Kellokoski Psychiatric Hospital (Kellokoski)

 museum, park, hospital, mental health institution / hospital

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Kellokoski psychiatric hospital is a legendary place. It was opened in 1915, over 70 years after the first psychiatric hospital in Finland was opened in Lapinlahti, Helsinki in 1841. Lapinlahti however ceased to function as a psychiatric hospital - or as any kind of a hospital for that matter - in 2008.

Remember "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"?

Well, electric shock treatment was all the rage in Kellokoski, too. In that sense Kellokoski not only kept up with the times but actually went much further than most institutions for example enabling their patients to mingle with townsfolk and even work alongside with them.

Kellokosksi hospital not only tore down the physical fences around the hospital perimeter but also those mental barriers that had made it (and still make it in many parts of the world) hard for "normal" people to see patients as fellow feeling human beings with their own set of idiosyncrasies that aren't necessarily all that different from, say, someone who has a thing for collecting stamps, for example. :)

Largely thanks to Jack Nicholson's wild and moving portrayal of a sane man inside a mental asylum, shock treatment got a bad reputation, almost a death knell, that its still trying to recover from.

Anyways, Kellokoski is still fully functional psychiatric hospital with a very interesting history as one may well imagine.


On the premises is a museum that will be able to shed more light on the history of the hospital, its staff and its inhabitants. Unfortunately the hospital museum is only open by special arrangement (tel. 050 3250 187).