4,023 Comments for Riverside State Hospital

Speaking of the Cold War as history is just incredible. I remember being in grade school in the late 60s when fallout shelter signs were on most of the large buildings in my little town (which was within a couple hundred miles of an airbase where B-52s were based), learning the difference between a tornado siren and an air raid siren, and having air raid drills in school as well as fire drills and tornado drills. Yet I don't know, somehow I think maybe I felt safer with the whole crazy doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction than I do now, with black market arms trading and very well-financed terrorist groups.

Of course we should all just get along. But those of us who have dedicated our professional lives (and our personal lives, too, because these aren't jobs you just walk away from at the end of your 8 or 12 or 16 hours) to helping people who need assistance to have the best lives they can, also feel an obligation to at least try to educate the public on behalf of the people we serve. Much of the sadness and pain and abuse associated with these facilities would not have happened had those who controlled allocation of resources (and that's all of us via the voting booth) not considered them just "nuthouses" for the "insane." Mental illness is not a character flaw, is not a sign of failure, is not "all in the head" (although it is a problem with brain functioning). It is just as real as cancer or kidney failure or any other disease. People who have it deserve the same regard and care that we give any other person. Think about some of the ideas we learned in school--the way to judge a society's goodness is to look at how it treats those members least able to care for themselves, and that until there is justice for all, there can be justice for none. How can we just write off people as being unworthy of pleasant surroundings? How can we say they are not important enough or not deserving enough or not aware enough to notice or care? Pretty much everything we say tells more about us than it does about those we cast aside as "other."

I don't imagine people glaring down from the windows. I feel like they would be delighted to have a visitor, to have some special attention and someone new to talk to.

Just because a person has a mental illness doesn't mean s/he is no longer human! People with mental illness enjoy parties and social activities just as much as any other group of people--perhaps more, because they often feel and are left out. Music, dance, fun, social interaction--all are very therapeutic.

Knowing most states, the lease is probably still being paid. In the late 1990s, i was still using a 386 (or maybe it was a 486) computer with a dot matrix printer. The printer kept chewing up ribbons, and i learned how to splice them and get another 100 pages or so out of the ribbon. That's how hard it was to get supplies. But when the printer finally did break down completely, the powers-that-be, in their infinite wisdom, chose to pay a $300 repair bill on the obsolete machine rather than let me buy the $75 ink jet printer I had been asking for on every month's office supply order.

In my experience, the most dangerous thing to happen with a sewing machine is running the needle through your own finger. I used to work at a sheltered workshop where the best jobs were the ones in the sewing department. We had a government contract to make various supplies for the military and the jobs paid well above minimum wage. The employees all had either mental illnesses or developmental disabilities.

The hospital probably got lots of mail. Remember that until the 1950s, many employees lived in housing built for them on the grounds of the facility. Many of the patients' families did stay in contact with them, plus there would be all the "business/official" mail. The mailroom might have been utilized to provide vocational training for some of the patients as well.

I once heard the difference in old-style architecture and modern architecture explained this way: in past centuries, materials were very expensive, but time was cheap. Time was the one thing that most people had in abundance. So when builders went to the trouble of securing the expensive materials, they wanted to show them off with the finest craftsmanship and detail. Today, because of all the technology we have, materials are cheap but time is very expensive. Not to mention that we've become so accustomed to modern technology and decades of accepting as an article of faith the idea that newer ways are better just because they are newer (by now many of us have seen the folly of that assumption) and some crafts and techniques cannot now be re-created. They are lost arts. States also tried to out-do each other when they erected public buildings, whether a capitol or a psychiatric hospital.

i wondered about the radiators too, especially since the one under the windows seems about double the length of a typical room's radiator. Even if the room did require two radiators, I don't think they would normally be so close together, unless that was just done for convenience of installation because that's where the piping was. Where's our resident HVAC expert? Anyway, on a cold winter night with those windows rattling in the wind, I know where I want to be! BTW, is that pipe across the ceiling a retrofitted sprinkler?

i love it.. it is definitely ominous

Most of the people I've worked with really enjoyed bingo and would ask to play it, not because they had nothing else to do, but because it was fun, especially when they won a little prize. Staff usually enjoyed it too, because a shift is a lot easier when the people you're working with are enjoying themselves.

I doubt very much that these are confidential patient files. Doctors, therapists, psychologists, social workers and other human services professionals have always had patient confidentiality as a central tenet of their professional code of ethics. So even though HIPPA is only a few years old, earlier procedures would still have guaranteed confidentiality. In my state we found that our state regulations, which predated HIPPA, were already stricter than HIPPA. I am sure many other states were in the same situation. The stricter standard always prevails. States are usually very careful about storing the records of the old facilities and don't just leave them laying around an abandoned site. When confidential records are found, it is likely that they were the "personal" files of a particular staff person, not the patient's "official" record (yes, the same confidentiality standards apply to "personal" files, and the copies or notes in "personal" files should either have been shredded and burned, or incorporated into the "official" file). Facilities are required to keep all kinds of records, not just patient files. The documents in this room could very well be fire drill reports, petty cash accounting, menus, maintenance work orders, staff meeting minutes, contingency plans for power outages or severe weather, the facility policy manual, MSDS sheets for all the chemicals used in cleaning and maintenance, accounts payable and receivable, count sheets for controlled substances, furniture inventories and disposal reports, and on and on and on...

the photos available here are awesome. i hvnt see any sites doing this yet. good job.

kelvinsse.blogspot.com

looks like a scene from the steven king show kingdom hospital!! creepy

what, no porn?? how boring!! lol