I'm Aisha Roscoe, and this is the Sunday story.
If you drive a couple hours north of Seattle, you'll find a lush valley, miles of farmland, gray mountains in the distance, and the ruins of an old psychiatric hospital.
This hospital, northern state, opened more than 100 years ago.
It once had a working farm and its own power plant.
Here's Sydney Brownstone, an investigative reporter with the Seattle Times, describing it.
Northern state was founded on this idea of occupational therapy, this notion that if you are given work to do, like on the farm or in the dairy, in the laundry, you will develop better mental hygiene and then be able to return to society.
It was a very hopeful time.
Northern state is how psychiatric care used to look in the US.
Sprawling campuses with armies of doctors and nurses employed by state governments.
The buildings themselves look like they could be tuscan villas or something.
So they have these beautiful terracotta tiles, these neatly manicured lawns.
This was done very intentionally for the purpose of healing.
But, you know, some historians and experts say that it had a double purpose.
It also served to make people outside the institution feel better about what was going on inside of it.
Patients for years or even decades in hospitals like these.
And doctors sometimes use brutal methods to try to control their behavior.
Induce comas, lobotomies.
Then, in the middle of the last century, antipsychotic drugs arrived, and doctors adopted new, progressive views about psychiatric care.
As a result, states started to shut down the old style hospitals.
Over the past half century, 84% of state psychiatric hospital beds in the US have disappeared.