201 Comments Posted by dme

Thinking of all the people I've worked with over the years, I think most of them would have felt safer and been more comfortable in a small room like this, with a window to the outside and that didn't have to be shared, than in a large open dormitory with a dozen or more other patients, no privacy, and lots of noise. When a person feels out of control and perhaps thinks the world is out to get him/her, a small private space can be good. I know if given the choice of this room or the dormitory in the previous shot, I would choose this room every time.

The janitors are spending all their time working on that dang self-serve lobotomizer (so far, every model they've come up with has killed the patients who've used them). Because that's what they do every day, we have all these broken windows, loose floor tiles, falling ceilings, crumbling plaster, and just general mold and filth everywhere! :-)

It's not a self-serve lobotomy machine (we haven't quite perfected that one yet), but this IS the machine that sharpens the tools used for removing parts of patients' brains. The parts are then stored in those big brown bottles. :-)

Where I worked we kept records for at least 7 years after the case was closed. In practice it was much longer--if not forever--simply because there wasn't anyone to go through charts just to see which ones had been closed for the required length of time. As long as a case was active, we had to keep the entire record, although only the current volume and the one preceding it would be in the active records room. Others were stored in secure storage in the basement. For some of our long-term people, the record for just one person would fill two banker's boxes.

It seems like Mandy and her brother and his friends have way too much time on their hands and not nearly enough supervision. At the very least they might want to reconsider using a public forum to disclose their felonious escapades to the world. It's a strange sense of humor that thinks it's funny to destroy someone else's property and to almost sustain a serious injury. They probably wouldn't believe how much fun it's possible to have without breaking, smashing, or trashing anything. (BTW Mandy, the police use the Internet too)

I think the old architects were really on to something when they specified so many large windows to let in sunlight. Not just for seasonal affective disorder (which wasn't recognized at the time) but for the general curative aspects of light. I remember one winter when I had a horrible case of bronchitis, but because I thought I might be pregnant (it turned out I was), I didn't want to take medications. It lingered for a couple of weeks. Then there was one of those too-rare days of perfect blue sky in the winter. I spent the day on the sofa with the sunlight pouring onto me from the window, and by evening my symptoms were gone. I know it's probably just a coincidence, but it did happen. And now the news is filled with stories of how we've become so aware of the dangers of UV rays that most of us are Vitamin D-deficient, and the doctors are recommending more time in the sun for children, just like Dr. Spock (the baby doc, not Spock from Star Trek) did all those years ago. I feel sad when I see new schools with those tiny energy-efficient windows that make them look more like prisons.

When a person with mental illness is charged with a crime, their mental state will be evaluated. If it is found that their thinking is so distorted that they did not know the difference between right and wrong at the time of the crime, they can be found "not guilty by reason of insanity." Different states use different terminology, including things like "guilty but insane," "not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect" or "not guilty by reason of diminished capacity" (this one usually applies to a person with mental retardation). After such a verdict, the person is sent to a forensic psychiatric unit instead of to prison.

I don't think anyone should infer something sinister about an incinerator. Most large hospitals (psychiatric or general) have them.

What parts of Dan's (the first Dan) comments are not true? At the risk of "pretending to be an expert," I feel the need to clarify an earlier comment I made elsewhere on this site. I mentioned three incidents of violence involving people with mental illness. I don't want anyone to think that violence is common, or that most mentally ill people are violent. We ALL have the potential to become violent . The episodes I mentioned were noteworthy because of their rarity, not because they were typical. Those few events happened in the course of 25 years of work, and contact with hundreds of patients. Most days had no violence, and most of the "violence" that did occur was very minor and very brief, and involved no real danger.

I really don't understand what some people find surprising about there being a beautiful fireplace in a psychiatric hospital. Would it be surprising in a hospital for people with cancer or heart disease? Does having a mental illness destroy one's ability to recognize and appreciate beauty? I think I must have read the comments wrong, and not recognized facetiousness.

"Crazy people?" I'll just leave it alone... I've done group activities with people who have Alzheimers, and sometimes using a familiar toy or other object gets people talking and sharing memories, and from there you can help them better understand the present. Look at how many people saw this picture and immediately said, "oh, I had one of those!" Or it might have been used in play therapy, if some of the patients were young children. Or it came from a visitor's waiting room, or an employee's child forgot it after visiting the employee at work. There are so many possible explanations, and no reason at all to find it "weird."

For some patients, like Jessie, life in the hospital was better than life at home. I've worked with patients whose old records stated that the only way their family could "manage" them was to keep them locked in a room or in a shed in the backyard. One person was even tied to a tree.

I first started working in the mental health field right at the time the class action lawsuits were being settled. Some of the regulations in the consent decrees seemed so silly. Not silly=trivial, but silly as in "why in the world does that have to be codified? It's just common sense!" such as the rules that residents have their choice of clothing and food. I gradually came to understand why it was necessary, that there had been a time, not very long ago, when people being treated for mental health concerns did not have even these most elementary choices. One thing that I was taught to think about, when evaluating the amount of choice and self-determination a resident had, was how many doors the person went through in a day, and compare that to how many doors I went through. That's because in the institutions patients often spent entire days without leaving their ward (mostly because there were only a couple of aides for a large number of patients, and it's easier to maintain order if the group stays in one enclosed space). Despite all this, I still believe it was the system that failed, resulting in abuse and neglect. It was not someone's malicious intent to abuse people (aside from a very few, but you find a few of those people in every situation where one person has power over another). There was not enough space, not enough money for adequate staff/materials/maintenance, not enough training, and most importantly, not enough public support. Every superintendent's report I've ever read contains a list of things that need to be done to make life better for the patients, and a plea for the legislature to appropriate the required funds. People with mental illness just didn't matter enough.

My attempt at translation of the above comment:
"I am Dominican and I remember that I worked in that place for a long time with patients that I still remember very fondly and my co-workers whom I loved alot, even though many are dead, I will always continue loving them." I haven't used Spanish for years, but hopefully I got the general idea right.

A belated note to Joy: you forgot to include the part where they cut off the top of the person's head and took out parts of their brain. :-)