History
The hospital was established in 1889 and opened in July 1893, and the first superintendent was Dr. Edward Warren King. [3] By June 1900, the Ukiah district attorney Hon. T. L. Carothers filed charges against Dr. Edward Warren King, for reasons including, "incompetency, lack of medical skill, high-handed and dictatorial methods, lack of ability to command respect of his subordinates" and other charges. [4]
This hospital was the destination for inmates charged with crimes but found not guilty by reason of insanity. Its earliest patients, all male, were transferred from other state mental institutions at Stockton State Hospital and Napa State Hospital. [3] The name of the hospital was changed in 1893 to the Mendocino Asylum. [3] Female patients were accepted beginning in 1894. Two additional wards were built in 1910 and 1918, respectively and a major renovation and expansion of the facility took place between 1925 and 1933. The original main, Kirkbride plan building, was completed in 1893 and was razed in 1952.
By 1932, the hospital had over 1,900 patients and 300 employees and by 1935, the figure had risen to over 2,600 patients. [3] The hospital population hit a high in 1955, at over 3,000 patients and 700 employees. Increasing discharges and transfer of the criminally insane to the Atascadero State Hospital eased the overcrowding. By 1966, population was back under 1,800 patients.
In 1920, Dr. Martha G. Thorwick was affiliated with this hospital. [5] This hospital was one of the many state asylums that had sterilization centers. [6]
Roughly 1,600 patients died at the Mendocino State Hospital with 1,200 were cremated, and 400 people were buried in a mass grave at the Ukiah Cemetery (after the graves were relocated). [2]
Controversial Practices and Patient Experiences
During its operation from 1893 to 1972, Mendocino State Hospital in Talmage, California, participated in California's eugenics program under the 1909 Asexualization Act, performing forced sterilizations on patients deemed "unfit" to prevent the inheritance of mental disorders; as one of seven state psychiatric facilities involved, it contributed to the approximately 12,000 such procedures in mental hospitals statewide between 1909 and the 1950s, often without informed consent and motivated by overcrowding and societal control. A notorious 1920s incident highlighted the era's casual brutality when hospital officials invited the president of the Association of Railway Surgeons to sterilize two inmates as a "special honor" during a convention. Lobotomies, the invasive prefrontal leucotomy procedure popularized in the 1940s to treat severe mental illness, were also conducted at Mendocino as part of broader U.S. psychiatric trends, leaving many patients with permanent brain damage, emotional blunting, or death, though exact numbers remain undocumented in available records. No direct evidence links the hospital to CIA-funded mind control experiments like MKUltra, which targeted other institutions, but its history of experimental therapies—such as insulin coma and electroshock—reflected the era's unethical human experimentation on vulnerable populations. Patient escapes, termed "elopements" in administrative logs, were recurrent due to chronic understaffing and overcrowding, peaking in the 1930s when the population exceeded 2,600; monthly reports tracked dozens of incidents, including names, wards, and recovery costs, with community "shelter-in-place" alerts in the 1960s underscoring public safety fears, while staff abuses like beatings with blackjacks in the 1950s led to criminal convictions. These practices, alongside roughly 1,600 patient deaths (many buried in unmarked mass graves), exemplified the institutional neglect that prompted the hospital's closure amid statewide deinstitutionalization efforts.
Connections Between Jonestown, Jim Jones, and Mendocino State HospitalIn the mid-1960s, Jim Jones relocated the Peoples Temple from Indiana to Redwood Valley in Mendocino County, California, drawn by the area's rural isolation and proximity to Mendocino State Hospital, a sprawling psychiatric facility in Talmage that served as a hub for the Temple's expansion. Several Temple members, including Jones's wife Marceline—a registered nurse—and at least six others, secured positions on the hospital's psychiatric staff, leveraging these roles to influence patient discharges and secure government funding for the church's burgeoning network of care homes. As California's deinstitutionalization efforts accelerated in the late 1960s, the hospital's patient population plummeted from around 3,000 to 1,200 by 1969, enabling the Temple to absorb former patients into its communal residences, where they received Supplemental Security Income (SSI) payments that funneled substantial revenue—estimated in the tens of thousands annually—to the organization. These "ambulatory" individuals, often vulnerable and in need of structured support, were portrayed by Jones as beneficiaries of the Temple's progressive social welfare model, but the arrangement also amplified his control, as care home operators like Temple loyalists Eva Pugh and Birdie Marabel monitored residents closely, blending rehabilitation with indoctrination. Amid this, the hospital's Department of Research conducted controversial LSD experiments in 1967, dosing patients to study the drug's impact on human DNA and chromosomal structure, with reports indicating induced breakage after prolonged exposure—trials allegedly funded by the CIA under MKUltra's umbrella of mind control initiatives, though direct Temple involvement remains speculative and tied to broader conspiracy narratives. Jones capitalized on this milieu, smuggling pharmaceuticals (including mind-altering drugs possibly pilfered from the facility) to Jonestown in Guyana by 1977, where they were used to enforce compliance during the commune's "White Nights" rehearsals for mass suicide. Dozens of these former Mendocino patients eventually followed Jones to the South American settlement, only to perish in the 1978 massacre, underscoring how the Temple's hospital ties transformed institutional castoffs into unwitting participants in a tragic utopian experiment.
In 1972, the hospital was closed. [1]
