The Maine Insane Hospital was built 16 years before the birth of Sigmund Freud, who illuminated the unconscious world, and well over 100 years before the understanding that mental illness was at least as much a biological condition as an environmental one. When lawmakers today are presented with a plan to replace the insane hospital, now called the Augusta Mental Health Institute, they should conclude that, after 160 years, Maine got its money’s worth from AMHI, and a new building is a reasonable investment.

The proposal before the Appropriations and Health and Human Services committees today carries with it a history of AMHI that contains inadequate services, poor planning and a court order that Maine do a better job or else. These failures are not the buildings’ fault, of course, but they stand as a monument to the state’s shortcomings in mental-health care. The buildings themselves are rundown and badly designed for appropriate psychiatric treatment. Four times during the last decade study commissions have considered renovating the current facilities and four times they have concluded that new buildings were needed. The most current study, in 1998, concluded that renovation costs for the forensic unit there would be as expensive as building new and, in any event, the current footprint of the main building would not allow for the design of a state-of-the-art treatment facility.

The proposed facility is modest, compared with the historical number of beds at AMHI. The new psychiatric treatment center would contain 48 civil and 44 forensic beds, as well as 16 beds in two supportive living centers. AMHI once served as many as 1,800 patients, a number few would suggest the state return to, but it is heartening that the current plans would also allow the new $30 million facility to expand in the event more beds are needed.

Some providers of mental health services in this region have been concerned that a new facility in Augusta would mean the end of Bangor Mental Health Institute, creating a serious inconvenience for patients and their families in the northern half of Maine and a loss of jobs in the Bangor area. The report for the Mental Health Department is unambiguous on this issue: “State-operated inpatient hospitalization for Region III is and will continue to be provided by the Bangor Mental Health Institute (BMHI).” Given the state’s uneven policies on the institutes, the statement still may not satisfy everyone.

But with the old facility past its useful life and the demand for mental-health services clearly not being fully met, a new facility in Augusta is a needed and important investment. Done right, Maine might not need to revisit the issue for another 160 years.