From time to time, we get calls in the newsroom from relatives of people staying at Eastern State Hospital, asking us 
to examine the conditions inside the facility — the second-oldest psychiatric hospital in the United States.
In Sunday’s newspaper, staff writer Beth Musgrave takes a look inside Eastern State Hospital. Beth, who has written extensively about services for the mentally ill and the mentally disabled in recent years, reviewed inspection reports and interviewed inspectors, officials in the state fire marshals office, Eastern State officials, advocates for the mentally ill and former patients and their families about the condition of Lexington’s 180-year-old hospital for the mentally ill.
Although there are disagreements about the condition of the buildings, almost everyone agrees that the campus of Eastern State, near Newtown Pike, is obsolete. Through her reporting, Beth explains why, and updates plans to move and rebuild the facility in more modern fashion. Both in the paper and on Kentucky.com, find out why one advocate for the mentally ill says the aging structure is a "disgrace to our state" — and why advocates say rebuilding it needs to be higher on the priority list.
Then on Monday, Beth returns to the Communities at Oakwood, the state’s largest home for the mentally disabled. The Somerset facility has been in the news throughout the last several years — but few of the headlines have been good ones. Oakwood had been cited repeatedly by the state over patient safety concerns, and the federal government has threatened to revoke its funding. Oakwood is now under a new management team, and Beth found some noticeable changes there. In Monday’s paper, Beth details those changes, which could prove crucial in whether the facility keeps its federal funding.
UPDATE (8/22/07): The state today will announce that it has reached an agreement to allow plans for a new Eastern State Hospital to move forward more quickly. For that story, click here.
Peter Baniak
metro editor
Nothing could be more important than protecting the residents of Eastern State Hospital and Somerset. These are our forgotten citizens. We owe it to them and ourselves to see that they received adequate if not superior treatment. We already spend about 500 dollars a day per partient at each institution. We must make sure that the patients receive the full benefit of that expenditure. Beth Musgrave has no doubt saved lives at these institutions by her stories. - Daniel W. Phillips III, Ph.D.
I am glad to see that someone cares enough to make the statement that David did. The people did not ask or do anything to be this way. Now people are wanting to cut funding for them, ship them out, or whatever it takes to keep them from being a taxpayers burden. But we have druggies out here who voluntarily end up like this, and we want to spend taxpayers monry to help them. What’s wrong with this picture?
I was a patient in the hospital by court order for 72 hrs. the hospital is fallen apart. in my room there was a hole behind my bed with the inside of the wall showing. there is peeling lead paint every wheres. I was in a wheelchair and going over to the class room in the recovery mall was not for people in wheelchairs you had steep up hills and steep down hills in the hallways by the time i got over. I thought I was going to have a heart attack. A lot of the patient in there have trouble walking or are in wheelchair. I sure hope they consider the patients when building the new building. I didn’t even want my husband to even see the condtion of the hospital. the chair we sat in to watch tv lokked like they hadn’t been cleaned forever. and when we had meals everyone did not have chair at the dining table they had to set else where to eat with their trays on thier laps.