{"id":7303,"date":"2025-03-03T14:36:34","date_gmt":"2025-03-03T19:36:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/carefarmingnetwork.org\/?p=7303"},"modified":"2025-05-20T23:08:34","modified_gmt":"2025-05-21T03:08:34","slug":"re-creating-the-asylum-farm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carefarmingnetwork.org\/re-creating-the-asylum-farm\/","title":{"rendered":"Re-Creating the \u201cAsylum Farm\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Today\u2019s state hospital patients sit idle on massive grounds designed to sustain meaningful work.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Author: John Hirschauer<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Though it\u2019s often said that America \u201cclosed the asylums\u201d in the twentieth century, every state still operates at least one public mental institution. These facilities, called state hospitals, are the last stop on each state\u2019s continuum of care for people with serious mental illness. Patients typically get admitted after an insanity plea, a declaration of incompetence, or a court finding of grave disability. Unlike patients at general hospitals\u2019 psychiatric wards, those at state hospitals often stay for months, even years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As an artifact of nineteenth- and twentieth-century mental-health policy, today\u2019s state hospitals are often set on mammoth physical plants in small, rural towns; many operate on the same grounds as the old asylums. Those facilities, conceived as self-contained therapeutic farming communities for the mentally ill, downsized after the passage of the 1964 Community Mental Health Act. The vestigial population that remained behind, plus the dwindling number of patients later admitted, filled the husks of the properties, which officials rebranded as state hospitals.Instead of resigning patients to drugged-up days on locked wards, state hospitals should reopen their farm and occupational-therapy programs, paying patients commensurate with work performed. Doing so may be costly, but improving institutional care can reduce violence on hospital wards and, eventually, violence in the community if patients are discharged. The work may have the \u201cemphasis of a different social era,\u201d as Schwartz put it, but the structure and dignity it provides are perennially valuable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read the full article…<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today\u2019s state hospital patients sit idle on massive grounds designed to sustain meaningful work. Author: John Hirschauer Though it\u2019s often said that America \u201cclosed the asylums\u201d in the twentieth century, every state still operates at least one public mental institution. These facilities, called state hospitals, are the last stop on each state\u2019s continuum of care […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8015,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-care-farms-in-the-news"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nRe-Creating the \u201cAsylum Farm\u201d - Care Farming Network<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/carefarmingnetwork.org\/re-creating-the-asylum-farm\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Re-Creating the \u201cAsylum Farm\u201d - Care Farming Network\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Today\u2019s state hospital patients sit idle on massive grounds designed to sustain meaningful work. Author: John Hirschauer Though it\u2019s often said that America \u201cclosed the asylums\u201d in the twentieth century, every state still operates at least one public mental institution. 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