Bryce Hospital: Reform, Decline, and Wyatt v. Stickney

Bryce Hospital opened in eighteen sixty-one on a hill above the university, at what was then called the Alabama State Hospital for the Insane. Its architect, Samuel Sloan, designed the building according to the Kirkbride Plan, a treatment philosophy developed in the eighteen thirties that held that the physical environment of an asylum could itself be curative. The layout was a long central building flanked by graduated wings, all bathed in light and surrounded by gardens and farm fields.

Patients would work, walk, breathe fresh air, and recover. The theory was humane by the standards of an era when the alternatives included cells, chains, and poorhouses. The hospital's first superintendent, Peter Bryce, arrived from South Carolina in eighteen sixty at twenty-seven years old.

He had studied psychiatric care in Europe and worked in New Jersey before coming to Tuscaloosa. Bryce ran the institution on a philosophy of respect: he banned restraints, including straitjackets and shackles, abolished them entirely by eighteen eighty-two. He encouraged farming, crafts, and patient newspapers.

Between eighteen seventy-two and the early eighteen eighties, some of the patients wrote and edited their own newspaper, called The Meteor, a publication that now represents one of the rare surviving inside accounts of life inside a progressive nineteenth-century psychiatric institution. The institution was later renamed Bryce Hospital in his honor. The twentieth century was less kind to the place.

Patient populations rose while funding shrank. By nineteen seventy, Alabama ranked last among all states in mental-health funding. Bryce held fifty-two hundred patients at that point, in conditions that a Montgomery Advertiser editor compared to a concentration camp.

That same year, a cigarette tax earmarked for mental health was cut and a hundred staff members were laid off. In nineteen seventy-one, a federal lawsuit filed on behalf of a fifteen-year-old boy named Ricky Wyatt produced a landmark ruling by Judge Frank M. Johnson establishing minimum federal standards for the care of people with mental illness.

The case, Wyatt v. Stickney, rewrote the legal relationship between patients and institutions across the entire country. It began in Tuscaloosa, in a hospital named for a man who had tried, a century before, to do better.