Monday, November 3, 2014
MENTAL CRASY INSANE SCHIZOPHRENIA ETC. VIDEOS
SAM BROWNE TEACHES COMPUTER AT SAN FRANCISCO COMMUNITY COLLEGE! A REALLY SWEET GUY!
Thursday, August 21, 2014
Zyprexa An American psychosis. (Psych Ward SFGH)
Imagine that a virus suddenly appears in our society that makes people sleep 12--14 hours a day. Those infected with it move about somewhat slowly and seem emotionally disengaged.
Many gain huge amounts of weight -- 20, 40, 60, and even 100 pounds. Often their blood sugar levels soar, and so do their cholesterol levels. A number of those struck by the mysterious illness -- including young children and teenagers -- become diabetic in very short order. Reports of patients occasionally dying from pancreatitis appear in the medical literature. Newspapers and magazines fill their pages with accounts of this new scourge, which is dubbed metabolic dysfunction illness, and parents are in a panic over the thought that their children might contract this horrible disease. The federal government gives hundreds of millions of dollars to scientists at the best universities to decipher the inner workings of this virus, and they report that the reason it causes such global dysfunction is that it blocks a multitude of neurotransmitter receptors in the brain -- dopaminergic, serotoninergic, muscarinic, adrenergic, and histaminergic. All of those neuronal pathways in the brain are compromised. Meanwhile, MRI studies find that over a period of several years the virus shrinks the cerebral cortex, and this shrinkage is tied to cognitive decline. A terrified public clamors for a cure. Now, such an illness has in fact hit millions of American children and adults. We have just described the effects of Eli Lilly's best-selling antipsychotic, Zyprexa.
Robert Whitaker in Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America..
Re: Robert Whitaker and Zyprexa (trigger)
Posted by ralphrost on February 26, 2007, at 6:52:56
In reply to Robert Whitaker and Zyprexa (trigger), posted by Squiggles on February 23, 2007, at 7:06:09
Freaking true and sad...
> Some posts ago, someone said i should take a look at what Robert Whitaker has to say about the antipsychotic drug, Zyprexa. Well, i looked and found a couple of articles under:
>
> http://www.thestreetspirit.org/August2005/interview.htm
>
> http://zmagsite.zmag.org/May2004/levine0504.html
>
> I'd like to add that Robert Whitaker is a member of Mindfreedom and takes a radical perspective on the mistreatment of patients by pharmaceutical companies. He is a prize-winning journalist (author of "Mad in America"). Personally, I don't have enough evidence or knowledge to believe that drug companies are more likely to mistreat the mentally ill through drugs, than hospitals or physicians or psychiatrists. In all cases, the rule of law is the best watchdog. Somebody said "if they won't do the right thing, make them".
>
> Squiggles
>
>
Imagine that a virus suddenly appears in our society that makes people sleep 12--14 hours a day. Those infected with it move about somewhat slowly and seem emotionally disengaged.
Many gain huge amounts of weight -- 20, 40, 60, and even 100 pounds. Often their blood sugar levels soar, and so do their cholesterol levels. A number of those struck by the mysterious illness -- including young children and teenagers -- become diabetic in very short order. Reports of patients occasionally dying from pancreatitis appear in the medical literature. Newspapers and magazines fill their pages with accounts of this new scourge, which is dubbed metabolic dysfunction illness, and parents are in a panic over the thought that their children might contract this horrible disease. The federal government gives hundreds of millions of dollars to scientists at the best universities to decipher the inner workings of this virus, and they report that the reason it causes such global dysfunction is that it blocks a multitude of neurotransmitter receptors in the brain -- dopaminergic, serotoninergic, muscarinic, adrenergic, and histaminergic. All of those neuronal pathways in the brain are compromised. Meanwhile, MRI studies find that over a period of several years the virus shrinks the cerebral cortex, and this shrinkage is tied to cognitive decline. A terrified public clamors for a cure. Now, such an illness has in fact hit millions of American children and adults. We have just described the effects of Eli Lilly's best-selling antipsychotic, Zyprexa.
Robert Whitaker in Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America..
Re: Robert Whitaker and Zyprexa (trigger)
Posted by ralphrost on February 26, 2007, at 6:52:56
In reply to Robert Whitaker and Zyprexa (trigger), posted by Squiggles on February 23, 2007, at 7:06:09
Freaking true and sad...
> Some posts ago, someone said i should take a look at what Robert Whitaker has to say about the antipsychotic drug, Zyprexa. Well, i looked and found a couple of articles under:
>
> http://www.thestreetspirit.org/August2005/interview.htm
>
> http://zmagsite.zmag.org/May2004/levine0504.html
>
> I'd like to add that Robert Whitaker is a member of Mindfreedom and takes a radical perspective on the mistreatment of patients by pharmaceutical companies. He is a prize-winning journalist (author of "Mad in America"). Personally, I don't have enough evidence or knowledge to believe that drug companies are more likely to mistreat the mentally ill through drugs, than hospitals or physicians or psychiatrists. In all cases, the rule of law is the best watchdog. Somebody said "if they won't do the right thing, make them".
>
> Squiggles
>
>
Saturday, February 1, 2014
@ Excerpts from "The Troubled Mind" &
Since the beginnings of recorded history, man has been fascinated with the insane, with their deranged feeling, thinking, and behaviour. Insane people with fanciful delusions have at times attracted large numbers of adherents, who looked upon their psychotic leaders as prophets or as saviours of some sort. The alluring properties of the "prophet's" message may be more than just a beckoning of a way to escape from the boredom of everyday life. I suspect that many followers are riveted by a peculiarly intoxicating quality of psychotic ecstasy conveyed by the "mad" leader. ........
The psychiatric disease that converts man into an other-worldly creature - at once wiser than the wisest of the sane and yet so deeply troubled that he suffers more than a terminal cancer patient - is surely schizophrenia. Because of his bizarre loss of contact with everyday reality, the schizophrenic can appeal to us as a messiah bearing the message of the infinite. For our conception of the universe is bounded by the straitjacket of conventional thinking processes. A schizophrenic's self-perception is so fragmented that he seems to function at a different plane of consciousness from the rest of humanity. Some psychiatrists who have dealt extensively with schizophrenics even wonder whether the schizophrenic's "psychotic" perception of the world might not conform more to ultimate reality than does our sane vision.
Because of such doubts, Ronald Laing, a Scottish psychiatrist, questions whether schizophrenia should be viewed as a disease at all in the ordinary sense. He feels that the schizophrenic experience may be quite a natural one. In schizophrenia, individuals, for unclear reasons, have entered into an "inner world" that part of their psyche which is unconscious most of the time and which contains many of the primitive instinctual elements "discovered" by Freud. 厖 He views the schizophrenic episode as a potentially enriching experience, perhaps reminiscent of a psychedelic trip on LSD. "This journey is experienced as going further in, as going back through one's personal life and back and through and beyond into the experience of all mankind, of the primal man, of Adam and pehaps even further into the beings of animals, vegetables and minerals" If society would only allow them to embark on this journey unimpeded by social pressures, psychiatrists or tranquilizing drugs, they would emerge from it as better people.
March 2001 Update -
Here are a couple of collages of photocopies from this book which I just found in an old notebook. Enjoy.
More may follow ...
Just in case those scans aren't legible to you ... here is the gist of what they say ...
' ... which we clasp rather tenuously. To learn how delicate are your claims on reality, all you need do is ingest a moderate dose of LSD. The most frightening and yet most uplifting experience that psychedelic drugs elicit is the merging of the self with the universe. After first being fascinated with the perceptual changes produced by the drug, you may begin to wonder about the boundaries of your own body and soul. You feel yourself shrink to a pinpoint or expand to fill the room. Soon you begin to wonder where you leave off and the rest of the world begins. The ultimate consequence of this sensation - which is almost impossible to describe in words - is a fusion of the self with the infinite, man with God, your body with the rest of the universe. This is the ultimate beatific experience of Eastern and Christian mystics, something they strive for during years of meditation, but ...'
'Only when Laing's utopian age of nonpsychiatry comes to pass will everyone presumably realise that schizophrenia need not be a disease but instead a uniquely enriching life experience, like sexual intercourse. He argues, "The laugh's on us. They [the ex-schizophrenics] will see that what we call 'schizophrenia' was one of the forms in which, often through quite ordinary people, the light began to break through the cracks in our all-too-closed minds ... perhaps we will learn to accord to the so-called schizophrenics who have come back to us, perhaps after years, no less respect than the often no less lost explorers of the renaissance.'
