Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania • Page 10

Dec 27 2008 Post-Gazette PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE SUNDAY, DECEMBER 28, 2008 WWW.POST-GAZETTE.COM A-10 cous games and patients were set to work growing their own food, and doctors and aides used straitjackets and warm baths and sheer force of persuasion to help a population that once included the mad, the elderly, the depressed and, in its beginnings, the plain impoverished. had a coal mine. They made their own steam. Electricity. They had a farm and probably grew about 60 percent of all the food they ate.

They canned the food. They grew their own wheat and made their own said Father DeVille. was certainly Isolation scorned The era when mental patients dug the coal for the institution that sheltered them ended long ago. In later years, reforms in mental health law closed down the farms and canneries, and patients no longer worked the laundry after experts drew an uncrossable boundary between work and treatment. they took the work away, it was very troubling to some of the patients.

They were satisfied where they Father DeVille said. In turns, as treatment philosophies changed, the hospital, with 80 buildings dotting 1,001 acres in South Fayette, began to wither. Today a handful of buildings still run. At last measurement, the grounds encompassed 335 acres. Mayview is passing, and not altogether quietly.

State officials insist the closure represents progress, a new day. Critics suggest that some of the mentally ill sent into the community flourish as promised. absolutely a wonderful thing that this hospital is said Mary Jeanne Serafin, the chief executive officer and a longtime veteran of both Mayview and the now closed Woodville State Hospital. we know today about people who have mental illness is that they really do much better, they recover much better in an environment that is inclusive of the community and that they get other kinds of supports and services in the community that were not able to be duplicated in this environment because of its isolation from the That isolation, now coming to an end, was once thought strength. It entered the world in 1893 as Marshalsea, so-named for the famous London debtors prison in which Charles father was once held.

Built as a successor to almshouse and relocated from the banks of the Monongahela, Marshalsea became a place to which the poor, the orphaned, the unwed pregnant, the tubercular, were sent, living alongside the insane, mentally retarded and members of the population who were merely inexplicable. Most of the remaining old buildings at the South Fayette site are vacant; only a few dozen patients are left, and soon, they will be gone. The hospital is the remnant of a time when experts believed people with mental illness were best cared for in large institutions, often in rural settings. Many around the state closed as medications improved and government policies and court decisions increasingly directed people with mental illness to live in group homes or other commu- nity settings. Father DeVille, who served as chaplain at Mayview from 1992 to 2000 and at Woodville State Hospital in Collier in the three preceding decades, remembers patients who were largely forgotten in that system of care, where lengths of stay often lasted years.

But for him, the Mayview closing still evokes some nostalgia. strange, but I fell in love with the patients. Even when they beat me he said. They did that, sometimes. The hospital began long before the days of psychotropic drugs.

Cold packings, and thermal baths and steam cabinets were common. Two former Mayview nurses, Marion Franks and Josephine Walsh watched the film with Father DeVille 15 years ago, and their comments were recorded. They reeled off names and, sometimes, recalled folks who were defined by their task at Mayview. The man who gave water treatments to calm patients flickered on the screen. called him Hydro Mrs.

Franks said. Some patients were packed into heating machines, their heads jutting out and wrapped in ice to prevent seizures. The treatment was meant to kill syphillis, an incurable disease 75 years ago. An ultraviolet lamp treated skin ailments. did very well for what we knew, you know what I Mrs.

Walsh said. What they knew changed exponentially as the mysteries of the mind were unlocked by medical science. Mayview moved from an almshouse to a hospital in a transition that mirrored changes in society, Mayview: a last reminder MAYVIEW, FROM PAGE A-1 SEE MAYVIEW, PAGE A-11 Steve strange, but I fell in love with the patients. Even when they beat me The Rev. George DeVille thatyour moneyissafeandhaspotentialforgrowth.

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