Kirkbride Plan

The Kirkbride Plan refers to a system of mental asylum design advocated by Philadelphia psychiatrist Thomas Story Kirkbridein the mid-1800s.

The establishment of state mental hospitalsin the U.S. is partly due to reformer Dorothea Dix, who vividly testified to the New Jerseylegislature in 1844, describing the state's treatment of people with mental illness: they were being housed in county jails, private homes and the basements of public buildings. Dix's effort led to the construction of the New Jersey Lunatic Asylum, the first asylum built on the Kirkbride Plan.

Kirkbride developed his requirements based on a philosophy of Moral Treatment. The typical floor plan, with long rambling wings and rooms arranged "in echelon" (staggered, so each connected building still receives sunlight and air), was meant to promote privacy and comfort for patients. The building form itself was meant to have a curative effect, meant as "a special apparatus for the care of lunacy," and Kirkbride wrote that their grounds should be "highly improved and tastefully ornamented."

Built mainly in the northeastern and midwestern U.S., these asylums tended to become large, imposing, Victorian-eragovernment projects with their surrounding grounds. By 1900 the notion of "building-as-cure" was largely discredited, and in the following decades these facilities became too expensive to maintain. Many Kirkbride Plan asylums still stand, abandoned, neglected, and vandalized.

Examples include:

• 1845 New Jersey Lunatic Asylum at Trenton, New Jersey, the first Kirkbride Plan building
• 1848 Jacksonville State Hospital at Jacksonville, Illinois
• 1854 State Lunatic Hospital at Taunton, Massachusetts
• 1858 Northampton State Lunatic Hospital, Northampton, Massachusetts
• 1861 Bryce State Mental Hospital, Tuscaloosa, Alabama(still in use)
• 1862 Western Pennsylvania Asylum for the Insane (also known as Dixmont State Hospital) at Kilbuck, Pennsylvania(scheduled for demolition in late 2005)
• 1863 West Virginia Hospital for the Insane, Weston, West Virginia
• 1871 Hudson River State Hospital, Poughkeepsie, New York
• 1876 Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital, Hanover, New Jersey
• 1874 Athens State Hospital, Athens, Ohio
• 1877 Worcester State Hospital, Worcester, Massachusetts
• 1878 Danvers State Hospital, Danvers, Massachusetts
• 1885 Northern Michigan Asylum for the Insane, Traverse City, Michigan
• 1895 Buffalo State Hospital, Buffalo, New York(designed by H.H. Richardson)
• 1906 Fergus Falls State Hospital, Fergus Falls, Minnesota

External links

• Kirkbride Buildings — information, history, photographs

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
It uses material from the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirkbride+Plan Wikipedia article Kirkbride Plan.