In Washington State, ‘All Solutions ... Are Local’

Route Fifty: Like many states, Washington had founded major state hospitals to house the mentally ill through the better part of the 20th century. As the country moved from institutionalization of those in need of mental health treatment to localized treatment, federal funding went away and major mental health facilities across the country were shuttered.

Such was the case just outside the 10,000-person town of Sedro-Woolley, Washington, where Northern State Hospital—once the largest hospital in the state, employing over 1,000 people and home to over 2,700 patients—has sat largely dormant since it was shuttered in 1973.

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