The Glore Psychiatric Museum Proves that Museums Can Be Horrifying

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When most people envision a trip to the museum, they imagine that it will be stuffy and boring. The Glore Psychiatric Museum absolutely demolishes this stereotype with a varied collection of morbidly fascinating artifacts and displays.

The human body is an incredibly complex thing, and the most complicated part of the body is the brain.

This museum helps to document the ways that society have attempted to treat people with mental issues or people who society deemed to be defective.

St. Joseph State Mental Hospital

The Glore Psychiatric Museum was built in a building that was once the St. Joseph State Mental Hospital.

That means that when you walk through the halls of the museum, you are visiting rooms that once held real patients who experienced many of the things you’ll see recreated in the museum.

As Glore worked his ambitions grew, and he worked to help document the history of how mental illness was treated throughout American history and beyond.

Many of the recreations found in the museum were created by patients who helped with the process as a sort of treatment.

 

Patients In St. Joseph State Mental Hospital

Whether or not recreating items that were basically torture devices is effective treatment can be debated, but these artifacts are now on display, and the past can’t be undone. We can only hope to learn from the past and try to avoid making the same mistakes over again. At first glance, many of the rooms in the museum feel scenes from a, particularly morbid Halloween display. But the sad truth is that humans have been unspeakably horrible to people who they deemed different.

Just 50 years ago people who behaved abnormally were lobotomized and reduced to living vegetables in the name of making them “normal”.

This isn’t to suggest that doctors were wrong to try and treat the patients who passed through the hospital.

Artifact In The Glore Psychiatric Museum

The museum also has artifacts that show just how destructively humans can become for reasons beyond their control.

Visitors can witness the more than 1,400 metal and plastic objects that were found in one patient after they died unexpectedly.

A Way Use to Detained Patients

The museum is named after Dr. George Glore, who worked in the building when it was a working mental hospital.

He turned to the people who were treated in the building for inspiration, asking them to help him recreate the treatments they had gone through to serve as a testament for future generations.

The Glore Psychiatric Museum is actually part of a larger collection of museums in St. Joseph, Missouri.

If the Glore sounds interesting, then you should consider making a day of it by swinging by some of the other museums.

If you’re in Missouri and interested in history, morbid artifacts, or mental health, then The Glore Psychiatric Museum is a must-visit destination.

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