True Horrors at Cook County Insane Asylum and Poor Farm

Episode two of Borrowed Lives, “Finding Liberty,” begins with Elise being startled awake after being doused with a deluge of freezing cold water. The man conducting the treatment refers to it as “cold-water therapy,” and reveals that Elise is in the Cook County Asylum for the Insane.

The asylum was a real place in Chicago, often called Dunning, and Hydrotherapy was the name of the treatment being used on Elise. It was thought at the time to help soothe people who were depressed or agitated. The man in charge refers to himself as an alienist. The term is rooted in the Latin word, allius, which means other. It’s also the source for the English word alien and the French word, aliéniste, referring to a doctor who treats the mentally ill. The character would be called a psychiatrist today.

When the facility opened in 1854, it was a home for the poor and homeless, where people who had fallen on hard times could get food and a place to sleep. Because so many residents also struggled with mental illness, Chicago added an Insane Department and eventually built a separate Cook County Insane Asylum in 1870. It’s believed there could be up to 38,000 bodies lying in unmarked graves underneath the old grounds.

Residents began calling the mental health facility the Dunning Asylum in 1882 when the Chicago rail line added a stop there called the Dunning Station. It was named after the Dunning family, who owned property just south of the asylum.

Dunning became known as a nightmarish hell parents used to frighten naughty children. “Be good or I’ll send you to Dunning,” was a dreaded phrase. The facility gained a horrible reputation because it was true for most of the residents. Rather than getting the mental health treatment they needed, the inmates were neglected and abused while living in the perpetually overcrowded rooms. And the food was often spoiled and filled with weevils.

In 1874, a Chicago Times reporter visited the asylum and found the conditions deplorable and the stench unbearable. The report quoted an attendant, “The rooms swarm with vermin. The cots and bedclothes are literally alive with them. We cannot keep the men clean, and we cannot drive the parasites away unless they are clean.”

Patients suffered these horrific conditions for decades until the state took over the asylum from the county, and it became the Chicago State Hospital. Eventually, mental healthcare improved in the 1950s with the invention of Thorazine, among other advances.

Keep following “Borrow Lives” to find out what other historical locations the characters will visit.