3,181 Comments Posted by Lynne

Jesus, y'all - look who's back! The ghost of our dear departed friend, Thomas Covenant! 8`-)

P.S. Danny, have you spent any time in a functioning morgue with real children who have died or have you ever actually lost a child? The humor dies down a little at that point. Black humor doesn't bother me when it's something you do to handle dealing with death when you have to face it, especially on a day to day basis like some folks do.

psychadellic one - I don't think anyone was intentionally implanting false memories; it's just that most of us didn't realize how much impact we could have on another person through suggestability and our own personal beliefs. However, if "therapists" are still doing this without using the results of the Loftus studies I would question their techniques, results, and ethics. A lot of people lost their licenses and credibility with that whole fiasco, and what's much worse, an awful lot of people were horribly traumatized by this and many family members were imprisoned by false accusations. Very sad.

LST69 - you are a doll, no matter how you spell your name. :-)

That's my Bri! :-)

Yes, I hate to admit my age here, but the Rosenhan study came out while I was in my first year as an undergraduate, and the reverberations were felt widely throughout the field. It was a brilliant study and remains one of the most powerful pieces of work I have ever read. Unfortunately, sometimes people somehow make it into the field without knowing about this incredibly key study.

We had something happen recently in the field (OK, recently to ME - 15 to 20 years ago is a lifetime for many of y'all ) where everyone was being taught that if you couldn't remember being sexually abused by your family, it meant you were obviously sexually abused by your family (but it was too traumatic for you to remember). A lot of well-meaning advocates and mental health personnel caused irreparable harm with that one until the very courageous researcher, Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, published her studies on the fallibility of human memory and the power of suggestion. She and others in the field discussed looking at events without preconception and entering a situation without a preconceived bias, as that skews your results in the manner you expect to see. Ironically, although this has always been the basis of the scientific method, far too many people in the mental health field don't like to be encumbered by the "cold sterile clinical" approach of being neutral until you get all the facts. Pity, isn't it?

When I assist with investigations now (and in the past), the cardinal rule you enter with is NOT to make any assumptions and NOT to lead people. It is remarkably easy to lead people (especially vulnerable people) into saying what they think you want to hear, so you have to be deadly accurate in your interviewing techniques or someone who is innocent will end up wrongly accused or someone who is guilty will walk away free.

If you assume that everyone is an abuser the research is out there (for anyone who cares to look for it) that you will find it everywhere. Conversely, if you don't believe it happens you can't find it, even with piles of evidence staring you in the face.

In my current job as a risk management liaison we spend lots (and lots and lots and lots) of time looking at patterns of injuries - time of day, type of injury, number of injuries, concomitant medical issues, history of injuries - and after a while it is not that hard to see some things that some folks would automatically assume was abuse actually turning out not to be abuse, or vice versa.

Ironically, we are usually jumped more by the people we investigate, because the onus always has to be on protecting the clients. Often staff feel as if an automatic assumption of guilt is made if they are investigated, but the process in all state institutions at this point is that we have to investigate all injuries or unusual events - it's as simple as that. Because the consequences of accusing someone of abuse are also so major, we walk a tight rope of making sure that accusations are not made without a LOT of attempts at getting it right.

If you accuse the wrong person of abuse you sometimes do more damage to the client, who may know full well that this person didn't hurt them, but they lose the relationship they had with this person through an improper accusation. You also may lose a staff person who was the best thing ever to come along for a lot of folks. However, we always have to go with protecting the clients first.

That does not occur when we assume they are abusing people without checking it out first, and it's an insult to staff everywhere.

One additional point that I have to keep coming back to is this - why do we like to heap scorn and ridicule on the people who did what they did with no money and no resources and some of them in frustration became abusive - and we don't heap scorn on ourselves for not demanding better conditions for the clients and their staff? It is because it is cleaner (and we can feel holier) if we act like abuse is solely an internal, personal characteristic rather a reflection of how systems go wrong and how it degrades the people who have to work under these conditions, as well as how society looks at the people who often end up in institutions as being less than human.