'If you think about it for a while, it should be evident that your sense of identity as a distinct individual is extremely important in enabling you to function in the everyday world. Being certain that ...'
Unfortunately (or maybe not), our library seems to have misplaced this book. Either that or somebody has eaten it or just didn't feel like returning it to the library. Have'nt found all that much about it on the world-wide-web so you'll just have to be satisfied with those glimpses ...
I believe the author's name was Solomon Snyder.
For more about R.D. Laing, click here
@ A few more quotes &
"Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them." George Orwell (1903�), British author. Nineteen Eighty-Four, pt. 2, ch. 9 (1949), extract from Goldstein's book. See Fitzgerald on Intelligence.
"All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand." George Orwell (1903�), British author. "Why I Write" (1947; repr. in Collected Essays, 1961).
"We are bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves, to one another, and to the spiritual and material world� mad, even, from an ideal standpoint we can glimpse but not adopt." R. D. Laing (1927�), British psychiatrist. The Politics of Experience, Introduction (1967).
"If you talk to God, you are praying; if God talks to you, you have schizophrenia." Thomas Szasz (b. 1920), U.S. psychiatrist. The Second Sin, "Schizophrenia" (1973).
"People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds; it is something one creates." Thomas Szasz (b. 1920), U.S. psychiatrist. The Second Sin, "Personal Conduct" (1973).
"There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him." Antonin Artaud (1896�48), French theater producer, actor, theorist. Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society (1947; repr. in Selected Writings, pt. 33, ed. by Susan Sontag, 1976).
"And what is an authentic madman? It is a man who preferred to become mad, in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor. So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses. For a madman is also a man whom society did not want to hear and whom it wanted to prevent from uttering certain intolerable truths." Antonin Artaud (1896�48), French theater producer, actor, theorist. Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society, (1947; repr. in Selected Writings, pt. 33, ed. by Susan Sontag, 1976).
From Politics of Experience by R.D.Laing -
Is there anywhere such a thing as a normal man?
Modern society clamps a straitjacket of conformity on every child that's born. In the process, man's potentialities are devastated and the terms 'sanity' and 'madness' become ambiguous. The schizophrenic may simply be someone who has been unable to suppress his normal instincts and conform to an abnormal society
{May type more of this book later - excellent case history & analysis}
Here's an excerpt from the script of the movie "Network" with Peter Finch. I'd like to get the book I'm not sure who wroted it. .. "I'm imbued with some special spirit. It's not a religious feeling at all. It's a shocking eruption of great electrical energy. I feel vivid and flashing as if suddenly I've been plugged into some great electromagnetic field. I feel connected to all living things to flowers, birds all the animals of the world. I'm linked to some great unseen living force what I think the Hindus call Prana. But it's not a breakdown. I've never felt more orderly in my life. It is a shattering and beautiful sensation. It is the exulted flow of the space-time continuum, save that it is spaceless and timeless and of such loveliness I feel on the verge of some great ultimate truth."
Schizophrenia
Literally, the fractal mind. A logos that affirms multiplicity and the occupation of all possible points. The schizophrenic is like the electron : if we predict the position, we cannot predict the velocity ; if we predict the velocity, we cannot predict the position. Like a nomad travelling through smooth space, the schizophrenic, like the electron in an electron cloud, may appear anywhere within the field, occupying all positions while singularly fluctuating between positions aleatorily. Schizophrenia is a Cageian simultaneity of happenings: the nose runs, the mouth babbles, the hands fiddle, the eyes roll, the feet shuffle, the diaphragm laughs or hiccups, the Eucalyptus adds its scent to the moment, the moon at that angle in the sky ... Schizophrenia is a process of compiling lists and letting go of syntax. Social schizophrenia is a simultaneity of spontaneities, a flux of ad-hoc organizings of activity, a surrealist engagement of "collective self-management" as the transtruction [ construction - deconstruction process] of dissipative structures. All of this is distinguished from clinical schizophrenia, which is alienated, repressed schizophrenia isolated from desiring-production and collective creativity. Liberated schizophrenia is schizophrenia that has come into its own as an Escherian, topological celebration of fractal generativity!
Singularity
A singularity is a virtual potentiality existing at the zero point which begins to actualize, upsetting the habit patterns of momentum which struggle to keep time as a linear progression, a stable identity where moment begets moment. Yet time is a discontinuity. Each moment dies and is reborn at the zero point, the Schrodinger space. All possibilities compress at this dense intensity. A singularity is a possibility that escapes compression into actualization. It is a sign of difference-in-itself. Since A is never equal to A, since a thing both is and is not what it is, identity never captures being and self-sameness is impossible b self-similarity generates nano-variations that become amplified in time. Molar identity attempts to scan and surgically remove such nano-variations b becoming involves creatively amplifying them. Because singularities demonstrate that identity is only and always approximate, the State has an ill will towards them.
|
by Milton Rokeach
I just thought of one book I (surprisingly) left off my list. It's a book few people have ever heard of, even within the mental health field. It's called "The Three Christs of Ypsilanti" and tells the story from the 1950's (long before the modern catch-phrase of de-institutionalisation) where they brought together three long-term schizophrenic patients onto the same ward in a hospital in (you guessed it) Ypsilanti Hospital.
Anyway, each of these three patients was suffering from the delusion that they were Jesus Christ. The book is the chronicle of their interaction with each other and the staff as they each tried to maintain and defend their 'identity'. I have never read anything quite like it as a 'case study'. And given the latest trends in the field, it is probably an unrepeatable undertaking.
It's a fascinating read - or at least I found it so. I actually carried it around for several years as a kind of "Bible". Not for the so-called psychiatric insights but for the dialogue & interplay between 3 human beings all claiming to have the same identity. Actually, I found very little on the web about this book except one classic comment:
Maybe "Leon" of Ypsilanti really WAS Jesus... and everybody tried to "CURE" Him!!
I did identify with Leon in many ways.
I may one day get the time & energy & inclination to type up the best bits of this book. In the meantime, enjoy a few scans of some old photcopies I have. I found it's tough to scan a thick book but not so tough to scan photocopies of that thick book. You learn something every day. Well, read these excerpts and you'll learn a thing or two. Call Leon 'deluded' if you must, but I think he has one of the most creative minds you would ever wish to encounter. Reading these words again, I am reminded of that song about Van Gogh, 'this world was never meant for one as beautiful as you'. But enough of my ramblings, here's some of Mr. Rokeach's ...
Mind you, even this smattering gives just a taste of the book's contents. You'll have to hunt down a copy to get the total experience. The ISBN is ... well, on second thoughts,
click here for the book info.
Pages 216 & 7
Pages ?? - where Leon says 'I have to see the relationship to infinity. If I can see that, I'm satisfied.', which may be as profound a statement you'll ever hear from someone who is supposedly 'deluded' and 'out-of-touch' with 'reality' ... unfrotunately I sliced the scanned image up a little bit so I haven't found what page it comes from ... so be patient ... all will be revealed in the fullness of time ...
Pages 144 & 145 - scanned from the actual book rather than from the photocopies ...
Pages 234 & 5 - need re-doing but almost legible
Pages 310 & 1 - mentions Laing
Pages 336 & 7 - reflections 'twenty years later' ...
Page 238 - has 'the relationship to infinity' but I need to re-scan it ...
More scans soon ... unless I happen to be abducted by advanced intergalactic travelers who have zeroed in on my brainwaves from the vastness of interstellar space. But that's probably not going to happen in the next five
Some Links
Most of the following come from a search using the Google search engine -
Quote from Milton Rokeach
Article about the identity of Christ mentions the book
Interesting discussion of the book {added May 17, 2002}
{Or click here}
Rapunzel - a poem which mentions the book
The message I mentioned previously suggesting maybe Leon actually WAS Christ
Article at Successful Schizophrenia site
The Politics of Experience by R.D. Laing
Swami Beyondananda Karma Talk
Interesting message at a dicussion board
An article called Rogue Messiahs
Another site which mentions the book
The actual Google search which I used. Many of which i have yet to fully peruse. You may like to do so in your spare time.
Back issues of Abraxas - one of which discusses 3 Christs ... could send 'em an email ...
... use other search engines ... you never know ...
