When I was first went into the Jesuits over 40 years ago, I lived at the novitiate in Poughkeepsie, NY. Part of our routine as novices was teaching "catechism" to elementary school-aged children in different venues every week. One of the two places I was assigned to teach at was the Hillcrest School for Children at the Hudson River State Hospital, located only about a half-mile down the road from the Jesuit facility. Actually, the Hillcrest School was set in the very back of the property, well away from the main entrance on Route 9 and we had to take a car back and forth for our weekly visits on Saturday afternoons. I suspect that the main reason for our going there, from the point of view of the hospital, was to give the young kids (they were aged about 6 to 14 years old) someone to talk to. My catechism students, as I recall, included two young brothers who had thrown their youngest baby brother out the window and an 8- or 9-year-old boy who heard voices all the time. My most vivid memory of Hillcrest itself was the temperature inside the building. It always seemed to be somewhere between 80 and 85 degrees in all seasons of the year. I was told that the reason for this was to keep the young patients perpetually fatigued and lethargic. Whether that was true, most of the other novices and me attempted as much as possible to go outside with our young charges onto the grounds of the hospital, both to run around the somewhat hilly area nearby, play a few games like catch, and escape the oppressive heat of their institutional home. I further recall a concerted attempt by at least some of the kids in season to search out and pick rhubarb that grew along the grassy knolls near Hillcrest.

Driving onto the property of the Hudson River State Hospital took visitors into a very different world than the one outside the hospital's stone walls. In the mid-1960s, the patient population living on the grounds of the facility could be numbered in the thousands (at its height, the hospital lodged about 9,000 patients in a mostly self-sustained and enclosed "total institution" as Erving Goffman would have termed it). As our car wound its way past the older buildings on the campus (the picture to the upper left is a drawing of the original "Kirkbride" building at HRSH), we would see many groups of patients being led from one place to another by staff members while, in other spots, patients were sitting in chairs or on benches simply staring out at whatever could be found nearby. It was, I recall, a very quiet environment and few of the mostly older and dilapidated-looking residents seem to speak at all to anyone nearby. Nonetheless, the grounds went on and on and occupied many tree-filled acres.

Psychologist Michael Britt, Ph.D. offers a glimpse into the Hudson River State Hospital (HRSH, later renamed the Mid-Hudson Psychiatric Center), in a recently-posted podcast interview on his website, The Psych Files. Dr. Roger Christenfeld, Research Director at a drastically-smaller current facility, discusses the history and therapeutic work of the HRSH in his interview with Britt. During 33 minutes, Christenfeld provides a glimpse of why the hospital was built and opened in 1869, what life was like for many patients in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and how the notion of a state psychiatric facility changed profoundly after about 1955.

Target Link: Episode 27: From Insane Asylum to Psychiatric Center: A Brief History (33 minutes, the interview is in mp3 format and can be downloaded to your computer)

Associated Resources

• Historic 51: A website devoted to the history of the Hudson River State Hospital. Includes many images and other information (e.g., a timeline) telling the story of the HRSH
• Kirkbride Buildings: This website has photos of the "Kirkbride" style building at HRSH, a standard form for psychiatric asylum buildings in the 19th century. As the introduction to this site explains: "Once state-of-the-art mental healthcare facilities, Kirkbride buildings have long been relics of an obsolete therapeutic method known as Moral Treatment. These massive structures were conceived as ideal sanctuaries for the mentally ill in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Careful attention was given to every detail of their design in order to promote a healthy environment and to convey a sense of respectable decorum. Placed in secluded areas within expansive grounds, many seemed almost palace-like from the outside. But growing populations and insufficient funding led to unfortunate conditions that spoiled their idealistic promise."

In his volume on memory, the German evolutionary biologist, Richard Semon (1859-1918), postulated that the result of encoding an experience in memory would result in a specific physical trace of that experience in the brain's cells, or what he termed an "engram" (Semon, 1904, 1921 [in English]; see Cherkin, 1966, note 1 for a brief explanation of Semon's argument). The famed American neuropsychologist, Karl S. Lashley (1890-1958), searched in vain for evidence of such engrams or memory traces in his Harvard laboratory and went on to propose a countertheory of memory as function of non-localized "mass action" across the brain.

