The Ridges

I just wanted to share a page I found on The Ridges, also known once as the Athens Mental Health Center or even the Athens Lunatic Asylum, perhaps the city's most notorious legacy. Here's a quote about the treatments once used in the facility:

1. Water Treatment

Patients were submerged in ice-cold water for extended periods of time. Sometimes they were wrapped in sheets which had been soaked in icewater and restrained.

2. Shock Therapy

Electric shocks were administered to patients submerged in water tanks or, more commonly, directly to the temples by the application of brine-soaked electrodes. A patient held a rubber piece in his mouth to prevent him from biting his tongue off during the convulsions which followed a treatment. (See One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest for a painful example of electroshock therapy.)

3. Lobotomy (Original)

Patients had their skulls opened and their neural passages separated midway through the brain. This difficult and arduous procedure killed many people, but those who survived did in fact forget many of their depressive or psychotic tendencies. They also forgot a lot of other things, like how not to shit down your leg at dinner time, but with such an abundance of patients the only thing most doctors worried about was how to streamline the process. Open-skull brain surgery is a tricky business no matter how you slice it.

4. Lobotomy (Trans-Orbital)

Developed by Dr. Walter J. Freeman in the early 1950s, this simpler lobotomy became something of a craze in mental health circles up through the 60s. Dr. Freeman's method involved knocking the patient unconscious with electric shocks, then rolling an eyelid back and inserting a thin metal icepick-like instrument called a leucotome through a tear duct. A mallet was used to tap the instrument the proper depth into the brain. Next it was sawed back and forth to sever the neural receptors. Sometimes this was done in both eyes. There is some evidence that this method actually helped some people with very severe conditions, but much more often the patient had horrible side effects and in many cases ended up nearly catatonic. It also killed a whole bunch of people, too.

The lobotomy procedure in particular has always fascinated me. One of the conferees at the AVERT Project that I covered earlier mentioned its use even on one of the Kennedys' own: Rosemary Kennedy . I remember the director of activities at Appalachian Behavioral Healthcare, the Ridges' progeny, reminisced about witnessing it being used even up until the '70s. He didn't even seem to bat an eye. I guess attitudes have changed greatly in a small amount of time.

Here are some pictures from the aforementioned Web page of the Ridges.

The main building is vast and stands four stories tall.

The tuberculosis ward of the complex is often broken into or vandalized.