that tradition insane asylums or crazy houses goes all the way back to early medieval europe with cases of treatment going back further than that one such building is called the naren terma which is the german word for fools towers it was built in 1784 when holy roman emperor joseph the first was uh in office you also have bethlehem royal hospital notoriously known as bedlam it was established as a priory in 1247 when henry iii was king it is thought to have begun care for the insane in 1377. the history of treatment for the mentally handicapped goes all the way back for centuries but back to the topic insane asylum of tennessee now just start off this list the first asylum built in the state was the tennessee lunatic asylum it was established by legislature in 1832 and opened in nashville in 1840 it was located at 12th avenue south and division street the thought behind building this asylum arose out of the greater context of what was then known as the asylum movement which was largely built upon the theories of a group of european physicians the base of this system was centered around a theory that lunacy or insanity came from a disordered environment and involved removing patients from their harmful surroundings and placing them in a controlled setting with the hopes that they could develop habits and healthy modes of thought just five years after the opening of this asylum a book titled a secret worth knowing was written supposedly by an asylum patient under the name green grimes and it appeared to be praising the asylum success but despite this book the institution quickly faced a set of interlocking problems the legislature had been quite generous with its budgetary appropriations at least as measured by the total size of the state budget for most years during the antebellum era before the civil war asylum appropriations far exceeded those for the state penitentiary which is the other public institution founded during this era of reform and in fact the asylum budget often even surpassed that of the entire executive payroll but the money would never be enough the asylum would lurch along absurdly over budget and understaffed sometimes by as much as 200 percent but it wouldn't be until a visit by dorothy dicks who was an advocate for the care of the mentally handicapped that she deemed the current asylum unfit overpopulated and far over budget she along the with the pleas of staff urged the legislator to approve the construction of another facility it would undergo several name changes but most of us have probably heard it called middle tennessee mental health institute which is located along murfreesboro park just outside of nashville it was built in 1857 and operated until 1995 when the hospital moved to a new location the original buildings were demolished soon thereafter another one to mention and this one's kind of important would be the east tennessee hospital for the insane aka lakeshore mental health institute it opened in 1886 with just 99 patients that were transferred from the lunatic asylum in nashville the opening of this asylum was plagued with funding stops and political infighting although it would change names to eastern state hospital in 1927 and again to lakeshore mental health institute by the 1970s a few people still refer to it as eastern state its history is filled with scandals stories of abuse and inhumane conditions there are also plenty of stories of sadistic workers beating patients that goes well into the 1970s the prison system originally ran state hospitals that treated mental illness up until the establishment of the state department of mental health in the 1950s lakeshore was fenced guarded and many patients were caged restrained when the midnight rate of 1971 happened state representative richard krieg uncovered the horrible conditions there and it's something that you'd see out of like a wes craven horror film or something because bed beds for the elderly spilled into dark and unlit hallways large rooms were so crowded that all of the beds touched each other large water leaks and rusted out pops created a damp environment and there were roaches and bugs everywhere the hospital wings were also deemed as extreme fire hazards now lakeshore would run all the way up until 2012 when it was officially closed and then today only one building remains standing although i do recall in the news somebody actually went inside one of the buildings and found all kinds of patient records social security numbers and stuff i would assume this happened after lakeshore closed uh a common you better straighten your ass up story when i was in school was that if you don't start acting upright i'm going to send you to lakeshore stories that it was basically hell on earth were rampant among school-aged kids not knowing what it actually was nor what happened there the next place to mention would be the western hospital for the insane in bolivar tennessee its history stems back to 1873 when the general assembly of the state suddenly realized that they needed another hospital for the mentally ill the state would purchase nearly 1200 acres from of a former plantation owned by general calvin jones it would be officially open in eight november 1889 with 156 patients transferred from the nashville asylum it would grow to house over 2 300 patients by the 1960s and in repeating fashion this hospital was severely overcrowded with not enough doctors and staff to treat all of the patients that they have patients will become warehoused for decades people would be fortunate just to see a psych for 10 minutes a week the