The Decline Of Dixmont State Hospital: Photo Gallery
A few fits of trespassing 20+ years ago should have given me more insight to America's mental health crisis.
When the Reagan administration cut public health funding in the 1980s, hundreds of hospitals that had treated people with mental illnesses were forced to close, including Dixmont State Hospital outside of Pittsburgh. By the time I was living in southwestern Pennsylvania 20 years later, Dixmont was a crumbling playground for a wide range of trespassers, including photographers and teenagers looking for a cool place to drink.
And, on a few Sunday afternoons in the winter of 2023, my buddy Tim and I. After writing about our adventures on my personal Website, I was contacted by a location scout for MTV’s “Raw Fear,” and ended up writing about that trip in the column I had at the time.
“I suppose Dixmont is as good as any other place for ghosts and spirits,” I wrote.
“From 1859 to 1984, Dixmont was a self-sufficient community of crazy people. It had its own power plant, morgue and farm. At its peak, Dixmont was home to 1,500 patients, but was closed after decades of financial troubles and dwindling bed counts.
“Today it's a teenage wasteland of empty beer cans, crumbling ceilings, damage from an early 1990s fire, broken windows and graffiti. Perhaps the most telling chunk of graffiti reads ‘Wal-Mart sucks,’ in reference to the mega-corporation's on-again, off-again plans to tear down all of the buildings to make way for a superstore.”
Wal-Mart made the plans off-again permanently in 2013, after a landslide on the site made it dramatically more undesirable.
The shuttering of Dixmont and facilities like that was, arguably, the biggest — and most under-reported — public health crisis of my lifetime. Thousands of people, some of whom had spent most of their lives in institutions, were turned out onto the streets with little advance warning.
There’s been no relief since. Writing in “Crazy” in 2006, Pete Earley summed up the problem that prompted him to write his landmark book with a few simple statistics:
“In 1955, some 560,000 Americans were being treated for mental health problems in state hospitals. Between 1955 and 2000 our nation’s population increased from 166 million to 276 million. If you took the patient-per-capita ratio that existed in 1955…you’d expect to find 930,000 patients in state mental hospitals.
“But there are fewer than $55,000 in them today. Where are the others? Nearly 300,000 are in jails and prisons….The largest public mental health facility in America is not a hospital. It’s the Los Angeles County jail. On any given day, it houses 3,000 mentally disturbed inmates.”
I took a bunch of photos on those trips with Tim with an early-generation digital Kodak camera (gallery below). The architecture of state hospitals like Dixmont was often exquisite, as evidenced by these photos, suggesting — even if treatment methods were barbaric — that society understood there was a mental health crisis in the 19th and early 20th centuries than we do today.
It's devastating what has happened to all the hospitals. Now there are a few high-end places for the super wealthy, or jails, as you mentioned, or family and others who love the person are expected to house and care for them (which sadly, results in unhoused individuals in many cases). Particularly those with serious mental illness. It's proof that our society doesn't care. Your photos are heartbreaking.
The lack of institutional support for mental health services is troubling to me. I feel like there is a focus on the ugliness that happened in these institutions as opposed to the potential that can be achieved in future iterations.