2,712 Comments for Fuller State School and Hospital

Well said!

Ahh, the usual "lonely chair" shot. :)

Great location Motts!

Or a harness for someone who wanted to take a bath and didn't have the trunk support to do it without slipping under the water. It is MUCH easier to shower an uncooperative person than to try to put them in the tub, and I can speak from very wet personal experience about this. :-)

Many clients, especially those with cerebral palsy or other motor impairments, enjoy the bathtub because the warm water helps loosen their overworked muscles and allows them some actual relaxation and a temporary release from the cruel hands of gravity. That's why hydrotherapy was used as much as possible with this particular group of folks. Not cold water, as someone suggested earlier, because that tends to make people less compliant and more irritable than soothing and relaxing warm water.

As an FYI, many places currently use a lot of upright portable privacy screens. I myself prefer curtains and always push for them, but there are ways of putting up privacy screens across the stalls as well. I know that at one point there were problems with clients locking themselves in the stalls if they had solid doors, and folks also sometimes had severe injuries if they lost their balance when getting up from the toilet and hit the door or if they had a seizure and hit the door. As well, if you have a client who engages in fecal smearing or ingestion you need to keep an eye on them - for obvious reasons. And that is just a part of your every day work - they don't pay you extra to clean people who are covered from head to toe with feces - and then brush their teeth as well.

Again, the initial reason for these practices wasn't to degrade and humiliate people, it was the result of minimal funding, overcrowding, and low staffing levels.

As a sidenote, ask your parents and grandparents if they always voted for social welfare spending or if they fought all tax increases. ;-)

JAVA, if you think that most MDs actually took the time to view patients you are mistaken - I wish they would have, but few left their offices. Besides, MDs are one of the few groups that are allowed to look at naked people and can actually ask them to take their clothes off without getting hit. :-) Why would they spend time looking at naked people in institutions, most of whom were fairly handicapped, when they could open up a private practice, do physicals, and look at all the nude nonhandicapped people they wanted?

In former days the emphasis was on economics - the budget was miniscule and that meant staffing was very low. In order to take care of the most people in the quickest, easiest, safest fashion (with the least amount of money provided by the latest taxpayers' vote) you had to come up with designs that understood the lack of staffpower and the general condition of the people living there. Privacy is a luxury when the staffing ratio is 1 staff to 30 clients. In order for people to even get baths you have to develop a fast and safe method of doing it. No one enjoyed it, no one believed things would get so crowded, and it wasn't built for someone's sadistic pleasure, although there were and are some sick people (as in every group) who may have enjoyed staring at nude people.

Think about being the sole caretaker for 30 people, most of whom can't walk, who don't understand what you are saying to them, and who can't or won't cooperate when you are trying to clean them up. You have just finished dinner and you are supposed to get all 30 people bathed and ready for bed and it is just you. One of the people in your group wants to take a bath, but you aren't sure she can hold herself up. You could do like they did in some places and have everyone walk through showers and just hose them down. Baths were a luxury because you had to clean the tubs out in between clients, and that took time, so seeing bathtubs is a good thing. However, what if you are working with Client #1 and Client # 2 has a seizure behind you and slips under the water and drowns? What if someone wants to go in the tub room to drown themself? Privacy is the first "luxury" to go when there are few staff and lots of people.

I know that every time someone commits suicide in a mental hospital or jail everyone yells about how they should have been monitored. But then there is a group that hollers about their lack of privacy if they are constantly monitored.

Things are MUCH better today, but there are still many places where we are still working on the concepts of privacy and dignity. And remember - this is a pretty Western/Americanized concept of privacy - there are many other places in the world that consider this a strange thing - to prefer privacy over group activities. We are a fairly modest culture, Brittany Spears notwithstanding. ;-) However, both in the community and in institutional settings that is the current policy - as we do live in America we want to reflect these cultural values - we work with staff so they understand that we can have both. Now that funding is better and we have better staffing ratios (in the daytime 1 staff to 4 or 5 clients in most places - if you are lucky - and 1 staff to 8 clients at night) we are better able to incorporate both privacy and safety.

...and it's on the the ENTRANCE! You're an intrepid sould, Motts!

That set of wheels looks about 1935!

The ghost of the nude nurse may lurk within the buildings! : O

I was thinking just what Anna said! Eh, it's probably just another icky, moldy old basement down there.

You've achieved an illusory quality with your b&w that you could never create with color!

There's a specific name for that kind of doorway arch window. Can't remember what it is.

Nice contrast between the beaming light and the gloomy room.

What's that Felini movie in which the crazy uncle climbs the tree, starts hurling rocks, and screaming "I want a woman!"

Anyway, that's in eerie play of light and shadow. I like it a lot!

Corpse grinder my azz! Looks more like an old ice cream maker. Well, maybe not. What is that thing?

Is that an LP of Martin Luther King speeches?

Totally hideous looking!