Description
2013 Ohioana Book Award Finalist
Asylum at the Hill is the story of a great American experiment in psychiatry, a revolution in take care of those with mental illness, as seen through the example of the Athens Lunatic Asylum. Built in Southeast Ohio after the Civil War, the asylum embodied the nineteenth-century “gold standard” specifications of moral remedy. Stories of patients and their families, politicians, caregivers, and community illustrate how a village in the coalfields of the Hocking River Valley responded to a national impulse to provide compassionate care in line with a curative landscape, exposure to the arts, outside exercise, useful occupation, and personal attention from a physician. Despite the fact that in the end doomed by overcrowding and overshadowed by the upward push of new models of psychiatry, for twenty years the therapeutic community at Athens pursued moral remedy therapy with energy and optimism. Ziff’s fresh presentation of The us’s nineteenth-century asylum movement shows how the Athens Lunatic Asylum accommodated political, economic, community, circle of relatives, and individual needs and left an architectural legacy that has been uniquely renovated and repurposed.