New Hampshire State Insane Asylum

That was the original name of the state hospital for those who were suffering from various mental disorders in the 1840s.  Here in Concord it is now a much smaller building located a short distance from the original asylum and is now called the New Hampshire Hospital.  When we first moved here I was fascinated by the huge complex that is located in the same area of the State Archives.  I soon found out that it was the original hospital built in 1842 which opened its doors to 96 patients.  Over the next 150 years it housed up to 2,000 people.  Seven more buildings were added to the original building to house female patients away from the male patients, nurses who worked at the asylum, a chapel, a kitchen, a surgery, and other buildings necessary to maintain the program.  From the front the building looks pretty impressive but as I have driven around the area I have seen the less attractive realization of what took place for many people who were brought there.  The area is beautiful with a pond, land for gardening which many of the patients worked in. According to the information I read they produced much of the food that was eaten by the patients and employees.  Another sad aspect I found in my searching for information was that the hospital started a cemetery they named Meadow Cemetery to bury the patients who died but no one ever claimed the body. It was well hidden about a mile and a half away from the hospital about 300 feet back away from the road behind a grove of trees.  This weekend Scott and I visited it and there were several hundred graves which was a sad indication of what often happened once the person was put in the hospital--all ties with their families were severed.

I couldn't find much about what it was like for the patients in Concord but in the mid 1800s a woman named Nellie Bly pretended to have a breakdown and was committed to an insane asylum in New York where she witnessed first hand the horrendous treatment that the mentally ill were receiving.  Joseph Pulitzer made sure that everything she saw and wrote about was published.  This apparently started a reformation but in spite of that I'm sure that being in a mental hospital in the 18th and 19th century was often a nightmare experience.

We have heard so much on the news lately about the affects of mental illness when people are not given the care they need.  Here in Concord it is amazing to see the number of homeless people wandering the streets who have obvious mental health issues. We still are not doing all we should to protect the mentally ill from themselves or the victims who died as the result of the severe psychosis that often manifests itself in tragic ways.