1,522 Comments for Metropolitan State Hospital

Micheal: I read all of your Metro State blogs and they are by far the coolest and funniest shit I have read in a long time.....I laughed my ass off! The way u tell the stories makes u truly understand and also appreciate the photos submitted on Opacity. Thanks a lot dude :)

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. :-)

Perhaps this was a hall connecting two wards.

One of Kirkbride's basic principles was that psychiatric hospital should have attractive, pleasant furnishings to facilitate patients' mental health and hopefully lead to their discharge from the facility. That's why he specified gardens, trees, large windows, wide hallways, high ceilings, careful selection of staff, and regular entertainment programs in the auditorium, among many other things. He recognized the problems of having too many patients in one hospital. He advised that patient bedrooms be as large as possible, to give patients "quiet and privacy...provided their dimensions are not so great as to lead to two patients being placed in the same room." State hospitals, in his opinion, "should be made good enough for the highest class of its citizens" because what is good enough for the most well-to-do patient "is none too good for the humblest of the unfortunates who are compelled to look to these institutions for custody and treatment." The attitude underlying all of his recommendations was that "the best hospital, best built, best arranged, and best managed, is always the most economical in the end." But then came far more patients, low salaries, lack of maintenance, little or no staff training...and we know the results. (the quotes are from a book I read recently but I can't remember its name)

You know you're in bad shape when even your underwear isn't your own. :-)

A very trivial question that popped into my head when I saw this--in the old institutions built before electricity, what powered the clocks in the towers? Was there a winding mechanism in the attic?

What are those pipe-looking things near the bottom of the left-hand wall? Were there sinks or toilets on the opposite side in the past? Or maybe radiators? (but wouldn't radiators be on the wall or ceiling in a room with water?) And is that an electrical outlet under the sink on the right? Seems like safety must have been first on the mind of whoever installed that. Perhaps this room used to have another purpose and the outlet was disconnected when the sink was installed. As I think about it, I don't recall ever having been in a bathroom where the electrical outlets weren't above the fixtures.

I've been terrified of the dentist since I was about 8 years old. My regular dentist had a family emergency so his partner was covering his appointments for that day, one of which happened to be mine. I had badly chipped my two front teeth a couple of years earlier in a bike accident, and that icy cold air they used to use, to dry your teeth, I think, before they had the suction device they use today--caused severe fingernails-on-a-chalkboard type pain. My regular dentist knew this and was very careful. This dentist didn't, and when I started to cry he put his hand over my nose and mouth until I stopped crying because I couldn't breathe. I never did tell my parents.

I suppose the reason they tear down old buildings is partially due to a fascination with so-called "new and improved" structures, and also due to a focus on the financial bottom line. Asbestos abatement, lead paint removal, bringing vast plumbing, electrical and HVAC systems up to current code, retrofitting automatic sprinkler systems if the building doesn't already have one, universal design for accessibility, plus our changed ways of living/use of space and changed standards of privacy and patient rights...it probably is cheaper to tear it down and build from scratch. I wonder if they salvage what architectural elements they can before actual demolition. Many of these buildings have a quality of workmanship that cannot be duplicated today.

Yea, and you would sneer at me you SOB!

I looked at the picture and thought over the last child who could have played with this doll. What was this place like for them: a safe haven or a prison?

You would think the slash marks would be inside the door, from a tortured soul trying desparately to get out. It's strange that they're on the outside.