Following upon the work of Ramon y Cajal and Sherrington, the Canadian neuropsychologist, Donald O. Hebb (1904-1985), disagreed with Lashley and argued for a mechanism by which memories could be localized, i.e., his proposal for the "Hebbian synapse" on the neuron and collections of such synapses across associated neurons in the form of "cell assemblies" (see Brown & Milner, 2003, for a longer appreciation of Hebb's contributions). For the past four decades, the focus for identifying Hebbian synapses has been undertaken under the overarching research concern for long-term potentiation (LPT), that is, the assumption that "information is storied in the brain as changes in synaptic efficiency..." and that "the location of storage, the engram of learning and memory, must therefore be found among those synapses which support activity-dependent changes in synaptic efficiency" (Bliss & Collingridge, 1993, p. 31).

In a report published in the Journal of Neuroscience, a group of researchers at the University of California at Irvine have reported the first direct visual and physical evidence for a memory trace. As the press release from the UCI describes their breakthrough work

the study shows that synaptic connections in a region of rats' brains critical to learning change shape when the rodents learn to navigate a new, complex environment. In turn, when drugs are administered that block these changes, the rats don’t learn, confirming the essential role the shape change plays in the production of stable memory...Working with advanced microscopic techniques called restorative deconvolution microscopy, the UC Irvine team found that the LTP-related markers appear during learning and are associated with expanded synapses in the hippocampus. Because the size of a synapse relates to its effectiveness in transmitting messages between neurons, the new results indicate that learning improves communication between particular groups of brain cells.  (UC Irvine scientists, 2007, July 25).

So, more than a century after Semon proposed a role for a physical trace in the brain's cell in the establishment of a memory, laboratory research has appeared to confirm this finding.

Target article: Fedulov, V., Rex, C. S., Simmons, D. A., Palmer, L., Gall, C. M., & Lynch, G. (2007). Evidence that long-term potentiation occurs within individual hippocampal synapses during learning. Journal of Neuroscience, 27(30), 8031-8039. [Link to abstract]

Press release: UC Irvine scientists unveil the 'face' of a new memory [Press release]. (2007, July 24). Today@UCI. Retrieved July 31, 2007 from the UCI website: http://today.uci.edu/news/release_detail.asp?key=1638

References

Bliss, T. V. P., & Collingridge, G. L. (1993, Jan 7). A synaptic model of memory: Long-term potentiation in the hippocampus. Nature, 361(6407), 31-39.

Brown, R. E., & Milner, P. M. (2003). The legacy of Donald O. Hebb: More than the Hebb synapse. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 4, 1013-1019. Retrieved July 31, 2007 from http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v4/n12/full/nrn1257_fs.html

Cherkin, A. (1966, Jan 15). Toward a quantitative view of the engram. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 55(1), 89-91.

Hebb, D. O. (1949). The organization of behavior: A neuropsychological theory. New York: Wiley. (Reprinted by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002.)

Semon, R. (1904). Die Mneme als erhaltendes Prinzip im Wechsel des organischen Geschehens. Leipzig, Germany: Wilhelm Engelmann.

Semon, R. (1921). The mneme. London: Allen and Unwin.

The Wellcome Trust has made available both its historical and contemporary image library for biomedical topics. Read More...

The New York Times reports that the founder of "rational-emotive behavior therapy," Albert Ellis, has died at age 93. Ellis was both an incredibly influential figure in his challenge to the orthodoxy of Freudian theory in the 1950s and 1960s, but also one of the great characters in psychology. His belief that people are prone to think like they were crazy (and thereby makes themselves nuts) and that people believe all sorts of nonsense prompted him to rail and challenge both patients and critics alike. I only saw Ellis once or twice at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, but to hear him preach the "Gospel of St. Albert" as the New York Times obit writer put it was a bracing experience. In class, lectures and discussions about Ellis' approach to therapy in my experience often bring out passionate statements in support and opposition. But, they are always fun.

Target article: Kaufman, M. T. (2007, July 25). Albert Ellis, influential psychotherapist, dies at 93. New York Times. Retrieved July 24, 2007 from the New York Times website.

Resources: Albert Ellis Institute | Albert Ellis (@ Wikipedia)