NAMI Athens Speaker Series at The Athens Public Library

The Early Years of the Athens Lunatic [sic] Asylum

Speaker: Katherine Ziff

.15 CEUs for Athens Public Schools Teachers

In spite of modern medicine, the plight of most persons with chronic mental illness in the twenty-first century is serious. Over half receive no care whatsoever on any given day. Many are homeless, and of those receiving care in Ohio’s insinstitutions, four times as many are in our jails and prisons as in the few tiny hospitals. Remarkably, this situation is quite similar to that which Dorothea Dix campaigned against in the mid-nineteenth century. But Dix’s campaign was surprisingly successful as state governments all over the country responded to her plea by building carefully designed and beautifully landscaped mental health asylums designed to provide “moral treatment” to persons with mental illnesses – then considered morally impaired. Katherine Ziff – Department of Counseling at Wake Forest University and author of Asylum on the Hill: History of A healing Landscape – will explain.

Time:  6:30-8:00 PM

DATE: MARCH 24, 2016

Location:  Athens Public Library, 30 Home Street, Athens, OH 45701.