Another article which discusses the book
More discussion of the 'messiah complex'
{Oddly enough, this reminds me of a quote attributed to Buddha: 'Don't just do something, sit there!'
Excerpts from The Troubled Mind
October 2002 Update:
Page 107 - Leon defines the word parable. "Parables go from higher level ideas to lower level expression so that a person with less education can understand."
PLus "I love truth even though it hurts ..."
Page 126 - "Truth is the Boss."
Page 204 - Leon speaks about an infringement on his emotional life ...
Page 126 - Leon speaks of his 'light brother' and the spirit of 'truthful energetic happiness' ....
I really ought 2 scan pages 196 to 199 - about the ethics of conducting such an exercise ... "I was about to explore an obscure area of the human psyche by means of a method never before tried ..."
}
MARK MAYNARD DOT COM
video of the ypsilanti state (mental) hospital
By Mark | February 8, 2007
I was just poking around on YouTube and happened across some relatively interesting footage of kids exploring the old Ypsilanti State Hospital. “State Hospital,” in case you didn’t know, was something of a euphemism. It was an asylum. It’s probably best known as the setting for “The Three Christs of Ypsilanti,” a book which I’m sure I must have written about here at some point. Long story short, it’s a step-by-step tutorial on how not to deal with the severely mentally ill. Guess what – when you lock three men up together, all of whom think they’re Jesus Christ, none of them get better. I would have just thought that that was common sense, but I suppose it was worth a shot. Anyway, the book still exists as a cautionary tale on how not to treat the mentally ill. I don’t want to go on and on about the hospital, as I really don’t really know that much about it, but here’s a clip from a somewhat recent “Michigan Daily” article for those of you who are interested.
…The state Legislature authorized construction of “a hospital for the human, curative, scientific and economic treatment of insane persons to be known as the Ypsilanti State Hospital” in 1931. The buildings were designed by Albert Kahn, the architect of dozens of buildings on campus, including Angell Hall and Hill Auditorium. The first six patients were admitted on June 15, 1931, and by 1932, the hospital was spending 80 cents a day on each of its more than 900 patients.
The diary of Dr. O.R. Yoder, the hospital’s longtime medical superintendent, shows the effects of the Great Depression that gripped the nation back then. On July 2, 1931, he wrote, “Were constantly stopped by hundreds of people seeking work. Several thousand applications on file.” Later that month, the Ypsilanti Savings Bank closed its doors, and the doctor was left with $1.75 in his pocket.
In the hospital’s early days, there were no anti-depressants or anti-psychotics. Psychiatrists generally relied on Freudian talk therapy. The type of patient who wound up in Ypsilanti State Hospital, however, was often too ill to benefit from talking. For these patients, there were a variety of bodily treatments, ranging from the benign to the bizarre.
Patients on “hydrotherapy” were given warm baths or wrapped in cold, wet sheets. “Physiotherapy” consisted of exposure to ultraviolet and infrared light. Those patients suffering from psychosis due to the end stages of syphilis were given heavy metals to ingest or deliberately infected with malaria. Before antibiotics, poisoning or life-threatening fever were the only options to kill the microorganism that causes syphilis….
The post-World War II era saw the construction of two new wards, bringing the hospital’s capacity beyond 4,000 patients. It also saw an explosion of new research activities, ranging from mundane epidemiological studies, to “finger-painting as a diagnostic and therapeutic aid,” to work involving a substance referred to as “L.S.D. CID #527.” Dr. Jonas Salk honed the skills that would later lead him to develop the polio vaccine by testing flu vaccines in Ypsilanti State Hospital on what even a U.S. military medical history website describes as “volunteers,” in quotes…
The facility has since been sold to Toyota and I believe that most, if not all, of the buildings have been torn down to make way for their research facilities. I sometimes regret not having gone to check the place out when I had a chance, but then I remind myself that, at least so far, staying away from places were the mentally ill were tortured and given crude lobotomies has served me well. (And, plus, who knows what kind of nut I might have run into down there.)
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17 Comments
mark
Posted February 8, 2007 at 9:39 pm | Permalink
Good images of the hospital can be found here.
mark
Posted February 8, 2007 at 9:41 pm | Permalink
And here.
robr
Posted February 8, 2007 at 10:10 pm | Permalink
It’s true the state hospital system has many ghosts and demons associated with their pasts– really whacked-out “treatments” that ran the gamut from comical to absolute torture. But towards the end, saner, more respectful care could actually be found here, or at Pontiac, or even Eloise… At least, until we, as a society, just decided to shut these hospitals and dump the patients in the streets with the idea that they could take care of themselves and their medical needs through scant and poorly funded out-patient programs– Of course, just to save a few bucks. You could probably make a chart showing the “spike” in the number of homeless around here with the closing of these facilities… Yeah, we sure take care of our own…
mark
Posted February 8, 2007 at 10:39 pm | Permalink
Things are still evolving. In another five years they’ll all have their own reality television shows. We’ll be asking them for their autographs.
Speaking of the race to the bottom that American culture has become, did you hear about the most recent casualty? Anna Nicole Smith, dead at 39. American society to blame. News at 11:00.
kvltrede
Posted February 9, 2007 at 12:07 pm | Permalink
Seems to me that if you put three Jesus Christs in a room your odds are pretty good that one of them really is the Son of God. The true Jesus is then quite likely to cure the other two. A pretty efficient system if you ask me.
Now, if three Jesus Christs walk into a bar, well, you’ve got the makings of a pretty good joke.
It's Skinner Again
Posted February 9, 2007 at 12:49 pm | Permalink
I always thought it would have worked better if they’d used four Jesi, one for each gospel. I hope they consult me next time.
lusia mitchell
Posted October 20, 2007 at 4:03 am | Permalink
I have written you at length at your email address. I will only say this: I have spent my life with outsiders being “clever” and wonderfully insightfull about the daily lives of people who lived, or perhaps, should live, at YSH. However, if you are really concerned, you should stop stepping around the people who annoy you because they are rooting in dumpsters, shadow-boxing on the street, yelling at you…
They were the people I grew up with for 17 years. They are MY PEOPLE and you are simply pompous middle-class ignorants who would rather fall back on high school reading and bad movies and feel smug and avoid those people in your daily lives and applaud yourselves.
You people DON’T HAVE A CLUE. NOT. ONE.
NOT
ONE
You have no idea what it is like to not be able to take care of yourself or to have family who absolutely cannot, even if they want to so do.
So
It is far easier for you to assume that someone who was in YSH was subjected to horrible treatement, instead of really researching what went on there.
And
I’ll bet the farm that YOUR babysitter wasn’t a what? patient? inmate? whatever? at YSH. Mine were. Nor your neighbors.
I’m just panting to hear from you self-righteous people re: how you are going to take in all of those (then) 4,000 people into your homes or convert a house or apartment on your street so that they can transition into “your life” or at least, make certain that they get basic nutrition (where is that money coming from?) and antipsychotic drugs so that they don’t scare the hell out of you on the street as you go about your business…
Or maybe, you think we should just shoot theem all and save the bother and monies?
lusia mitchell
Posted October 20, 2007 at 4:08 am | Permalink
Oh
P.S.
I knew all “3 Christs” at YSH…
The question here for me is…
Who do you all think YOU are?
It seems to me that our current president thinks that God speaks to him.
At least the men I knew who thought they were Christ never ever sent other people to die in a war that has absolutely no meaning.
mark
Posted October 20, 2007 at 1:32 pm | Permalink
Luisa, I checked my email archive, and I’ve never received a note from you, at least not from the email address you entered with your comment. Is it possible that you sent your emails to the author of the “Michigan Daily” piece I quoted? (That indented section, which suggests that patients were mistreated, was not written by me.) If you’d like to share more about what it was actually like in the Hospital with the 3 Christs, we’d love to hear your perspective.
baileycamper
Posted October 21, 2007 at 5:12 pm | Permalink
I would be really curious as to how you know the three christs. I have a personal interest in knowing and hope you will respond.
egpenet
Posted February 14, 2008 at 9:26 pm | Permalink
It’s a very long time ago, but when I first moved to Ann Arbor, I worked at the I.C.L.E. (Institute for Continuing Legal Eductaion) at UofM editing law books, and lived on North Campus. My neighbor was Jim Duderstadt and family. Next door to Jim was a afriend, who had a huge mason jar full of mescaline tabs.
