Meadowview Psychiatric Hospital

Meadowview Psychiatric Hospital is a hospital in Secaucus, New Jersey.^[1]

Founded as the Hudson County Hospital for the Insane 1864, the hospital was originally located on Snake Hill. In 1927 and its name changed to the Hudson County Hospital Mental Diseases.^[2]

When the asylum originally opened it had a capacity of 140 patients. Different wings were designated for men and women, and each room held several beds. Patients were not limited to the mentally ill. Justification ranged from schizophrenia to syphilis. Many people were admitted to the hospital "who had no reason to be there: healthy residents who had been determined by their relatives to be a burden." Sometimes families signed in their elderly relatives when they could no longer afford to take care of them. At the time, it was not difficult to sign in a patient, but harder for one to leave the hospital. According to Secaucus Town Historian Dan McDonough, "Anybody could sign somebody in. However, you would need three doctors to sign you out." The causes of death of many patients were not recorded, because the patients had been given pauper's funeral in the potter's field on the grounds, which was known as the Hudson County Burial Grounds. In the 1930s the facility adopted the name Mental Disease Hospital, as it was believed to be a less offensive name. At the end of that decade, the hospital was moved to County Avenue at the location where Meadowview Psychiatric Hospital] is now located. In 1939, the Mental Disease Hospital, which by then housed 1,872 people, ceased operations upon the opening of Meadowview Hospital. Patients were moved to the new hospital, at what is now the Meadowview Complex, in January 1927. They were transported in buses and ambulances, according to a contemporary Newark Evening News article. The Hudson County Hospital for Mental Diseases was renamed Hudson County Meadowview Hospital in 1967.^[3][4]

Meadowview Hospital was the victim of serious neglect, losing state funding and license in the 1990s and in 1995 services were contracted out.^[5] The hospital began a slow road to recovery and in 2011 became an accredited mental health facility. It offers 84 beds with inpatients and outpatient treatment and serves the residents of Hudson and surrounding counties.^[1]

See also

• Hudson County Burial Grounds

References

External links

• Meadowview Psychiatric Hospital
• Hudson County Hospital for the Insane

Coordinates: 40°46′59″N 74°03′32″W / 40.7831°N 74.0588°W / 40.7831; -74.0588