I still say that those who act outraged about abuse in institutions need to look around first, because abuse happens everywhere. There are many, many, many of us right now whose entire lives are dedicated to keeping these folks safe. Please go police your own community before you heap your scorn on those of us who actually are doing something about it.

Allie Cat,

Pull in the claws - you are right on the edge of flaming some good people because you are a little full of yourself right now. You are doing an awful lot of judging of others without having any idea of what you are talking about. Most of us don't mind a healthy discussion about the ills of the system, given that most outsiders don't have the first clue or interest in the good things that have happened (which shows their own state of mind rather than being reflective of the system). But the point at which you start making public judgments about others merely because of the place they worked makes you as dangerous as people who actually do engage in abuse, because you have prejudged without any facts, and that is equally wrong. You have smeared some good people whose only "sin" was choosing to take care of people who have problems.

Once you have cleaned up the child care system you work for we will be happy to listen to the negative information you want to throw at us. I would say, however, that you may want to consider another job, because if all you are looking for is abuse, you will find it, whether it is there or not. People with that viewpoint scare me every bit as much as the people who engage in abuse. "Witch trials," we used to call them. All I have to do is think that someone is abusive and magically they are.

So we damn and fire all the facility caretakers for the terrible sin of having worked at a facility. Then there are no staff, so we hire pure and self-righteous people who often turn out to be ill-suited to work with this population and guess what? The rate of true abuse rises because the first group of staff actually knew how to deal with all the incredibly difficult scenarios that attach themselves to people who are fragile or who have illnesses of any sort.

You worry about me being in charge of abuse? Sorry, that's what I do and I am very good at it, which is why I feel I can comment about what happens in this field. What would worry me is having you come work a few shifts where I work. Of course, like others, if you made it through the initial criminal background screening you would still need 6 weeks of pre-service training and a minimum of a month being under the wing of a seasoned staff before you could work with my folks. Most people don't have that sort of patience to hang in there that long, especially not the sort of people who like to make snap judgments about things with which they are unfamiliar.

Some of the things you have said are true, but it's difficult to respond to someone who throws rotten garbage along with the mix. If you want to discuss issues, please disentangle them from your accusations. You sound like someone from a lynch mob who has prejudged the outcome and is rearranging the facts to fit the situation.

I have said all along that there have been and are problems with the system, some of them atrocious. But I have also tried to point out which of the supposed atrocities DIDN'T actually occur but were the product of feverish imaginations, why the REAL problems occurred, why we shouldn't prejudge the staff (many of whom kept alive some very fragile people or who championed people with some pretty horrendous problems), and what could be done to fix the problems of the system.

My guess - your favorite colors are black and white.

Marcia, my friend - ignore the above comment, darlin'. Sometimes people like to think that everyone else is horrible but themselves. I think it's time that you and I just give up on trying to educate people who are happy to believe the worst about others. Sad to have to come to this point, isn't it? Branded a liar and untrustworthy merely because of the place you worked. Almost seems undemocratic somehow, doesn't it?

So maybe we all need to just walk out of the institutions right now and let the criticizers and labellers and name callers come and do our jobs at the pay that is given and with the mandatory overtime hours attached. They'd be back here in 24 hours (if they could last that long and/or not kill off our fragile people with their lack of knowledge about how to do this very specialized job) and they would be begging us to come back. Luckily for them (and for the folks we work with!), that will never happen. So let 'em be righteous, let 'em throw stones, let 'em not call you a liar "directly", just by ugly insinuation. I say the hell with 'em.

But one day I'll tell you how I REALLY feel. :-)

Virginia,

No, nothing like that I've heard of where I have worked.

psychadellic one,

Obviously more than one beer . . . . . . .

