| Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals | 
| Author: Christopher Payne
Creator: Oliver Sacks
Publisher: The MIT Press
Category: Book
List Price: $45.00
Buy New: $28.78
as of 9/10/2010 12:44 CDT details
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Seller: sbd-
Rating:  13 reviews
Sales Rank: 44,430
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 216
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 3.9
Dimensions (in): 12 x 10.4 x 1
ISBN: 0262013495
Dewey Decimal Number: 362.21
EAN: 9780262013499
ASIN: 0262013495
Publication Date: September 30, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Winning entry, General Trade Illustrated Category, in the 2010 New England Book Show sponsored by Bookbuilders of Boston. and Winner, 2010 Ken Book Award presented by the National Alliance on Mental Illness of New York City Metro (NAMI-NYC Metro).
"Payne is a visual poet as well as an architect by training, and he has spent years finding and photographing these buildings—often the pride of their local communities and a powerful symbol of humane caring for those less fortunate. His photographs are beautiful images in their own right, and they also pay tribute to a sort of public architecture that no longer exists. They focus both on the monumental and the mundane, the grand facades and the peeling paint."
—Oliver Sacks, Asylum
For more than half the nation's history, vast mental hospitals were a prominent feature of the American landscape. From the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth, over 250 institutions for the insane were built throughout the United States; by 1948, they housed more than a half million patients. The blueprint for these hospitals was set by Pennsylvania hospital superintendant Thomas Story Kirkbride: a central administration building flanked symmetrically by pavilions and surrounded by lavish grounds with pastoral vistas. Kirkbride and others believed that well-designed buildings and grounds, a peaceful environment, a regimen of fresh air, and places for work, exercise, and cultural activities would heal mental illness. But in the second half of the twentieth century, after the introduction of psychotropic drugs and policy shifts toward community-based care, patient populations declined dramatically, leaving many of these beautiful, massive buildings—and the patients who lived in them—neglected and abandoned.
Architect and photographer Christopher Payne spent six years documenting the decay of state mental hospitals like these, visiting seventy institutions in thirty states. Through his lens we see splendid, palatial exteriors (some designed by such prominent architects as H. H. Richardson and Samuel Sloan) and crumbling interiors—chairs stacked against walls with peeling paint in a grand hallway; brightly colored toothbrushes still hanging on a rack; stacks of suitcases, never packed for the trip home.
Accompanying Payne's striking and powerful photographs is an essay by Oliver Sacks (who described his own experience working at a state mental hospital in his book Awakenings). Sacks pays tribute to Payne's photographs and to the lives once lived in these places, "where one could be both mad and safe."
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 13
 STUNNING PHOTOGRAPHS OF CLOSED STATE MENTAL HOSPITALS July 7, 2010
M. Sexton (Fort Myers, FL United States)
I was captivated as soon as I saw this book mentioned on Amazon--photographs of spooky, old, closed mental hospitals falling into ruin--who could resist. The book is amazing, documenting a lost story of treatment for the severely mentally ill in America. I am sure that not everyone wants to look at falling down buildings, but I was totally mesmerized by the meticulous photographs. I need to add that I am a retired clinical psychologist, but still I think that this book of photography is amazing. At one time state mental hospitals had the best of intentions, as they were, at their best, places of respite and care for the insane before any drug treatments were available. These were closed, protective communities where the patients' labor produced the food on the table, and the staff, including the physicians, lived on the grounds of the hospitals. I lived in Worcester, MA, for several decades, where Worcester State Hospital (the oldest mental hospital in America) was situated. I took a clinical graduate course in the Clock Tower there, and worked at UMass Medical Center--right across the street--where you could still see that tower from some of the offices. The history of mental institutions in America is fascinating; they started with the hope of providing a community of care but often became warehouses for various minority populations as time progressed (Worcester State Hospital, for example, warehoused the Irish immigrants coming to the U.S. after the potato famine). I do not believe that you need to be a psychologist to be fascinated by this book. At one point a couple of decades ago, the Mass. Department of Mental Health had an open house at Worcester State Hospital (most of it was closed by then). Much to their surprise, droves of folks showed up, including myself, to wander through the buildings, view the hydrotherapy baths, and walk through the creepy basement of the Clock Tower which contained what looked like cells for the most violent patients. I highly recommend this book to those with an interest in the history of mental health treatment, and to those with an eye for visually stunning photographs of historic buildings that are falling into ruin.
Haunted minds June 22, 2010
Amaranth (Northern California)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
"Asylum" is a fascinating coffee table book of now-abandoned mental hospitals. It's not the usual coffee table book with mouthwatering food or colorful scenic vistas. "Asylum" evokes a bygone age. In the 19th century, mental hospitals were seen as having a salvific mission--they'd be places for refuge, exercise, and therapy. By the following century, they were drab, depressing places where patients were routinely mistreated. Now, many of these buildings are empty shells. The places LOOK haunted. There are mental hospitals that still have the unclaimed ashes of former patients, books on their shelves, artwork on the walls.
"Asylum" shows that mental hospitals used to issue their own postcards, have their own farms. Napa State Hospital was once a stately gothic structure--now it's a set of dreary modern buildings. The book chronicles the destruction of the Danvers Mental Hospital in Massachusetts as well. The now-abandoned gothic building of the asylum in Worcester, Massachusetts struck an eerie chord. I knew a professor who said he had gone there as a child because of his lack of emotions. The Worcester asylum looks like the setting of a horror movie (it was also the only mental institution Sigmund Freud visited when he came to the US in 1909).
"Asylum" has an introduction by psychologist Oliver Sacks. It's a superb, fascinating, poignant and subtly chilling coffee table book.
 Awesome photographs! February 12, 2010
Sharon West (Illinois)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Great pictures but I wish there were more stories woven into them.... basically a coffee table photo book.
Did We Know? January 3, 2010
I. Yeates (Saratoga Springs NY)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
A haunting, painful book to read. The extraordinary photographs complementary to the text offer a contextual glimpse into mental hospitals, which honorably began as "asylums." The deplorable decline that transformed such havens into virtual prisons utilized to experiment with and medicate its patients into submission is very different from its dignified beginnings. For those who found daily life overwhelming, it was an accessible, inviolable refuge and a peaceful shelter. A safe sanctuary, which brought to mind a line in Yeats' poem (The Stolen Child), "...for the world's more full of weeping than you can understand..."
A glance into a forgotten world December 31, 2009
Joe A. Barone
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I especially appreciated this book because I was raised on the grounds of a state mental institution. I took for granted something that made such places unique. They were small cities unto themselves with farms, utility plants, fire departments and all the other kinds of services which made them mostly self-sufficient.
This book acknowledges the blessings and curses of such institutions, and there were both. It is an important memory of an often-forgotten part of the nation's history.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 13
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