7.30.2025
The Kirkbride Plan was a sprawling initiative to create a self-contained paradise on the west side of Traverse City. It was like a regular paradise except most of its citizens were mental patients. They had their own hog farms and everything. The asylum opened in 1885 and closed about a hundred years later. The serious looking psychiatricists who learned how to dress from Freud got up to some pretty interesting stuff there, techniquewise. A list of 'procedures' they engaged in includes: lobotomy/leucotomy; narcosynthesis; neurolepsis; seclusion; hydrotherapy; restraint (devices for which pictured above). A few of my ancestors spent some time up there, and I'd like to know what epigenetic effects got handed down from, say, carbon monoxide induced paralysis to me and my sister and our cousins. Why even though I don't believe in ghosts, strictly speaking, when I walk through the hallways converted into restaurants and knicknack stores I don't want to stick around for long even though the rare book shop, owned and run by the nerdiest bibliophile in town, a guy who refurbishes old typewriters for fun, is one of my favorite loitering spots. After they closed the hospital there wasn't much of a plan. It was a good thing if you're against barbaric surgical practices such as cutting into the brain tissue of the antisocial, but it's not like a whole host of services sprang up to take on the load. The public mental health network here is notoriously ineffective and had itself a tidy little corruption scandal a few years ago. And there was a forested area everyone calls 'The Pines' adjacent to the asylum grounds that served as a de facto homeless camp for years, which wasn't without its problems (tent fires, overdoses), but it was cleared out and not all those folks have somewhere to go. The day before I drove up a guy with Severe Derangement Syndrome managed to stab his way through eleven shoppers at the local Walmart before he was tackled. And being back in the U.S. my first thought was: at least it wasn't an automatic weapon. Then I thought, how did he get that far, and then: who pays attention to someone screaming at Walmart?
A lot has been written about the T.C. State Hospital but this was on hand:
