Kennedy first brought up wellness farms during his presidential run, and when he painted a picture of pastoral meccas for treating addiction, he joined a tradition that dates back more than 200 years. Take the Retreat, founded in England at the end of the 18th century by a Quaker, William Tuke, who along with the French doctor Phillipe Pinel is considered a father of “moral treatment,” an effort to create humane hospitals. Instead of shackles and corporal punishment, the Retreat provided a stately country home, with acres of land to tend cows and grow food. The doctor Benjamin Rush—who signed the Declaration of Independence—was inspired by moral treatment, and wrote in 1812 that men who “assist in cutting wood, making fires, and digging in a garden, and the females who are employed in washing, ironing, and scrubbing floors, often recover,” whereas those who don’t do any manual labor do not.
Tuke and Pinel believed that farming was especially helpful, and many early asylums in the United States employed a “work as therapy” component, says Neil Gong, a sociologist at UC San Diego. At the time, these institutions were cutting-edge, and those running them believed that the “insane” didn’t have to be locked up in chains to improve. “Mental hospitals started out in the 19th century with very utopian expectations around them and their ability to cure,” says Andrew Scull, a sociologist and the author of Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry’s Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness. By the end of the 19th century, every state had at least one government-funded institution.
But when moral treatment was generalized to larger populations, it fell apart. (The Retreat was designed to take on only 30 patients.) Over time, government-run asylums became overwhelmed with cases, and rampant with abuse. At scale, institutions “rapidly declined into warehouses where lots of unpleasant things happen to the patients, and where patients tended to get lost,” Scull told me.
Including farming didn’t protect against such issues, either. The Fort Worth Narcotic Farm, a federally funded project opened in 1938, promised to blend honest farmwork with recovery from drug addiction. Only 25 percent of patients, one study estimates, stuck to their treatment plan, and most people treated at federal narcotic farms, according to a 1957 study, used drugs after they left. The U.S. Narcotics Farm, which opened in 1935, was the temporary home of many famous jazz musicians, including Chet Baker. But once people left the farm, the majority—nearly 90 percent—relapsed. It closed in 1976 after a congressional inquiry led by Senator Ted Kennedy found that doctors were testing experimental drugs on the people living there, and sometimes giving patients drugs such as heroin and cocaine as a reward.