I had other friends in town that did LOTS of drugs.
That neighbor of Jim’s and mine ended up at Ypsi, as did several other people I knew. I’d go on Sundays with a cartyon of cigarettes and head for Ward B and walk the lounges.
What I saw were abandoned people … tyhose abandoned by their families … those abandoned by us. It was very distrubing.
I understand that the most severely deformed, handicapped or otherwise most critical of the mentally ill were kept at Pontiac State Hospital.
The “ethos” of this country is that if you cannot produce, you’re OUT. That ethos is antithetical to any religious teaching of which I am aware. It is facistic. Nationalistic. Even Republican … as if to say … that tortured soul is being punished by God for being the way he/she is … let them suffer.
Being a “good” social democrat … that attitude makes me puke.
Vicki Lansen
Posted March 27, 2008 at 3:03 pm | Permalink
Hi Mark. My Great Uncle Max Kemmerling lived almost his entire adult life from the age of 20, at/in Ypsilanti State MH. Prior to his incarceration, he was a All State athlete, an National Honor Society Member, and frankly, just a real sweet, handsome guy. I plan to track down “The Three Christs of Ypsalanti” but I am curious if there are any searcable archives for the hospital. I now live in Chile, so it’s not like I can just skip down the road and look at documents.
I’d like to find out what my Uncle was there because of, schitzophrenia? what? I’d like to know what his life was like. I never knew him, he was a “family secret”, but I did for a long time have a bedside table he made – a quite beautiful piece of work. I think he was a talented, gifted man, who just didn’t fit in. Hope you know of some resources to find out more about him. Thanks, Vicki Lansen (Kemmerling – Max Kemmerling was my Uncle).
mark
Posted March 27, 2008 at 10:35 pm | Permalink
I’ll move this up to the front page tonight, Vicki. Hopefully someone can help you.
Ronald J Withey
Posted October 27, 2013 at 12:48 pm | Permalink
I lived in YSH for about a year, and some months in 1983, 84. I was about 15, 16 when I went there. They called it yorkwoods center, bldg 7. My first day, I was so scared I stabbed a staff member in the leg, and they put me into the quiet room for 8 hours, and had me on suicide watch for the rest of the night. The place to this day haunts me, but because of it I have changed my life for the better.
Brian Ronewicz
Posted December 8, 2013 at 7:31 pm | Permalink
I was there in 1990 – till they shut down in 1991. I was haunted every night I went to sleep, with apparitions of dead and tortured. When they removed me from here they put me in a worse place than this . They sent me to Fairlawne . Dungeons with tunnels and cages where they physically try to get the crazy out. Mental illness was treated in the most inhumane way ,that often than most killed patients. Now the souls wander around in purgatory just trying to find a way to let their souls rest. I was 14 when these places started treating me.All I remember are the ghosts and different entities that cloud these old death camps for mentally Ill may all rest in peace.
Mark
The Rise & Fall of the Humane State Hospital System=GREED makes MURDERERS
You are absolutely right. Doctors and the drug companies behind them are
evil predators that push dangerous, destructive drugs for mega
profits.The cancer and medical institutions are run by the Rockefellers
of the Illuminati, who are intent on world domination. These demons
financed Hitler.
Drugs have a whole slough of demonic properties: they cause suicidal tendencies, they retard brain function, destroy your liver, cause cancer and heart disease, wipe out your friendly bacteria which is 80% of your immune system, make you very acidic, which is the right terrain for ALL DISEASE, destroy your libido, make you feel unreal, make you aggressive and violent, etc.
This is the most ugly business in the world and the most profitable. I NEVER go to doctors. They have ruined my health in every way. They all belong in jail.
DO NOT SUPPORT THESE CRIMINALS!
The rise and fall of state hospital State school was dumping ground Robert Mielke, shown here during a stroll around the grounds of the Northampton State Hospital, said he struggled when patients occasionally asked why they were hospitalized. "Today, I'd probably have an answer," he says. Mielke worked in many different jobs at the now-closed hospital. CAROL LOLLIS Photo By THEO EMERY Staff Writer NORTHAMPTON - Reaching the end of a pitted, weed-choked driveway of the Northampton State Hospital, Robert Mielke said that when patients sometimes asked why they were hospitalized, he had no answer to give them. He turned a deaf ear to the question, he said, because in many cases there was no good reason for their confinement. During the many years he worked at the now-closed hospital - first as a groundskeeper, then on the wards, and eventually as hospital treasurer - he didn't have the answer he has now: that thousands of patients filled the wards, grew old and, in some cases, died at the hospital simply because society was not able or willing to care for them in any other way. In its heyday, the hospital was a town within a town, he said, as he stood near the edge of the sun-dappled campus on a September morning. It took more than an hour for Mielke to amble around the silent buildings overlooking Northampton. He pointed out the overgrown peach and apple orchards, the site of the greenhouses, the dormitories for married couples, and the doors to the honeycomb of tunnels under the property. The significance of the decaying structure, now silent but for the occasional wind-slammed door and the shriek of rusty air vents, is as sprawling as the hospital itself. Its legacy, Mielke said, is imprinted upon every patient who passed through the hospital doors and, sometimes, asked why they were there. "How do you answer people who ask 'why am I are here?' What do you say?" said Mielke, now 53. "Today, I'd probably have an answer." The boom, the bust More than a century ago, Northampton State Hospital was in the forefront of reform efforts to improve conditions for people with mental illness. The hospital and its nearby sister institution, the Belchertown State School, boomed together, becoming integral parts of the area economy by mid-century. Eventually, they also became emblems of the way society segregated the ill, the disabled and the outcast. As medicine and technology advanced, and attitudes about mental illness and retardation slowly shifted, both area institutions were caught in a tide of social change that swept the nation in the 1960s and 1970s. This interior photograph was taken in 1985, after this building at the Northampton State Hospital was emptied. Gazette File Photo Those changes focused on emptying such places rather than filling them, and discharging people with mental illness and retardation into community settings. The state shifted care to a new generation of reformers in the private sector, and boarded up the buildings at both institutions for eventual sale and development. The evidence of those changes are visible everyday in Northampton, Belchertown, and the surrounding towns. Most care for people with mental illness and mental retardation has shifted from hospitals and institutions to private organizations founded upon a vision of treating these people in the community, as equals. These agencies and advocacy organizations, with unlocked doors that open onto neighborhood streets and downtown hubs, strive to integrate people with mental illness and retardation into the fabric of society - rather than banish them to society's margins. Good intentions Though Northampton State Hospital and Belchertown State School eventually came to represent much of what could go wrong with care for mentally ill and retarded people, they initially were viewed as humane alternatives to inhumane conditions. In 1841, a young Boston school teacher named Dorothy Dix began teaching religion to jail inmates at Middlesex County Jail. To her shock, she discovered a "mad woman" chained to the wall in a basement cell. Dix gave up teaching and began investigating the plight of people with mental illness and mental retardation across the commonwealth. In 1843, she reported the findings of her town-by-town investigation to the Legislature. People with mental illness and retardation were confined in cells and cages in nearly every community in the state, "chained, naked, beaten with rods, and lashed into obedience," she told lawmakers. Responding to Dix's stinging report, the state began funding institutions to care for the people Dix found, differentiating for the first time between mental illness and mental retardation. The state's only hospital for the mentally ill in Worcestor, built in the 1830s, had became overcrowded, and so the state funded new hospitals for the mentally ill in Northampton and Taunton. The Northampton Lunatic Hospital opened in 1858 around the notion that "moral treatment" of fresh air, hard work and regimented schedules for people with mental illness would cure them, according to "The Life and Death of Northampton State Hospital," a book published by Historic Northampton. A publication of the time summed up that optimism. The Ballou's Pictorial Drawing Room Companion proclaimed in 1956 that the hospital was "an exponent of the humane feeling that is entering the state government, replacing the cold and unChristian-like spirit which has formerly regarded these poor, unfortunate beings." Those attitudes, in turn, evolved. Pliny Earle, hospital superintendent from 1864 to 1885, was once an advocate of such "moral treatment," but by the time he arrived in Northampton, he had come to doubt whether it could cure mental illness, and he began to emphasize work rehabilitation for the patients. By the close of the 18th century, Northampton State Hospital - as it was renamed - had became a place not to