History
Begininngs and Early Mission
On April 23rd, 1869, the 300 bed St. Louis County Insane Asylum opened its doors, admitting on its first day 127 patients transferred by wagon train from an over-crowded state hospital in Fulton and 80 from the County Poor Farm. The Asylum was the second in the State, the first being Fulton State Hospital, which opened its doors in 1851, and was notable for not being just first in Missouri, but the first psychiatric hospital west of the Mississippi. It took the suicide of Missouri’s 7th governor, Thomas Reynolds, in 1844 to get the enabling legislation passed for Fulton’s construction, after the crusading efforts of Dorothea Dix had fallen on deaf ears in 1841.
Present Reality and Current Mission
For much of its history, St. Louis State Hospital had been a “full service” psychiatric facility, with acute, intermediate and long-term psychiatric beds, Gero-psychiatry unit, a child and adolescent unit, a substance abuse unit, an emergency room, and an outpatient clinic with satellites stretching as far south as Farmington and as far west as New Haven, Missouri. Beginning in the 1960’s, the hospital began to downsize, reflecting the nation’s effort at deinstitutionalization of individuals with severe and persistent mental illness, in an effort to promote greater community integration. With the advent of new medications, and community-based service alternatives that are now available to assist in the care of our clients, the hospital reduced its scope of care as well as the number of patients served, shrinking from 4,400 patients to its current census of 180 clients. Today, the Department of Mental Health successfully treats the vast majority of its 76,000 clients in the community, with only 1,100 in institutional settings.