Chestnut Lodge (formerly known as Woodlawn Hotel) was a historic building in Rockville, Maryland, United States, well known as a psychiatric institution. Located at 500 W Montgomery Avenue, [1] it was a contributing property to the West Montgomery Avenue Historic District. [2]
In 1886, Charles G. Willson commissioned an architect to build a four-story brick "summer boarding house" on 5 acres (2.0 ha) of land he had purchased in the west of Rockville. During the construction of the building, Willson filed for bankruptcy, and the unfinished building was bought for $6,000 by Mary J. Colley (the owner of the Clarendon Hotel in Washington, D.C.) and her partner Charles W. Bell. Under their ownership, the building was opened as the Woodlawn Hotel in the spring of 1889. The hotel boasted electric bells, gas lighting, and 40 luxurious guest rooms. Catering to rich visitors from Washington who boarded in the hotel during the summer months, it was initially quite successful.
In 1900, town officials refused to allow the Washington & Rockville Railway to begin operating streetcars until the company fulfilled its agreement to extend tracks from Courthouse Square west to the hotel. [3]
After a decade or so of prosperity, however, the fortunes of the Woodlawn Hotel declined as many of its semi-permanent residents moved into new houses in Rockville. In 1906, the hotel's owners were heavily in debt and were forced to sell the building and grounds at public auction.
The hotel was purchased by Ernest Luther Bullard (1859–1931), a native of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a surgeon and professor of psychiatry and neurology. Bullard renovated the building and re-opened it in 1910 as a sanatorium for the care of nervous and mental diseases, renaming it Chestnut Lodge after the 125 chestnut trees that grew on the grounds.
For many years, Bullard was the sole physician working at the Lodge, but over the next 75 years a total of three generations of the Bullard family operated the private hospital. Many nationally renowned therapists, including psychoanalytic psychiatrist Clarence Edward Bunge, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, [4] [5] Wayne Fenton, [6] Thomas McGlashan, [7] Harold Searles, [8] and Otto Allen Will Jr., worked at the hospital over the years. The hospital was the site for a series of influential studies on the long-term treatment outcome for psychiatric conditions, known as the Chestnut Lodge studies. [7] [9] [10]
In the 1950s and 1960s, innovative dance therapist Marian Chace had regularly scheduled sessions with groups of patients. Judith Richardson Bunney followed her in this work. In the 1960s and 1970s, Donn B. Murphy conducted a drama group for patients. One of the core therapeutic features of Chestnut Lodge was to encourage the individuality of both patient and staff. This was found to have stimulated creativity and both groups benefitted by overcoming pressures to conform. [11]
The psychiatric work performed at Chestnut Lodge was detailed in the 1954 book, "The Mental Hospital." The book provides insight into both the positive and negative aspects of mental health treatment at the time. Written by three psychiatrists, the work delves into many of the factors influencing patient and staff interaction. [12]
In 1980, Rafael Osheroff, a nephrologist and father of three, sued Chestnut Lodge for negligence. In his complaint, Osheroff claimed that "the staff failed to prescribe drugs and instead treated him according to the psychodynamic and social model.” [13] The lawsuit was settled in 1987 by an agreement between the two parties. [14] [15]
In 1997, the lodge was purchased by CPC Health, [16] then was obtained by the Washington Waldorf School in 2001 when CPC Health declared bankruptcy. [17] In December 2003, the property was conveyed to Chestnut Lodge Properties, Inc.
In 2008, zoning officials approved a plan to convert the main building to condominiums and build upscale housing nearby. [18] The grove of chestnut trees and some original building façades were to be preserved.
Around 3 a.m. on Sunday, June 7, 2009, the unoccupied structure caught fire and collapsed. No one was injured. The cause of the fire was not immediately known. [19]
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1964) is a semi-autobiographical novel by Joanne Greenberg, written under the pen name of Hannah Green. It served as the basis for a film in 1977 and a play in 2004.
Herbert "Harry" Stack Sullivan was an American Neo-Freudian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who held that "personality can never be isolated from the complex interpersonal relationships in which [a] person lives" and that "[t]he field of psychiatry is the field of interpersonal relations under any and all circumstances in which [such] relations exist". Having studied therapists Sigmund Freud, Adolf Meyer, and William Alanson White, he devoted years of clinical and research work to helping people with psychotic illness.