cure, but to warehouse poor people who could not afford psychiatric care, as well as the senile, the elderly and others who, by today's medical standards, were not mentally ill at all. There were about 600 patients at the hospital at the turn of the century; by the 1950s, that number would increase four-fold, to almost 2,500. The hospital's heydey When the hospital reached its peak census in 1955, it was a booming enterprise that provided some of the region's best-paying, most stable jobs. It had also become a nearly self-sufficient entity, boasting its own gardens, slaughter houses and canneries. Entire families of employees lived on or near the campus. There were baseball teams and social events, and constant traffic down the hill from the hospital to the town. Shirley Gallup came to Northampton from South Carolina in 1958, when there were more than 2,200 patients. She expected that her new job as a psychiatrist for newly admitted women would last one or two years, she said. She stayed for 28. When Gallup arrived, the hospital was bulging at the seams, a small city on a hill above Northampton - and already ripe for reform. By that time, the hospital was overcrowded, underfunded and physically declining. It would be years later before any legal protections would exist to prevent people from being involuntarily committed. The living evidence of that legal void was in the hospital's back wards and infirmaries. The hospital had many patients with genuine mental illness. But it also housed many people with temporary conditions, such as mothers with post-partum depression, and other who were simply old, unable to speak English, physically disabled, deaf, rebellious, or sexually promiscuous. "I felt, as I saw the patients, that some didn't need to be in the hospital. Some needed to be in nursing homes. Six hundred of those 2,300 were geriatric," said Gallup. "The older ones - they didn't have the family to take care of them. They aged there, and they didn't know anything but institutional life." It was around this time that two key factors emerged: anti-psychotic medications that could control depression and psychosis, and a movement to legally redefine how patients could be committed to hospitals and what rights to treatment they had. It was in the early 1960s that "deinstitutionalization" efforts began in earnest, pushed by mandates from President Kennedy on the federal level. During those years, most of the patients left the hospital, and the town began to see more of its neighbors from the hill, according to Robert Fleischner, staff attorney at the Center for Popular Representation, the Northampton legal group that advocated on behalf of patients. "By the time of deinstitutionalization, Northampton had a high level of tolerance and was used to seeing people downtown," said Fleischner. "That's not to say that it was perfect - it wasn't. But there was a willingness to have people around who look different and act differently." Making the case for change By the 1970s, the anti-institution movement among parents of children with mental illness and retardation was swiftly gaining ground. It was fueled by media reports such as the 1970 "Tragedy of Belchertown" series in the Union-News of Springfield and the expose of Willowbrook Hospital in New York State. Two short years later, the Belchertown School Friends Association, spearheaded by Amherst parent Benjamin Ricci, filed a lawsuit against the state, seeking to improve conditions at Belchertown State School. By 1976, the patient census at the Northampton State Hospital had fallen sharply, to 536. But the pace of change was not fast enough for legal advocates of the mentally ill. Documenting patients' behavior on the wards, they came to believe that patients who could easily live healthy, productive lives had assumed "institutional behaviors" that made them appear sicker than they were. In other words, the hospital was not curing patients, but making their conditions worse, according to Fleischner. Taking a page from the Belchertown School Friends Association suit and other groups like it, the lawyers who later formed the Center for Public Representation filed a class-action suit in 1976 on behalf of a state hospital You are absolutely right. Doctors and the drug companies behind them are evil predators that push dangerous, destructive drugs for mega profits.The cancer and medical institutions are run by the Rockefellers of the Illuminati, who are intent on world domination. These demons financed Hitler.
Drugs have a whole slough of demonic properties: they cause suicidal tendencies, they retard brain function, destroy your liver, cause cancer and heart disease, wipe out your friendly bacteria which is 80% of your immune system, make you very acidic, which is the right terrain for ALL DISEASE, destroy your libido, make you feel unreal, make you aggressive and violent, etc.
This is the most ugly business in the world and the most profitable. I NEVER go to doctors. They have ruined my health in every way. They all belong in jail.
DO NOT SUPPORT THESE CRIMINALS! patient named David Brewster and others there. Two years later, that lawsuit against the commonwealth of Massachusetts would be settled in what became known as the Brewster Consent Decree. That agreement, overseen by U.S. District Court officials, promised to reduce the hospital census to about 50 patients and to discharge the rest into the community, according to Fleischner. "It was revolutionary to think of putting people into group homes of eight or nine people," said Fleischner. Raymond P. Brien,regional director of the Department of Mental Health from 1976 to 1979, said those years were "very emotional" for everyone involved. Because he has a sister with mental retardation, he entered the social work field in the 1960s - just ahead of the regional and nationwide sea change in attitudes. "On both the mental retardation and mental health side, I got to know people who were pioneers who had profound beliefs that most of the people in those institutions didn't need to be there," said Brien. "It was the first region in the country that closed both its state hospital and the state school without dumping the patients." Dr. Jeffrey Geller served as medical director of the state hospital from 1979 until 1984. He helped draft the the lawsuit, and then joined the hospital staff the year after the consent decree to help implement it. Even today, some people involved with the hospital believe that the need remains for inpatient hospitals to treat mental illness, and Mielke and Geller are among them. Though Geller's view has shifted since that time, he felt a "tremendous excitement" in the aftermath of the decree, he said. The original timeline for the decree's implementation was set for 2 ½ years. Instead, it took 15, and ended in a conclusion that even Brewster's lawyers had not originally foreseen: The state opted to close the hospital completely. On Aug. 26, 1993, Northampton State Hospital discharged its last 11 patients, and, with the van door slammed behind the ex-patients, Northampton's hospital for the mentally ill became a piece of history. Early questions Not everyone shared the enthusiasm for deinstitutionalization. In the early 1980s, as new community programs opened and spread in Northampton, some residents - including then-Mayor David Musante - feared that Northampton was becoming a "mental health ghetto," as one prominent piece of graffiti in downtown Northampton proclaimed at the time. Several incidents involving former patients, including fires set at halfway houses, reinforced that impression and led to efforts to rein in the spread of group homes. Rebecca Macauley was one of those who sought to confront fear about deinstitutionalization. Even today, she has constant reminders of her past: Out the kitchen window of Macauley's Old South Street house, through a dip in the tree line, she can see a copper-domed spire atop Building G, a hospital ward where she was once a patient. Macauley said that for years, people associated with the hospital carried "anti-resumes" they only shared among themselves - lists of all the places they were hospitalized, all the treatments they received, the experiences they endured. The anti-resume she accumulated after the death of her husband included five hospitalizations at Northampton and five at the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Leeds. Macauley said that during the early 1980s, there was a "terrible stigma" associated with being a hospital patient. She eventually "came out" in a letter to the Gazette, saying there was a "witch hunt" afoot in Northampton that sought to blame the mentally ill for all of the city's problems. She got into a public exchange with Musante in the newspaper's pages, and eventually arrived in his office unannounced for an angry showdown. Instead, the two became fast friends - an example, she said, of the healing that can, and must, take place in the long shadow the hospital casts over Northampton. "It was great, we had a great conversation. We became good friends after that. I knew what he was saying, I knew what those fears were," said Macauley. "Northampton State Hospital is an example of failed social policy. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but no one looked far enough down the road to see what it would become. And now, we're living with that legacy."
Drugs have a whole slough of demonic properties: they cause suicidal tendencies, they retard brain function, destroy your liver, cause cancer and heart disease, wipe out your friendly bacteria which is 80% of your immune system, make you very acidic, which is the right terrain for ALL DISEASE, destroy your libido, make you feel unreal, make you aggressive and violent, etc.
This is the most ugly business in the world and the most profitable. I NEVER go to doctors. They have ruined my health in every way. They all belong in jail.
DO NOT SUPPORT THESE CRIMINALS!
