♪♪ ♪♪ Mike Cook: My name is Mike Cook.
I'm our Plant Operations Manager here at the Independence Mental Health Institute and then I also take care of the museum.
♪♪ Mike Cook: We are currently standing on the 3rd floor of the Reynolds building, which was the first building built here.
They started construction on it in 1868.
So, where we're standing now would have been one of the male wards many, many years ago.
♪♪ Mike Cook: The history of the hospital is really pretty fascinating.
It is going on 150 years.
It has been here a long time.
It has always been owned by the state.
It has always been a state mental hospital.
We are the second state mental hospital in Iowa, Mount Pleasant was the first.
And that has been its purpose, it has gone through several different changes over the years as far as treatments and that type of thing, but the hospital has always continued to serve some of the best care that the mentally ill can have.
It has always kind of been a catch-all, it houses a lot of the very seriously mentally ill that other places are not capable of housing or handling.
♪♪ Mike Cook: Up until the 1800s there really wasn't a mental hospital, a hospital to serve the mentally ill. And it was looked upon much differently then than it is looked upon today, a lot of times your relatives would simply lock you in an attic bedroom or a basement room or you would be dumped off at a county poor farm or something.
But the conditions you lived in were horrible, they were never very good, there wasn't any place you could get any kind of help or any place that you would even be treated with respect or dignity.
♪♪ Mike Cook: Dr. Thomas Kirkbride is a very interesting, very fascinating person and he was able to come up with his design, his Kirkbride architecture.
So, his view was you built this huge big beautiful building, this big castle almost, out in the middle of the country.
Most of them, all of them were basically built in the country because that gave you the opportunity to have farmland and you could have crops and animals, but it also gave you the opportunity to have nature trails and this type of thing.
So, that was kind of all of his, his idea was you would take these people who life has not been very kind to or treated very well, and you would put them in this huge big castle and you would treat them with respect and dignity.
♪♪ Mike Cook: The museum tells a lot, honestly.
One of the most important things I think is the museum really paints a picture of the patients.
And everything is from the nearly 150 years the hospital has been here.
Being in maintenance, obviously, we're in every little nook and cranny and everywhere so we're always finding things.
A lot of the dressers, a lot of the furniture, a lot of the furniture the patients made, a lot of art work, a lot of the art work has been done by the patients.
We've always had a real big activities program for the patients from the beginning and we still do today.
Mike Cook: And things are set up, each room is kind of set up in its own thing.
So the kitchen display, all the old kitchen utilities, and at the height of our population we had over 1,800 patients, so cooking was quite a chore.
Some of the different treatments that were done here, the electric shock treatment, for example, the first electric shock treatment that was used here that is on display here.
We also have two trocars that were used during the transorbital lobotomies when that kind of took place through the 1940s and '50s.
Medical equipment from the lab and the pharmacy and also that was just used in the exam rooms.
A big library display, we have a lot of the books that were originally used back in the 1860s and 1870s that were here.
So it's a wide range, but it all centers around the hospital and the patients and how it has changed over the nearly 150 years that it has been here.
♪♪ Mike Cook: You know, history in general is just extremely important for everybody to know.
History always kind of repeats itself and we need to know our past and our history and learn from that to try to move forward and learn what worked and what didn't work and what methods were the best and why types of treatments really had the greatest effect and that kind of stuff because mental illness isn't going to go away, the same as with any kind of major illness.
And we can learn from that and come up with better treatments and better ways to deal with that to help those people cope and have a more positive, productive life.
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