Hildegard E. Peplau was an American nurse and the first published nursing theorist since Florence Nightingale. She created the middle-range nursing theory of interpersonal relations, which helped to revolutionize the scholarly work of nurses. As a primary contributor to mental health law reform, she led the way towards humane treatment of patients with behavior and personality disorders.
The Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HRSD), also called the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HDRS), sometimes also abbreviated as HAM-D, is a multiple-item questionnaire used to provide an indication of depression, and as a guide to evaluate recovery. Max Hamilton originally published the scale in 1960 and revised it in 1966, 1967, 1969, and 1980. The questionnaire is designed for adults and is used to rate the severity of their depression by probing mood, feelings of guilt, suicide ideation, insomnia, agitation or retardation, anxiety, weight loss, and somatic symptoms.
The trauma model of mental disorders, or trauma model of psychopathology, emphasises the effects of physical, sexual and psychological trauma as key causal factors in the development of psychiatric disorders, including depression and anxiety as well as psychosis, whether the trauma is experienced in childhood or adulthood. It conceptualises people as having understandable reactions to traumatic events rather than suffering from mental illness.
Frieda Fromm-Reichmann was a German psychiatrist and contemporary of Sigmund Freud who immigrated to America during World War II. She was a pioneer for women in science, specifically within psychology and the treatment of schizophrenia. She is known for coining the now widely debunked term Schizophrenogenic mother. In 1948, she wrote "the schizophrenic is painfully distrustful and resentful of other people, due to the severe early warp and rejection he encountered in important people of his infancy and childhood, as a rule, mainly in a schizophrenogenic mother".
Deinstitutionalisation is the process of replacing long-stay psychiatric hospitals with less isolated community mental health services for those diagnosed with a mental disorder or developmental disability. In the 1950's and 1960's, it led to the closure of many psychiatric hospitals, as patients were increasingly cared for at home, in halfway houses, group homes, and clinics, in regular hospitals, or not at all.
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Harold Frederic Searles was one of the pioneers of psychiatric medicine specializing in psychoanalytic treatments of schizophrenia. Searles had the reputation of being a therapeutic virtuoso with difficult and borderline patients; and of being, in the words of Horacio Etchegoyen, president of the International Psychoanalytical Association, "not only a great analyst but also a sagacious observer and a creative and careful theoretician".
Loren Richard Mosher was an American psychiatrist, clinical professor of psychiatry, expert on schizophrenia and the chief of the Center for Studies of Schizophrenia in the National Institute of Mental Health (1968–1980). Mosher spent his professional career advocating for humane and effective treatment for people diagnosed as having schizophrenia and was instrumental in developing an innovative, residential, home-like, non-hospital, non-drug treatment model for newly identified acutely psychotic persons.
Psychiatry is the medical specialty devoted to the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of deleterious mental conditions. These include various matters related to mood, behaviour, cognition, perceptions, and emotions.
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Wayne Fenton was an American psychiatrist, well known for his academic contributions to the study of schizophrenia including key contributions to the classification of subtypes.
Otto Allen Will Jr. was a U.S. psychiatrist whose work in psychoanalysis focused on treatment of patients with schizophrenia using intensive psychotherapy. He is also credited for his advancement of attachment theory and milieu therapy.
Charles Prudhomme, M.D. (1908–1988), an African-American physician and psychoanalyst, entered the field of psychiatry in the 1930s. He served as the vice-president of the American Psychiatric Association in 1970–1971, the first African-American to gain elected office in the organization.
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Josephine Rohrs Hilgard was an American developmental psychologist, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst. She was a clinical professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Stanford Medical School. She conducted research on mental health and developed the theory of "anniversary reactions", which described how psychiatric issues might be triggered at anniversaries of significant events in a patient's life. She also specialized in hypnotherapy, and published research on the theory and practice of hypnosis.
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The Frieda Fromm-Reichmann Cottage is a historic house located at 19 Thomas Street in Rockville, Montgomery County, Maryland. It was built in 1936 to house the residence and professional office of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, one of the leading psychoanalysts at the Chestnut Lodge psychiatric hospital, on whose grounds it stood. Fromm-Reichmann (1899-1957) was influential in the development of interpersonal psychoanalysis and its use in the treatment of schizophrenia. The cottage was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2021.