The rise and fall of state hospital State school was dumping ground Robert Mielke, shown here during a stroll around the grounds of the Northampton State Hospital, said he struggled when patients occasionally asked why they were hospitalized. "Today, I'd probably have an answer," he says. Mielke worked in many different jobs at the now-closed hospital. CAROL LOLLIS Photo By THEO EMERY Staff Writer NORTHAMPTON - Reaching the end of a pitted, weed-choked driveway of the Northampton State Hospital, Robert Mielke said that when patients sometimes asked why they were hospitalized, he had no answer to give them. He turned a deaf ear to the question, he said, because in many cases there was no good reason for their confinement. During the many years he worked at the now-closed hospital - first as a groundskeeper, then on the wards, and eventually as hospital treasurer - he didn't have the answer he has now: that thousands of patients filled the wards, grew old and, in some cases, died at the hospital simply because society was not able or willing to care for them in any other way. In its heyday, the hospital was a town within a town, he said, as he stood near the edge of the sun-dappled campus on a September morning. It took more than an hour for Mielke to amble around the silent buildings overlooking Northampton. He pointed out the overgrown peach and apple orchards, the site of the greenhouses, the dormitories for married couples, and the doors to the honeycomb of tunnels under the property. The significance of the decaying structure, now silent but for the occasional wind-slammed door and the shriek of rusty air vents, is as sprawling as the hospital itself. Its legacy, Mielke said, is imprinted upon every patient who passed through the hospital doors and, sometimes, asked why they were there. "How do you answer people who ask 'why am I are here?' What do you say?" said Mielke, now 53. "Today, I'd probably have an answer." The boom, the bust More than a century ago, Northampton State Hospital was in the forefront of reform efforts to improve conditions for people with mental illness. The hospital and its nearby sister institution, the Belchertown State School, boomed together, becoming integral parts of the area economy by mid-century. Eventually, they also became emblems of the way society segregated the ill, the disabled and the outcast. As medicine and technology advanced, and attitudes about mental illness and retardation slowly shifted, both area institutions were caught in a tide of social change that swept the nation in the 1960s and 1970s. This interior photograph was taken in 1985, after this building at the Northampton State Hospital was emptied. Gazette File Photo Those changes focused on emptying such places rather than filling them, and discharging people with mental illness and retardation into community settings. The state shifted care to a new generation of reformers in the private sector, and boarded up the buildings at both institutions for eventual sale and development. The evidence of those changes are visible everyday in Northampton, Belchertown, and the surrounding towns. Most care for people with mental illness and mental retardation has shifted from hospitals and institutions to private organizations founded upon a vision of treating these people in the community, as equals. These agencies and advocacy organizations, with unlocked doors that open onto neighborhood streets and downtown hubs, strive to integrate people with mental illness and retardation into the fabric of society - rather than banish them to society's margins. Good intentions Though Northampton State Hospital and Belchertown State School eventually came to represent much of what could go wrong with care for mentally ill and retarded people, they initially were viewed as humane alternatives to inhumane conditions. In 1841, a young Boston school teacher named Dorothy Dix began teaching religion to jail inmates at Middlesex County Jail. To her shock, she discovered a "mad woman" chained to the wall in a basement cell. Dix gave up teaching and began investigating the plight of people with mental illness and mental retardation across the commonwealth. In 1843, she reported the findings of her town-by-town investigation to the Legislature. People with mental illness and retardation were confined in cells and cages in nearly every community in the state, "chained, naked, beaten with rods, and lashed into obedience," she told lawmakers. Responding to Dix's stinging report, the state began funding institutions to care for the people Dix found, differentiating for the first time between mental illness and mental retardation. The state's only hospital for the mentally ill in Worcestor, built in the 1830s, had became overcrowded, and so the state funded new hospitals for the mentally ill in Northampton and Taunton. The Northampton Lunatic Hospital opened in 1858 around the notion that "moral treatment" of fresh air, hard work and regimented schedules for people with mental illness would cure them, according to "The Life and Death of Northampton State Hospital," a book published by Historic Northampton. A publication of the time summed up that optimism. The Ballou's Pictorial Drawing Room Companion proclaimed in 1956 that the hospital was "an exponent of the humane feeling that is entering the state government, replacing the cold and unChristian-like spirit which has formerly regarded these poor, unfortunate beings." Those attitudes, in turn, evolved. Pliny Earle, hospital superintendent from 1864 to 1885, was once an advocate of such "moral treatment," but by the time he arrived in Northampton, he had come to doubt whether it could cure mental illness, and he began to emphasize work rehabilitation for the patients. By the close of the 18th century, Northampton State Hospital - as it was renamed - had became a place not to cure, but to warehouse poor people who could not afford psychiatric care, as well as the senile, the elderly and others who, by today's medical standards, were not mentally ill at all. There were about 600 patients at the hospital at the turn of the century; by the 1950s, that number would increase four-fold, to almost 2,500. The hospital's heydey When the hospital reached its peak census in 1955, it was a booming enterprise that provided some of the region's best-paying, most stable jobs. It had also become a nearly self-sufficient entity, boasting its own gardens, slaughter houses and canneries. Entire families of employees lived on or near the campus. There were baseball teams and social events, and constant traffic down the hill from the hospital to the town. Shirley Gallup came to Northampton from South Carolina in 1958, when there were more than 2,200 patients. She expected that her new job as a psychiatrist for newly admitted women would last one or two years, she said. She stayed for 28. When Gallup arrived, the hospital was bulging at the seams, a small city on a hill above Northampton - and already ripe for reform. By that time, the hospital was overcrowded, underfunded and physically declining. It would be years later before any legal protections would exist to prevent people from being involuntarily committed. The living evidence of that legal void was in the hospital's back wards and infirmaries. The hospital had many patients with genuine mental illness. But it also housed many people with temporary conditions, such as mothers with post-partum depression, and other who were simply old, unable to speak English, physically disabled, deaf, rebellious, or sexually promiscuous. "I felt, as I saw the patients, that some didn't need to be in the hospital. Some needed to be in nursing homes. Six hundred of those 2,300 were geriatric," said Gallup. "The older ones - they didn't have the family to take care of them. They aged there, and they didn't know anything but institutional life." It was around this time that two key factors emerged: anti-psychotic medications that could control depression and psychosis, and a movement to legally redefine how patients could be committed to hospitals and what rights to treatment they had. It was in the early 1960s that "deinstitutionalization" efforts began in earnest, pushed by mandates from President Kennedy on the federal level. During those years, most of the patients left the hospital, and the town began to see more of its neighbors from the hill, according to Robert Fleischner, staff attorney at the Center for Popular Representation, the Northampton legal group that advocated on behalf of patients. "By the time of deinstitutionalization, Northampton had a high level of tolerance and was used to seeing people downtown," said Fleischner. "That's not to say that it was perfect - it wasn't. But there was a willingness to have people around who look different and act differently." Making the case for change By the 1970s, the anti-institution movement among parents of children with mental illness and retardation was swiftly gaining ground. It was fueled by media reports such as the 1970 "Tragedy of Belchertown" series in the Union-News of Springfield and the expose of Willowbrook Hospital in New York State. Two short years later, the Belchertown School Friends Association, spearheaded by Amherst parent Benjamin Ricci, filed a lawsuit against the state, seeking to improve conditions at Belchertown State School. By 1976, the patient census at the Northampton State Hospital had fallen sharply, to 536. But the pace of change was not fast enough for legal advocates of the mentally ill. Documenting patients' behavior on the wards, they came to believe that patients who could easily live healthy, productive lives had assumed "institutional behaviors" that made them appear sicker than they were. In other words, the hospital was not curing patients, but making their conditions worse, according to Fleischner. Taking a page from the Belchertown School Friends Association suit and other groups like it, the lawyers who later formed the Center for Public Representation filed a class-action suit in 1976 on behalf of a state hospital You are absolutely right. Doctors and the drug companies behind them are evil predators that push dangerous, destructive drugs for mega profits.The cancer and medical institutions are run by the Rockefellers of the Illuminati, who are intent on world domination. These demons financed Hitler.
Drugs have a whole slough of demonic properties: they cause suicidal tendencies, they retard brain function, destroy your liver, cause cancer and heart disease, wipe out your friendly bacteria which is 80% of your immune system, make you very acidic, which is the right terrain for ALL DISEASE, destroy your libido, make you feel unreal, make you aggressive and violent, etc.
This is the most ugly business in the world and the most profitable. I NEVER go to doctors. They have ruined my health in every way. They all belong in jail.
