Therapy at Arkham Asylum

I started regularly going to therapy in August of 2015. My life had hit a crisis point, and it was clear that I needed an assist getting back on track. I called up the local hospital system and got an assessment appointment, and was directed to go to Bayley-Seton Hospital – which was in the process of being decomissioned, but there were still therapeutic services being run out of the building.

When I pulled up in the driveway and saw the image above, I started laughing. It was too good – the show “Gotham” was, aptly, using the grounds as Arkham Asylum.

It made me feel a little dangerous – I am anything but dangerous.

Bayley-Seton is a truly haunted place. The main building went up in the 1930s, and is a pretty threatening monument to Art Deco design. Servicing primarily military and veteran personnel, as well as the general public, it was sold off in the 1980s as part of Reagan’s efforts to deregulate hospital systems, and the Sisters of Charity bought it and named it after St. Elizabeth Seton.

It’s been through multiple handoffs since then, always with a reduction of services and staff each time. By the time I got there as an outpatient, going every week to see my therapist, it was largely empty. The outbuildings had broken windows, ivy embedded in the brick, and graffiti everywhere. The main building was sparsely occupied, and the primary clientele were coming in buses from halfway houses or other rehab centers.

It was pretty unnerving. But for me, in the waiting room with people bickering over bus passes and appointment times, it was real. It lent a certain seriousness to what I was going through – this isn’t trivial, you really need help. You are not that different from anybody else.

Granted, I wasn’t riding a bullet-ridden Gotham City Corrections bus. I was borrowing the car of my at-the-time boyfriend, as I drove through that archway and tried to find parking amid the prop vehicles cluttering the lot.

When the hospital announced that the therapeutic services were going to move to a shiny new building on the west shore of Staten Island, I was a little deflated. My therapist has been indispensable, and I still continue to see her almost 10 years later (remotely, since COVID, and that works for us). But I miss being an insane criminal. My days of nefarious deeds in the city of Gotham are long gone.