… Why have alarming nuts been allowed to colonize New York’s mission-critical subway system? Why do we no longer have what we once did: adequate facilities in the countryside for agitated urbanites to decompress far from the madding crowd?
The massive deinstitutionalization of the 1960s–1980s is now widely considered a blunder, but why did it seem like a good idea at the time? We need to consider why progressive reformers in the English-speaking world turned as fervently against lunatic asylums in the 1970s as their forebears had become enthusiastic for them in the middle of the 19th century.
The movement to construct massive stone or brick buildings in calm rural settings to shelter the mentally troubled began in Britain among Quaker humanitarians around 1800. New England Unitarian reformer Dorothea Dix brought it to the USA in the 1840s.
For example, the massive Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum opened in Weston, W.Va., in 1864 at the height of the Civil War. Resting on a square mile of grounds, the sandstone structure comprises 242,000 square feet. By the low tax standards of the time, this typical Victorian state mental hospital represented an immense expenditure by the pro-Union state government.