DO NOT SUPPORT THESE CRIMINALS! patient named David Brewster and others there. Two years later, that lawsuit against the commonwealth of Massachusetts would be settled in what became known as the Brewster Consent Decree. That agreement, overseen by U.S. District Court officials, promised to reduce the hospital census to about 50 patients and to discharge the rest into the community, according to Fleischner. "It was revolutionary to think of putting people into group homes of eight or nine people," said Fleischner. Raymond P. Brien,regional director of the Department of Mental Health from 1976 to 1979, said those years were "very emotional" for everyone involved. Because he has a sister with mental retardation, he entered the social work field in the 1960s - just ahead of the regional and nationwide sea change in attitudes. "On both the mental retardation and mental health side, I got to know people who were pioneers who had profound beliefs that most of the people in those institutions didn't need to be there," said Brien. "It was the first region in the country that closed both its state hospital and the state school without dumping the patients." Dr. Jeffrey Geller served as medical director of the state hospital from 1979 until 1984. He helped draft the the lawsuit, and then joined the hospital staff the year after the consent decree to help implement it. Even today, some people involved with the hospital believe that the need remains for inpatient hospitals to treat mental illness, and Mielke and Geller are among them. Though Geller's view has shifted since that time, he felt a "tremendous excitement" in the aftermath of the decree, he said. The original timeline for the decree's implementation was set for 2 ½ years. Instead, it took 15, and ended in a conclusion that even Brewster's lawyers had not originally foreseen: The state opted to close the hospital completely. On Aug. 26, 1993, Northampton State Hospital discharged its last 11 patients, and, with the van door slammed behind the ex-patients, Northampton's hospital for the mentally ill became a piece of history. Early questions Not everyone shared the enthusiasm for deinstitutionalization. In the early 1980s, as new community programs opened and spread in Northampton, some residents - including then-Mayor David Musante - feared that Northampton was becoming a "mental health ghetto," as one prominent piece of graffiti in downtown Northampton proclaimed at the time. Several incidents involving former patients, including fires set at halfway houses, reinforced that impression and led to efforts to rein in the spread of group homes. Rebecca Macauley was one of those who sought to confront fear about deinstitutionalization. Even today, she has constant reminders of her past: Out the kitchen window of Macauley's Old South Street house, through a dip in the tree line, she can see a copper-domed spire atop Building G, a hospital ward where she was once a patient. Macauley said that for years, people associated with the hospital carried "anti-resumes" they only shared among themselves - lists of all the places they were hospitalized, all the treatments they received, the experiences they endured. The anti-resume she accumulated after the death of her husband included five hospitalizations at Northampton and five at the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Leeds. Macauley said that during the early 1980s, there was a "terrible stigma" associated with being a hospital patient. She eventually "came out" in a letter to the Gazette, saying there was a "witch hunt" afoot in Northampton that sought to blame the mentally ill for all of the city's problems. She got into a public exchange with Musante in the newspaper's pages, and eventually arrived in his office unannounced for an angry showdown. Instead, the two became fast friends - an example, she said, of the healing that can, and must, take place in the long shadow the hospital casts over Northampton. "It was great, we had a great conversation. We became good friends after that. I knew what he was saying, I knew what those fears were," said Macauley. "Northampton State Hospital is an example of failed social policy. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but no one looked far enough down the road to see what it would become. And now, we're living with that legacy."
Perched atop a hill overlooking a small college town in Ohio (United States), Athens State Hospital-now known as The Ridges-has an imposing presence that the banners for the art gallery in the central building do little to diminish. While a fraction of the building is currently in use by Ohio State University, the majority of the aging Kirkbride hospital has been left to the peaceful solitude of its own decay. The hallways and rooms, still peppered with fragments of the past, are rife with uncharted mold and bacteria; the walls have become intricate murals of the eroding lead paint that dusts the floor and poisons the air. [Here the Fictionized Creep Show Atmosphere is being established...already Matthew the Big Fat Poop Head tried to make a PROSIQUILLOY of QUASI POETIC fancy words..CREATE the FALE IDEA that MENTAL HOSPITALS are and WAS "POISON. DEATH, BAD places!] The unique architecture of this campus has been spared due to the use of several of its buildings by local businesses, which maintain the properties of the abandoned ones. In many senses, Athens State Hospital is an anomaly. It has been incredibly well preserved and protected from thieves and vandals, and reminders of its history are still intact. Most state hospitals, such as Byberry State Hospital in Philadelphia, have been completely left to the elements and are easily accessible to anyone who cares to research them and risk getting caught by the meagre security forces that guard them. Such sites are frequently seen as a problem to the communities they are part of, due in part to the fact that an entire subculture of self-titled urban explorers has developed, populated by people ranging from those with a deep and abiding respect for the sites to those who look at them as opportune sites for graffiti and vandalism. While these sites are extremely toxic, the dangers are often invisible to those who enter. Asbestos and lead particles in the air do not affect one's health immediately and rotting floors often give no signal of their structural weakness until it is too late. Furthermore, these sites are on prime locations for development, yet their historical significance is undeniable, and often the cleanup of hazardous materials makes costs prohibitive. Asylums were intended to be self-sufficient and the majority of the food would be grown by patients in fields and greenhouses like this one. While now famous for the of abuses and horrors that took place inside, most state hospitals were initially beautiful, idyllic campuses founded in the late 1800s, largely in response to the tremendous need for mental health care for Public awareness of the need for adequate and full-time care for the mentally ill was higher than ever, and reformers like Dorothea Dix (1802-1887) and Thomas Kirkbride (1809-1883) helped promote what would become an unparalleled movement to create asylums funded by state and local governments to tend to the needs of the mentally ill.
Such facilities were founded on the curative principles of healing through humane treatment, labour and the natural beauty of the sprawling campuses on which the hospitals were built, and were intended to be self-sustaining. As such, the food was grown and the grounds maintained by patients, and by all accounts the treatment provided was a vast improvement on the universally care afforded to the mentally ill prior to this era. But such times were not destined to last. After the turn of the century, state hospitals became warehouses for an increasing number of people who society deemed undesirable, including criminals, the poor, homosexuals, those with unorthodox religious views, unwanted children, the elderly, syphilitics, alcoholics and anyone else who was inconvenient to those around them. During this period, it was frighteningly easy to commit a wife who was no longer wanted, children who misbehaved or aging parents whose care was too cumbersome.
As populations swelled past the capacity for which the asylums had been designed, the level of care plummeted, and with such diverse populations being cared for in the same wards, consistent treatment was impossible. Cuts in funding during wartime and the depression forced many patients to sleep on floors or in hallways.
BUT NOW THEY SLEEP ON SKID ROW CONCRETE SIDEWALKS and HAVE GASOLINE THROWN ON THEM and BURNED FOR "THRILLS!" LOOK AT THE ARTICLES ABOUT THE TEEN AGERS "THRILL KILLING HOMELESS" LEARNED IN "VIDEO ROLE PLAY VIOLENT GAMES!"
Treatment reached critical proportions during the Second World War, when funding and supplies were unavailable and the majority of able-bodied staff were involved in the war effort. The care for patients also became unimaginably nightmarish: there were wards full of malnourished, unclothed and filthy patients, who were forced to eat rotten food and sleep in quarters that were falling apart, often fatally exposing them to the elements. With staffing ratios at unthinkable levels (at times 1 staff member to 200 patients) and facilities crammed to nearly double their intended capacities, abuse by staff also became incredibly problematic. Patients were severely beaten, raped, prostituted, denied medical care and otherwise mistreated to levels that are beyond comprehension. ] One cannot help but think when looking at pictures from this period that the patients are nearly indistinguishable from Holocaust survivors. [I FEAR THE PHOTOS YOU SPEAK OF ARE ACTUALLY DELIBERATELY SELECTED TO FURTHER THE AGENDA THAT THE MOST VILE MONSTERS RAN THE MENTAL HOSPITALS, if you Think This, you are a DANGEROUS IDIOT, but if you CAN NOT SEE that AMERICA TODAY TREATS SANE AND INSANE ALIKE FAR WORSE than the People You Describe, TODAY, EVERY DAY, in the WORLD'S LARGEST PRISON INDUSTRY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX since THE ROMAN EMPIRE! WE CURRENTLY HAVE A PRISON POPULATION OVER TWICE THE NUMBER OF FARMERS ENGAGED IN PRODUCING THE FOOD WE EAT! Think about that!] As the peeling paint etches intricate patterns in the walls and doors of this asylum, its toxic dust coats the floor and floats in the air.