system for securing financial care for patients was extremely flawed and the state agencies agreed to pay for one patient per thousand because of this the hospital had to engage in deficit spending just to keep itself afloat now one important story here is that the hospital once had a quote unquote tight connection with uh georgia tan who operated the tennessee children's home society which was an adoption agency in memphis tan used the unlicensed orphanage as a front for her black market baby adoption scheme children born patients at the asylum would be placed for adoption with a false background for as little as seven dollars many children will be sold to pedophiles or for slave labor of the course of thirty years as many as five thousand families would be displaced due to tans adoption practices this will be backed by sick and demented local judges and politicians tan would make her millions from the 1920s to 1949 children at the orphanage would be starved beaten and molested and during four months in 1945 50 children died while in her care prompting an investigation by authorities it would not be until after her death in 1950 due to cancer did the real story come to light past this point viewer discretion is advised for the remainder of the video you will no longer see pictures of asylums in tennessee i ran out of pictures and you will instead see pictures of asylums from around the nation they should be labeled we will also be discussing some of the early medical treatments that took place at some of these asylums now this happened not just in tennessee but everywhere at every mental health institution now there are more horrible treatments that i won't discuss but we'll just talk about some of the basic stuff one treatment included insulin shock therapy which was the brainchild of manfred sacco who was a german neurologist and his thought was that the injection of a sufficiently large dose of insulin drastically lowered the sugar content of the blood and induced a hypoglycemic state basically they would put them in a coma a deep coma which could only be relieved by injection of sugar or administering of sugar as a diabetic that is very horrible if you've ever had low blood sugar it feels terrible this process would be repeated daily for months at a time with doctors administering as many as 50 to 60 treatments per patient that's a pretty horrible thing in earlier times it was thought that demonic possession cured insanity they would exercise demons that would exercise the mental illness right out of the patients benjamin rush who was the so-called father of american psychiatry would purge blister vomit and bleed his patients sometimes to death in an attempt to cure them as he thought that bodily fluids created an imbalance in the brain this obviously didn't work henry cotton the superintendent at trenton state hospital in new jersey thought that infected parts of the body would lead to madness he began pulling rotten teeth and when that clearly didn't work he evolved removing tonsils thinking that saliva was infecting the brain he would remove stomachs intestines gallbladders and in a shock this didn't work either and carried a very high mortality rate the next very questionable therapy was called metrozol shock therapy like insulin this worked on the mistaken theory that epilepsy and schizophrenia couldn't exist at the same time and the key seizures laszlo von meduna who is a hungarian physician discovered that the drug metrozol could produce a seizure-like convulsion in patients therefore shocking their brains out of mental illness it proved to be a shock physically as well because some patients had x-rays and it was actually damaging the vertebrae in their back sometimes even breaking it the other thing to discuss would be a lobotomy and i'm pretty sure just about everybody here has heard of lobotomy the thought behind this would be sticking a needle through the eye or up up your nose and severing neural connections in some of the frontal cortexes in your brain clearly this made zombies out of people didn't work either so there are more treatments that occur as i stated and there are a few more mental health asylums but we'll stop the video here because i just don't think i want to make a mini documentary yet also if you've made it this far please keep an eye on the facebook page i have a very important announcement coming up for the fall it's something that i think everybody will enjoy it does involve the pressman's home and involves a state society not going to spoil anything but you guys are going to love it being for a shock well thanks for watching please like share and subscribe this video and tell me what you think in the comments below as this is not a normal video for old history but it is history of the state and some people have close ties to uh some of these asylums you know maybe they had a loved one that went there you know and maybe they just wanted to know some of the history around it so it's one of those people please comment and tell me your story in the comments below thanks for watching [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: The Old History Project

Views: 9,733

Keywords: Old, History, Civil war, Tennessee, insane asylums, western state insane asylum, Bolivar state hospital, Tennessee insane hospital, Nashville insane hospital, Eastern State insane hospital, Lakeshore mental asylum, Lakeshore mental hospital, Mental illness treatments, The old history project, Old history

Id: k07vt7wB7xM

Length: 12min 44sec (764 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 21 2021