Creepy Old New York Mental Hospital Abandoned Decades Ago
Step inside an old abandoned mental asylum in New York. This psychiatric hospital used cruel methods of "healing" on its patients. The hospital closed in 1994, but remnants of its sordid history are still around.
Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center
Dover, New York
The Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center opened in 1924 in Wingdale, NY. It was open for 70 years and thousands of mentally ill patients were treated there.
"Over the years, the Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center adopted numerous experimental methods of treatment of the mentally ill. In the 1930s, the facility joined several other institutions on the vanguard of a new insulin shock therapy for the treatment of patients with schizophrenia and other compulsive disorders. Later, when the method of electro-shock therapy was created, the hospital was again a pioneer in implementing the method as a treatment for its patients in 1941. When neuropsychiatrist Walter Freeman developed a new method for treating a wide range of psychological conditions that became known as a lobotomy, the Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center was the preeminent institution for frontal lobotomy in the state of New York. ~ Atlas Obscura"
The mental hospital sat on almost 900 acres of land and had more than 80 buildings, including a golf course, bowling alley, baseball field, bakery, a dairy farm, and an ice cream parlor. During the peak of the hospital, it had 5,000 patients and 5,000 employees.
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