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An Imprecise History of Lyons View
1873
The General Assembly appropriates $75,000 and appoints a board to oversee building a mental hospital near Knoxville, in order to ease overcrowding at the insane asylum near Nashville.
1874
The state buys 300 acres of farmland along the Tennessee River from Tom Lyons for $19,500. Construction begins on the new hospital.
1886
The East Tennessee Asylum for the Insane finally opens, after a lack of state funding delayed completion for several years. With a capacity of 250 patients, the hospital is heated by steam and lit by coal oil lamps. Families of the superintendent, physician, steward, and matron live on the top two floors. Treatment at that time consisted of tender loving care, says Lea Acuff, a former chaplain and historian of Lakeshore. "It involved getting people out of the stressful situations of their life and helping them work through the cycle of their illness."
1896
The Underhill building for black patients is constructed. It remained the only building for black people until the hospital was integrated in the 1960s.
Early 1900s
Physicians began to be licensed and the philosophy toward treating mental illness became more clinical (clinical for its day, at least). Doctors learned how syphilis affected people, and would infect patients with malaria in order to produce a high fever in hopes of arresting the disease's progress (usually, though, the disease had progressed too far for the strategy to work). This period also marks a change in treatment philosophy, Acuff says, and families are encouraged to forget about their ill relatives. "When it became scientific, they begin to have inklings about the physical causes of mental illness. It wasn't long before people believed they just don't recover," he says. "There's no great optimism."
1915
Dr. Michael Campbell, the hospital's first and longest serving superintendent resigns. During his 30-year tenure, Campbell's attempts to make the hospital a "model institution for the treatment of the insane...were continually thwarted by a penny-pinching legislature," according to Beyond the Asylum
The History of Mental Handicap Policy in Tennessee . At the time, the state spent 37.5 cents a day on each patient, less than it did on prisoners. "The Knoxville hospital...became a custodial institution, overcrowded with patients of all types housed together and subjected to the use of restraints and drugs."
1927
The hospital undertakes many building projects and changes its name to Eastern State Hospital.
1930s
The hospital begins using various hydrotherapy and shock treatments. With hydrotherapy, patients were doused or soaked several times alternately in hot and cold waters. "The trauma of it seemed to produce some changes, at least they thought it did," Acuff says. Later that decade, electric shock therapy—where convulsions were induced—came into use. Electro-therapy is still considered a viable treatment option, but doctors at the time often overused it. Psychoanalysis is also in vogue, but Eastern State (like most state hospitals) does not have the money, staff, or time for it.
1940
Newspaper articles accuse the Eastern State staff of alcoholism, abusing patients, and keeping inhumane conditions. The state investigates, then swaps superintendents of its Western and Eastern hospitals, bringing Dr. Bedford F. Peterson to Lyons View, where he serves for 24 years. He constructs several new buildings (including the marble-interior Treatment Building, which included electro-, hydro- and hyper-term facilities), and started a patient newspaper, recreational and employee training programs, and community education efforts. "He had a deep attachment with the people. He knew them, knew their names, knew their families. He carried a lot of information in his head, which is why it didn't get written in charts," Acuff says.
1944
The Tennessee Valley Authority creates Fort Loudoun Lake, covering much of the hospital's farmland. The state gives the hospital farmland in another part of the county.
1953
The state creates the Department of Mental Health, removing Eastern State from the prison system. This period also marked a philosophical change—one geared toward helping the mentally ill function in society. The discovery of thorazine and the effects it had on the mentally ill begins pharmaceutical-based treatments throughout the United States.
1960
Dr. Peterson opens the Therapeutic Village, a model community of 12 cottages, a chapel, and shops—designed to prepare the ill to function in society. Unfortunately, it can accommodate only 240 of the hospital's 2,800 patients, and most of them remain locked in overcrowded wards. Today, many of the cottages are being rented out to Knox Youth Sports and Knox County, among others.
1965
Name is changed to Eastern State Psychiatric Hospital.
1971
The hospital's biggest scandal unfolds when the Knoxville Journal and state Rep. Richard Krieg pay a midnight visit, reporting about the over-crowded, unsanitary, unsafe conditions there. The state holds formal hearings, and several hospital administrators either quit or are fired. The new superintendent, Dr. John Marshall, begins a more earnest effort to stabilize mentally ill with drugs, and move them back into the community, using outpatient programs and halfway houses.
1972
The wings of the original hospital are demolished. It becomes the first state hospital to admit all minors to a unit separate from adults.
1973
Overlook Mental Health Center, stressing out-patient treatment, opens at Lyons View.
1974
Eastern State becomes accredited. The lawsuit Townsend v. Treadway requires state institutions to pay patients for work they do there—bringing an end to Lakeshore patients doing farm, laundry, and other work.
1976
Name changes to Lakeshore Mental Health Institute.
1980s
As its budget continues to shrink, the institute releases more and more patients into the community, and cutting staff. In 1981, the state almost turns Lakeshore over to a private company. In 1983, lawmakers consider selling the land—appraised at the time between $6.6 and $8.4 million—and building another hospital elsewhere.
1992
State announces plans to consolidate Lakeshore and Chattanooga's institute within five years, fueling employees' and mental health advocates' fears. So far, plans have not been followed through.
1994
Eighty acres of Lakeshore's property becomes a public park, owned and rented by the City of Knoxville, and managed by Knox Youth Sports.
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