5,961 Comments for Kings Park Psychiatric Center

very Resident Evil-ish.... here comes the Licker!!! :p

A really powerful picture...both the performers and the audience are gone...memories live on. And light remains.

I, too, wish that there would at least be some architectural salvage from these buildings if the buildings themselves cannot be adapted to another purpose. One of the most fascinating hotels I stayed in with my parents when I was a kid had been completely built of remnants of buildings slated for demolition--floors from old mills, doors from banks and schools, bathtubs from old hotels, things like that. The bridal suite was created from the steeple of a demolished church and stood off by itself on the grounds.

The pool table makes me think that violent patients were *not* living in this building around the time of its closure. Cue sticks and pool balls are not something you would want on a ward with patients who were prone to violence (although I suppose the sticks and balls could have been kept locked in a cabinet so that staff could regulate access).

Most people probably felt much more imprisoned by their mental illness and its symptoms than by the hospital. It's also important to remember that many so-called normal people in the community are not very accepting of others who have mental illnesses or developmental disabilities. For at least some of the patients, the hospital was a safe haven from teasing, pointing, laughing, avoidance, and sometimes outright violence (think of the videos of homeless people being beaten by others just for kicks) they experienced outside the hospital. I've worked with people who forged genuine, deep friendships while in the hospital, friendships that have been maintained for many years after both were released. Others became very close to a specific staff person and had more "family" experiences with hospital staff than they ever did with their birth family.

The sign reminded me of when I was involved in planning the community placements of the last individuals in a state institution for people with developmental disabilities. I had several parents tell me they didn't want their child moved to a group home until the staff had the facility's keys in their hand and the state had shut off the lights.

I'm still wondering why the NAACP would have been so interested in this place....maybe if you said the ACLU I would believe it. :-)
The argument about it being illegal to "lock people up" or "keep people against their will" should be very interesting to everyone in jail. I guess we won't be needing jails anymore, if it's *really* illegal to lock people up!

We may consider them "torture" now, but at the time, insulin shock and lobotomy were considered legitimate treatments. Electroconvulsive therapy is still used in cases of intractable depression. The old treatments were not considered torture. There was no other treatment available then, and these were attempts at getting people to a more functional condition so that they could be discharged and return home. As soon as medical knowledge increased and psychotropic medications became available, insulin shock and lobotomy ended. How do you think we get any drug? There are tests on human subjects. The main problem in the past is not that drugs were tested on patients or that some of the drugs were not helpful. That still occurs today. The problem was the lack of informed consent (of course, if a person is being treated for mental illness severe enough to require hospitalization, how capable is s/he of giving informed consent?). Most of the psychiatrists who worked at state hospitals did so because of genuine concern for the patients. They would have earned much more in private practice.

I would imagine that Creedmore is still open because there is still a need for inpatient psychiatric treatment, just not a need for the number of beds and facilities that existed in the past. Improved medications and community-based treatment and support greatly reduced the number of inpatient beds needed. Community treatment costs less than inpatient care and doesn't have the overwhelming operating costs of the huge institutions. Today you will probably hear more complaints about a *lack* of needed psychiatric hospital beds than about abuse in psychiatric hospitals. The days of "getting anyone committed with just a signature" are long gone, as they should be. There are still people for whom a hospital is the only safe place due to their mental state. I worked with far more people who had been discharged to the community *before* their condition had been adequately treated than with people who were "locked away" too long (referring to individuals who were hospitalized for the first time, or for a relapse of a pre-existing condition, after about 1988). Too-early discharge often leads to a failure of community placement and rapid return to the hospital (the "revolving door" effect).