RE -

Agreed. =8-P

Well, you turn them in, of course, and that second, or you are equally culpable. My poor husband knows that if I ever caught him treating someone badly who lives at the place where we work, I would turn him in to the authorities in a heartbeat. And I am fairly certain that he would do the same about me, or at least I hope he would. That is because if he is the sort of person who would be abusive, then he isn't who I think he is and needs to stop. THEN he needs to get help, but my first aim is taking care of the folks who need protection.

Sounds cold to a lot of people, but that's how it is. I am a psychologist but right now I am also in risk management, and it is my job to make sure people are safe and secure and getting what they need or else I raise hell about it. Doesn't always make me the most popular person around, but I REALLY care about what other people think about me - keeps me up late at night. ;-)

The concern you are hearing from some of us is that people make an automatic assumption that because we work in this field, especially in-patient care, we are all abusive and the taint clings, even though there is heavy duty nonstop (and I mean that literally) policing and training and interventions.

But the irony is that when abuse or neglect does occur, it's not usually because staff are bad people and it's not because the folks we work with are bad people and it's not because institutions are inherently evil. It's because the funding isn't there and the community support isn't there. Generally all the community wants to do is toss rocks; they don't jump up to the plate until a court mandate (and lots of money) comes in. It's not like there are lots and lots people out there volunteering to do this out of the goodness of their hearts. If the community money dried up everyone would be right back in the institutions tomorrow.

And that sucks, because that isn't where they should be, except in rare cases and usually for short periods of time. But that isn't because they are necessarily being abused; it's because everyone has the right to live in the community if the supports are there.

Again, we just want people to give us a break and quit assuming that all places are torture and doom and gloom and that no one but outsiders cares.

I have said this before, but it's still just as true - whatever you focus on you become, so it behooves us all, advocates more than anyone, to also look for the good in people and not immediately seek out the negative, because every one of us has a nasty side to us. It's just that those of us who work in in-patient settings get our fair share of having people talk about our dirty laundry and then they give us their fair share of dirty laundry as well.

Thank God I am on the soapbox, because I have been trying to see if there is any soap left in it to scrub out our dirty laundry.

It's also looking shorter and shorter each time I look at it, like you couldn't fit anything that size in there. I am more and more convinced that we must have been using whatever it was we used as the mattress drying "device" for a totally different purpose than it was ever intended. Sort of like finding an unused emesis basin and using it for storing jewelry because you don't have anything else to put your jewelry in, and then 20 years later someone like me says that an emesis basin is a jewelry storage device because they've seen it used that way before. 8`-)

Hey! Good idea, psychadellic one! I'll run it by our HVAC guys tomorrow as well!

Well, that's not what they were MADE for, I think, it's just that these or something like them were used in that one place for mattress drying because they were "handy-dandy." I was planning on running down to our laundry today to see if any of those folks who've been here for a while might know what they were, but I ended up having to do some other things, so mebbe tomorrow. :-)

Cindy, let me get you some stuff, but I'll need several days. I have some great old posters for medications from that time period. As far as side effects, I also have a bunch of stuff on that too, since I used to in-service medication side effects for my staff.

I forgot to mention that when these buildings get real old the ceilings disintegrate and "rain down junk" all over the place. Motts, correct me if I am wrong, but I believe what you are seeing on the floor is the ceiling. :-)

OK, I called a staff person I used to work with where I saw devices like this, and she said that back 20 to 30 years ago, the place we worked at (another state than where I am now) didn't have a real mattress sterilizer, so they used to scrub any mattresses that had to be re-used with heavy duty disinfectant and then they had to dry out, so they used a device like this to do it. It was just some metal shelving they used after they rinsed down the mattresses, cleaned them with bleach plus something else that was quite harsh to the skin, rinsed them with water to get rid of whatever it was, and then put them in a thing like this to let them air dry.

=8-o

The stuff you find out 20 years later. I am still laughing. 8`-)

I did ask the older gentleman at work who has lived there for many years about this being something for birds and he said it definitely wasn't. And to repeat what he said, he was appalled that anyone would think they cremated people in these. Guess people who live in institutions have a slightly more civilized idea about how things are handled than much of the public does. ;-)