Campus History Project: Athens Hospital For The Insane

Jordan Mills

English 151

Campus History Project

Athens Hospital for the Insane

The Ridges or as called in my brochure, Athens Hospital for the Insane is a place with deep history. When thinking of a mental hospital most people would picture a person in a straight jacket locked in a cell with padded walls. However, The Ridges was a place of paradise in a way until things took a turn for the worse in its later years.

There are many history buffs in the world today and I believe making a brochure with how the historic mental hospital was ran and operated would be an interesting piece. This brochure talks about history but with a contemporary feel and look to appeal to many. The main demographic is of this piece is 18-75 year olds. Which I do understand is a large demographic, but many people find history interesting, including me.

It was important to indentify a genre for this piece. I quickly thought that when thinking of a mental hospital, people think of a fearsome and unwelcoming place. I wanted to go with a dark feel to quickly identify that this wasn’t a bright and cheerful promotional piece. The overall tone I wanted to give was, as if an old man was reading this to his grandson. You, know, that old crackly voice, but yet composed.

It was important to me to build my credibility with the over feel and look of this brochure. If I went and bought some crayons and colored paper and scribbled everything on a sheet of pink paper and made it look pretty, I don’t think many people would take my piece seriously. When developing this piece I knew I had to make something people would believe in. When someone looked at it, without hesitation they would be pulled in by the over feel and genre of the brochure and want to read it and even maybe visit The Ridges.

With everything out there today, somehow it deals with emotion. Whether it is television, radio, a magazine or an ad, everything is linked up with it. With my piece I could have gone a couple different routes. I thought about making it all white with the Red Cross emblem to relate to a hospital. I could have grabbed the audience that way. Upon further review, I realized when people think of a hospital for the insane, they don’t see a typical hospital. They see a dark and spine-chilling place that I doubt that would want to visit. The emotion I hoped to capture here was fear. Not to the point of where the reader would be too scared to read it but, just to the point of attracting the reader in. The font I used to draw in the audience was for the main points. It is an eerie font that might strike fear into someone, but I wanted to quickly grab him or her right back in, using a regular but gripping font for the regular text.

When it came to the pictures in my brochure, I wanted to throw it back in time. Using a current picture was not an option. For my title page, I used an old picture of the two Victorian towers that look as if lighting should be striking above them at all times. That picture was to flow with the eerie font that I chose for the main titles. If the pictures didn’t flow with the over all layout and genre of the piece, then I failed. I believed I found the proper pictures that go with the over style of this promotional piece.

Making a decision to put in information regarding the haunted part of the ridges was a big decision. Many people have already heard the urban legends that surround that place. At first I did want to include the stories of “the stain” but, I decided otherwise and stuck to the facts and the facts I touched on, all dealt will history from how it begun, to how it ended.

The information that I included in the six sections of this brochure was simple. I decided to write about how the mental hospital got its start. The planning that was involved with it and then how it was developed into a self-sustaining facility. After I touched on that, I decided to talk about how the place had developed further down the road, towards its eventual closing. And that is where I discussed the over crowdedness, the procedures practiced on the patients, such as, lobotomies, electric shock and ice water treatment. From my prospective, I feel it hit on these topics and provided enough information to give you, the audience, an over gist of how The Athens Mental Hospital For the Insane started and how it ended.