I'm not disputing anyone's claims of abuse and mistreatment at Kings Park or anywhere else. But I do wish people would give more facts and specifics to back up their claims. "Shrieks and screams" alone do not mean a patient is being abused. The person might be screaming in response to internal stimuli, such as auditory hallucinations, particularly voices commanding him/her to do things he/she knows to be wrong. The person might be having a panic attack. The person might have autism and have no other means of communication, or have sensory integration problems. Any hospital is a scary place for children, unfortunately, and I hope steps were taken to make it as comfortable as it could be, especially for the children. I could tell you about several years of my life where I was forced to live in a very small room with people I didn't know, could only eat at certain times, had no choice of menu, had to use a bathroom down the hall that was shared with the whole hall, and was known only by a number, not a name. If I wanted to eat at all, I had to work in the kitchen. The elevators were often filthy, and frequently broken, forcing me to walk up four flights of stairs. Crazy people ran around yelling and pulling fire alarms at all hours of the day and night, even when there was no fire. I had to meet with visitors in a public room downstairs. Abuse? No...college.

While medication errors are never good, there is a big difference between a medication error and deliberate abuse. Medication errors are going to happen anywhere (I was in the hospital for medical issues for four days and caught four medication errors myself, some involving not getting prescribed medication or getting it hours later than ordered and one where a nurse tried to give me double the dose prescribed). They are even more likely when there is a high number of patients, low number of staff, patients on multiple medications at multiple times, and probably people giving medications who had little training and supervision in doing so. That doesn't make them ok, it just means that we are humans and not perfect. Complete elimination of mistakes is impossible. The goal is to set up systems that will minimize mistakes, catch the ones that do occur, and result in improvement. Again, in nearly all cases, the problem is with the system and not with the person. My understanding of moral obligation and legal requirement was always that if I witnessed abuse and did not report it, I was equally guilty of abuse.

I really liked this painting, and could even use it as the setting of a poem or story. But then, I guess I shouldn't really like it, because after all, I don't have any formal art training. How could I possibly know what is beautiful? In the past 25 years, I've heard many complaints from many people about their time in state care. The one complaint I have NEVER heard is that the art in the state facilities wasn't "good" enough. I also can second everything that Lynne said. Not only do the facilities watch everything very closely, so do the advocates and the state. Agencies are required to maintain files of all the "adverse incidents" that occur, and to properly investigate them, and correct anything that need correcting. Reports are also made to the state protective service division for any unexplained injuries (such as a person having a bruise on her knee, but no one remembers seeing her fall or bump into anything), and for any suspected abuse or neglect, so that outsiders are also observing, reviewing records, and interviewing staff. It is far more likely today that a person is placed in a group home or institutional setting because they are in an abusive situation in their community home than that they are abused in the group setting.

regarding getting a life and hanging out in psych centers...like I used to tell my kids when they didn't want to go to a discount store to shop because their friends might see them there: "Well, if they see you there, that means they were there too..."

In most cases a patient in a state mental hospital would NOT be sent out to a general hospital for care of physical illnesses or injuries. If a person's mental illness is so severe that s/he needs to be in a psychiatric hospital, then that person would be unable to manage in a general hospital without a staff person with them. The state hospitals were already short-staffed; they certainly couldn't spare a person to go be with a patient in the hospital 24 hours a day. So they had complete hospital facilities as part of their physical plant, and would only send a patient out for very specialized care that could not be provided on-site. Thus, most of the deaths at a psychiatric hospital were due to the same causes as death in any other hospital--heart disease, strokes, cancer, etc. Mental illness does make death more likely because a patient with a severe mental illness is less likely to seek routine medical care, less likely to have good insurance, less likely to be taken seriously, less likely to maintain a healthful lifestyle, etc.

I read Renee's comment yesterday about being told "this place is top secret," and wrote a joke about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction being hidden here, but decided it was in poor taste and deleted it. Today, on another site, I saw a picture of a buried Sherman tank being unearthed in 1981 from the grounds of either Pilgrim State or Central Islip...sorry, I don't know how to do hyperlinks, but the site is edgewoodhospital.com. Click on "pictures' and then on "other." The tank pictures are near the end of the set.