3,181 Comments Posted by Lynne

Heather,

I wish you could share some of her stories with us.

First time I went they didn't tell me what the drill was. So I was kinda pissed at first with all these chuckleheads getting up on the stage, blocking my view of the movie. :-)

One of the absolute kewlest movies ever, huh? And that gorgeous Brigitte Helm! The film was made in 1926 and was supposed to take place in the year 2026, which is kinda freaky the closer we get.
http://www.geocities.c...itte_helm_images.htm

You just GOTTA love anna, don't you? 8`-)

OK, a day late, 12 dollars short. Here are some old postcards and pix of Norwich State Hospital, formerly officially called the "lunatic hospital" or the "lunatic asylum" as you can see in the postcard titles. I thieved the second set of pix from somewhere - can't remember where or when. :-( If I thieved them and it's a problem, someone lemme know and I'll take them down:

http://members.aol.com...eAsylumHospital1.jpg
http://members.aol.com...eAsylumHospital2.jpg
http://members.aol.com...eAsylumHospital3.jpg
http://members.aol.com...eAsylumHospital4.jpg
http://members.aol.com...eAsylumHospital5.jpg
http://members.aol.com...eAsylumHospital6.jpg
http://members.aol.com...eAsylumHospital7.jpg
http://members.aol.com...eAsylumHospital8.jpg
http://members.aol.com...eAsylumHospital9.jpg
http://members.aol.com...hStateHospital01.jpg
http://members.aol.com...hStateHospital02.jpg
http://members.aol.com...hStateHospital03.jpg
http://members.aol.com...hStateHospital04.jpg
http://members.aol.com...hStateHospital05.jpg
http://members.aol.com...hStateHospital06.jpg

Babs, you KNOW I love you, don'tcha? :-)

'Cept my own! ;-)

"Gazing down in her white shroud,
Shroud of windy cloud,
Comes at night the phantom moon;
Comes and all the shadows soon,
Crowding in the rooms, arouse;
Shadows, ghosts, her rays lead on,
Till beneath the cloud
Like a ghost she's gone,
In her gusty shroud,
O'er the haunted house."

Or break IN. ;-)

I think I feel my brain being stolen away from me . . . .

Here's a more modern one:

http://www.pref.aichi....1list/016/no016.html

Tony,

Norwich Hospital built additional patient buildings during the 1950s and 1960s. As they built the new ones they just shut down the old ones. You ought to have a combination of new and old buildings there, just like we have where I currently work. If our place was shut down today, in 20 years if you went through you wouldn't know for sure which buildings were used when, so you would also see a jumble of different designs and materials.

[Thump thump thump]

Donna,

Most of the folks who would be in an isolation room would not be "poking their fingers through the door looking for human contact and affection". To be in an isolation room means you had almost always been fairly out of control and needed to be somewhere to cool off where you couldn't hurt others. Another reason for being in an isolation room was to be in a "safe" place for someone who, in the days before antipsychotic medications, had to wrestle with their own inner demons during a frankly delusional episode. To someone in the throes of a such a psychotic episode, most other people are looked at as being dangerous or having bad intentions and these folks often don't want to be around anyone else because most, if not all, other people are seen in a very negative light.

People who were depressed or suicidal were NOT placed in these rooms.

Until we get some books written by staff, however, the full side is still not available to the public.

I will say in the facility where I work that the possibility of severe on-going abuse of any sort is next to impossible. Too many checks and balances, too many people who are trained to spot the signs of abuse, and the fact that every person who lives there gets a body check daily and has multiple notes written on them in the charts by many different staff makes it difficult for abuse to occur without the abuser getting caught quickly. Add to that the fact that all staff have to go through criminal background checks (anyone with any sort of a violent history - spouse abuse, child abuse, or any other "barrier" crimes can not be employed) and are fingerprinted with the fingerprints going to the national data base, etc., and you are as safe here as you are in a regular hospital. You are certainly safer than in a community setting, I am sorry to say, because I personally prefer the freedom of the community settings, but they have a ways to go to assure such comparable checks.