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Thursday, August 16, 2012

Life in a Mental Hospital

"Erasing the Past at the Ghost Hospital"
By Lawrence Downes
The New York Times
Originally published on August 4, 2012

Engineers and earth movers have now joined nature and vandals in the slow dismantling of the Kings Park Psychiatric Center, an all-but-abandoned city of the sick on the North Shore of Long Island, on thickly wooded bluffs above Long Island Sound.
      
Kings Park was one of the island’s four giant state mental institutions — part farm, part warehouse — that treated hundreds of thousands of patients from New York City. It began in the 1880s and kept growing into the 1960s and ’70s until, like its counterparts on the island and across the country, it was made obsolete by new drug therapies and a new understanding of the rights of the mentally ill.

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New York State has largely abandoned its comprehensive commitment to caring for the mentally ill and disabled. When the hospitals emptied out, patients were sent to group homes to be better cared for; many were forsaken there, too. A recent series of articles in The Times found that abuse and neglect plague the mental-health system to this day. It would be wonderful if someday profitable redevelopment of Kings Park led to a surge in financing for care of the mentally ill. I’m not counting on it.

This article is here.

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A Letter to the Editor by Lucy Winer about this story is here.

I was committed to Kings Park Psychiatric Center on Long Island as a teenager in the 1960s after a series of suicide attempts. Having experienced the abuses of institutional life, I expected to rejoice at news of the hospital’s bulldozing. Instead, I feel grief.

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State hospitals were closed to save money. The promise was that savings would be invested in community mental health care. This never happened, and we are living with the fallout from this broken social contract.