LARNED — State officials today celebrated the 100th anniversary of Larned State Hospital, the state’s largest psychiatric hospital.

Kansas Department for Aging and Disability Services Secretary Shawn Sullivan joined Larned State Hospital Superintendent Dr. Tom Kinlen at a ceremony that included remarks from Sullivan and others and a signed event proclamation from Gov. Sam Brownback.

Kinlen rang a special bell, a hospital landmark, in honor of the occasion.

“This bell represents the chains and shackles that were used to restrain mental health patients in state institutions or asylums as recently as 60 years ago. In 1956, the McShane Bell Foundry melted the iron of those chains and shackles and recast them into a 300-pound mental health bell. It serves as not only a reminder of the on-going invisible fetters hindering those with mental illness today, but also as a source of hope and victory,” he said.

The Larned hospital, which sits on a 78-acre campus, is one of two state-run mental hospitals and also is home to the state’s Sexual Predator Treatment Program. I

It serves the western two-thirds of the state. It has about 1,000 employees and has capacity for about 450 patients.

It was opened in April 1914 to ease overcrowding at Osawatomie State Hospital and the now-defunct Topeka State Hospital. KDADS officials said the Larned location was chosen because there was plentiful water.

In the early years, “useful employment” was the treatment most frequently used at the hospital, so male patients were given priority. No female patients were admitted until 1916. The hospital’s farming operations continued until the 1950s.

The State Security Program, which was called the program for the “criminally insane,” first opened at the hospital in March 1939. It remains the only such forensic facility in Kansas. The Legislature established the Sexual Predator Treatment Program at Larned in 1994.

Over the past 100 years, the hospital has treated more than 58,000 individual patients, according to KDADS officials.