4,224 Comments for Northampton State Hospital

congratulations to all of you, the gallery is absolutely amazing.

i love this one, it looks so..pure.

i find this very creepy n a hundred questions cross my mind

really liking the pics tho x

The First Thing I Thought About When Seeing This Picture Was "Forever Frozen In Time"

my father was put in an aslyum
nearly killed him.

Was the clock telling the right time? o.O

looks like a thanatron...

Absolutely stunning. This is probably my favorite picture on here...so far.

there is so much mistery here, you cant get a straight answer out of anybody. its a dam shame there tearing it down.....

I hope i misunderstood the last comment. Auschwitz was built as a mechanism for genocide. However great the shortcomings of state psychiatric hospitals, they were established for the purpose of restoring people to health.

A sense of humor and perspective are also necessary for working in the mental health field. You have to be able to separate the person from their illness and the "bad" or dangerous behavior it can cause. One co-worker was severely injured when a delusional patient came into the building and swung a large hammer at his head. Another was hospitalized for a couple of days when a patient sprayed a toxic chemical in her eyes (he didn't understand that it was ok to use it for cleaning floors, but not for squirting people). Another patient brought a gun into the building, and one of the doctors disarmed him without violence. After these incidents, we made our building more secure, more Plexiglass windows and locked doors, so that there would be a little more time to defuse a situation before it reached the point of personal injury, and we made sure we were monitoring signs and symptoms more closely. No one wants patients to have to get into a crisis before they get the help they need. I've learned that virtually anything can be used as a weapon. I recall an enraged man running down the hall at staff, swinging his three-foot bowling trophy. If you take all of these things too seriously, you can't last in the field. You have to keep reminding yourself that this is why you are here. If the people didn't have problems, they wouldn't be where they are, so sometimes you have to suppress what would be a natural reaction in most settings, and just go on loving them and doing the best you can. Probably the funniest episode (again, in a gallows humor kind of way) was when two large, very strong, and very angry young adult male patients got into a fight. The secretary was so flustered that instead of using our standard code for calling for help, she got on the intercom and yelled "We need MEN on the third floor!"

Another factor that made workers' jobs so difficult at state hospitals is that the patients there were placed there because there was NO other place for them. If they had strong family support, if they had insurance, if they had money, they saw a private psychiatrist in a nice office and went to a private psychiatric hospital if the need for hospitalization arose.

I've worked with more than a few people who preferred to spend the hottest weeks of summer in a recently-constructed, air conditioned state hospital rather than stuck in their stifling, run-down, tiny apartment in a high crime area. Most people with serious, chronic mental health issues do not have the job skills to be gainfully employed, and SSI checks do not buy much in the way of decent housing. The community is often not very welcoming, either. I recall one incident where I was working with a young man, teaching him how to go to the drugstore to pick up and pay for his prescription medications. Reading and counting were difficult for him, but he could do both. The insensitive clerk looked at him disdainfully when he was slow to hand over his money and said, very loudly, "What's wrong with you? Can't you even read?" (We called the store later and spoke to the manager.) On another occasion, several staff and group home residents walked to a neighborhood ice cream shop for a treat on a summer evening. One of the residents used a wheelchair. Her wheelchair would not fit through the door, and the owner refused to unlock the other door so that she could enter the store. He said he didn't want "those people" in his store anyway. (We filed a formal complaint with the human rights commission, which sent out a very professionally-dressed lawyer to investigate the possible violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. He also used a wheelchair, and had the same experience as our resident did, so there were legal consequences for the business.)

I think the "S" after the room number stands for "south."

I've worked with many individuals who lived much of their lives institutions where the patient population included people with mental retardation as well as people with mental illness. Nearly all of them had what we called "institutional behaviors" that stemmed from their experiences in the hospital. There was a preoccupation with coffee and cigarettes, as those two items provided a good deal of the structure of the hospital day, and because there were staff who used the next coffee break or smoke break to control a patient's behavior ("you have to get dressed before you can have coffee," for example, or "calm down if you want your next cigarette"). Except in very rare and specific cases, in community placements we could not use cigarettes as a reinforcer for behavior plans. We had to try every other reinforcer first. Of course we encouraged people to quit smoking, but for many it was a decades-long habit. There has also been some research which showed that patients with schizophrenia may be self-medicating when they smoke, because there is apparently something in nicotine that acts on the parts of the brain affected by the illness. Other institutional behaviors included eating very rapidly and eating with one arm wrapped around one's plate, both done to protect the individual from those at the table who would otherwise steal their food. We also saw people who would carry their most valuable possessions (often coffee, cigarettes, sugar) with them everywhere they went because that was the only way they could be sure someone wouldn't take them while they were out of the room. Some people wore many layers of clothing even in the summer for the same reason. Other behaviors came from the large doses of antipsychotic medications they had been given, such as the "Haldol" shuffle and tardive dyskensia.