In his book, Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and The Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill, Robert Whitaker makes a compelling argument for how the Holocaust and the treatment of the mentally ill in this period both were founded on the same principles of eugenics and the cleansing of "undesirables" from society: the stated goal of the concentration camps was the extermination of Germany's upper-echelon groups deemed detrimental to society, while the same, if unstated, goal in the United States mental health system was attained through forced sterilization and lethal neglect. The halls of the Athens State Hospital are remarkably well preserved and unmarred by vandalism and theft. As the war ended, several major fictional and grossly emotional exposés brought thefalse idea that abysmal treatment of the mentally ill to light. A photo essay, entitled "Bedlam 1946", in Life Magazine and Albert Deutsch's 1948 publication, The Shame of the States (Mental Illness and Social Policy: the American Experience), helped raise public awareness of the plight of the inmates in a couple of psychiatric hospitals. While this served to ameliorate the situation somewhat, most of the measures taken to remedy the problems were short-lived.
Overcrowding and insufficient care continued to be problematic, although less so than during the years of the Second World War, and abuse of patients was never found to be true. There is simply no way to encompass all the cruelties heaped on the patients;[ but you will make up a load of lies to create your fictional pulp trash propaganda any way, it's the way of the liars] most are familiar with Electric Shock Treatments, which gained popularity as they produced manageable patients, albeit those whose cognitive functioning had been permanently impaired. A particularly barbaric variation of this treatment was performed at Athens State Hospital by Dr. Walter Freeman (1895-1972), who made use of neither anesthetics nor an operating room, and whose careless technique shocked even other doctors and nurses familiar with the procedure. Another common form of treatment was hydrotherapy in which a patient was placed in a tub, which would be filled with either scalding or freezing water, and a sheet was zipped around the neck so only the head was sticking out. Depending on the temperament of the staff, the patient might be left in such a state for days without even a pause to use the bathroom. As the hospitals' intent was less to cure than to warehouse patients, the purpose of the treatments was less to produce any measurable improvement in their condition than to subdue them, making them convenient for the staff. Left to its own, nature often playfully mimics architectural details, using dazzling complimentary patterns. During the late 1960s and 1970s, the advent of the "chemical straight jacket" Thorazine changed the face of mental health care. Neuroleptics like Thorazine produce a myriad of intensely uncomfortable, frightening side effects and were in fact later identified by Soviet political dissidents as one of the worst tortures they were subjected to in the "psychiatric centres" where they were confined. They produced docile and compliant patients however, and their use was far-reaching and indiscriminate in the American mental health system. As their use became more widespread and the push for - and newly formed patients' rights associations, the focus of hospitalization shifted from containing patients for the remainder of their natural lives to bringing their behaviorisms to manageable levels that would allow community integration. While this policy was in many ways beneficial, the treatment at to be an inhumane and dehumanizing process. [ ============================This book, entitled The Shoe Leather Treatment, referring to the common "treatment" of kicking patients until they were compliant or too injured to resist, former patient Bill Thomas relates that after years in state hospitals, a brief stay in prison after an escape attempt seemed an immeasurable improvement in his quality of life.] ==============================
Vandalism has severely damaged the buildings of the hospital in Maryland. Doors are broken, windows smashed and graffiti covers nearly every wall. Coupled with the push to reintegrate patients into society, this flagrant abuse and neglect finally led to the closure of many asylums. Even this process was messy, however. Under President Ronald Reagan's policies, which often led to dumping clients out of hospitals with inadequate aftercare, the homeless populations soared. When the closure of Byberry State Hospital was initiated in 1986, three hundread patients drowned in the Schuylkill River before the Pennsylvania Governor decided to slow down the process to a manageable level. This process continues to this day and the problematic nature of providing care for the mentally ill continues to haunt us. Harrisburg State Hospital in Pennsylvania recently shut down, forcing communities and mental health providers to scramble to find alternatives for patients with higher treatment needs. Many patients now in communities may require assistance for the rest of their lives in dealing with mundane chores most take for granted, such as buying groceries and paying bills, because they were never exposed to these problems during their hospitalization.
[AND NOW, IN THE 21 ST CENTURY, THE PATIENTS ARE BEING FORECLOSED OUT OF THEIR BOARD AND CARE FACILITIES...the STREETS in OKLAHOMA was FILLED WITH WANDERING FREEZING HOMELESS CRAZY MENTAL PATIENTS this month DURING THE BLIZZARDS of 2011!
THE "JESUS HOUSE' the ONLY PROVIDER of CARE for the OBNOXIOUS MENTALLY ILL INSANE HOMELESS, MULTIPLIED DUE TO BANKRUPT and FORECLOSURES upon MENTAL HEALTH HALF WAY HOUSES, the TELEVISION MEDIA in conjunction with the OTHER TWO BIG "CHARITIES" in OKLAHOMA CITY launched a SMEAR & ATTACK MEDIA "EXPOSEE' NEWS ATTACK" on the Jesus House, IN ORDER TO MAXIMIZE THE DONATIONS away from the MENTALLY ILL at the Jesus House" to the BIG CORPORATE "RESCUE-MISSION, INC" and "SALVATION ARMY. INC" who CAPITALIZES by ONLY HOUSING HEALTHY WORK AGE AND EMPLOYABLE PEOPLE, who go through FULL TIME WORK either ON CAMPUS or in LABOR-READY OUT SOURCE JOBS and PAY THE "MISSIONS" 90% of the INCOME for the "SALVATION & LOVE of the "CORPORATE "JESUS" and are KICKED OUT QUICKLY with NO REFUND OF MONIES for ANY INFRACTION!!!]
As the peeling paint etches intricate patterns in the walls and doors of this asylum, its toxic dust coats the floor and floats in the air. [and your asinine liues float like noxious ordors and flies above a pile of Bull Manure...] In his book, Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and The Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill, Robert Whitaker makes a compelling argument for how the Holocaust and the treatment of the mentally ill in this period both were founded on the same principles of eugenics and the cleansing of "undesirables" from society: the stated goal of the concentration camps was the extermination of Germany's upper-echelon groups deemed detrimental to society, while the same, if unstated, goal in the United States mental health system was attained through forced sterilization and lethal neglect. The halls of the Athens State Hospital are remarkably well preserved and unmarred by vandalism and theft. As the war ended, several major fictional and grossly emotional exposés brought thefalse idea that abysmal treatment of the mentally ill to light. A photo essay, entitled "Bedlam 1946", in Life Magazine and Albert Deutsch's 1948 publication, The Shame of the States (Mental Illness and Social Policy: the American Experience), helped raise public awareness of the plight of the inmates in a couple of psychiatric hospitals. While this served to ameliorate the situation somewhat, most of the measures taken to remedy the problems were short-lived. Overcrowding and insufficient care continued to be problematic, although less so than during the years of the Second World War, and abuse of patients was never found to be true. There is simply no way to encompass all the cruelties heaped on the patients;[ but you will make up a load of lies to create your fictional pulp trash propaganda any way, it's the way of the liars] most are familiar with Electric Shock Treatments, which gained popularity as they produced manageable patients, albeit those whose cognitive functioning had been permanently impaired.[Darn Right! I HAD 134 ECT Treatments in 1969-1971. It didn't kill me, & I AM HERE "EYE WITNESS" to TELL TRUTH!] A particularly barbaric variation of this treatment was performed at Athens State Hospital by Dr. Walter Freeman (1895-1972), who made use of neither anesthetics nor an operating room, and whose careless technique shocked even other doctors and nurses familiar with the procedure. Another common form of treatment was hydrotherapy in which a patient was placed in a tub, which would be filled with either scalding or freezing water, and a sheet was zipped around the neck so only the head was sticking out. Depending on the temperament of the staff, the patient might be left in such a state for days without even a pause to use the bathroom. As the hospitals' intent was less to cure than to warehouse patients, the purpose of the treatments was less to produce any measurable improvement in their condition than to subdue them, making them convenient for the staff. Left to its own, nature often playfully mimics architectural details, using dazzling complimentary patterns. During the late 1960s and 1970s, the advent of the "chemical straight jacket" Thorazine changed the face of mental health care. Neuroleptics like Thorazine produce a myriad of intensely uncomfortable, frightening side effects and were in fact later identified by Soviet political dissidents as one of the worst tortures they were subjected to in the "psychiatric centres" where they were confined. ] They produced docile and compliant patients however, and their use was far-reaching and indiscriminate in the American mental health system. As their use became more widespread and the push for un-institutionalization was spearheaded by President Nixon and newly formed patients' rights associations, the focus of hospitalization shifted from containing patients for the remainder of their natural lives to bringing their behaviours to manageable levels that would allow community integration. While this policy was in many ways beneficial, the treatment at homeless shelters to be an inhumane and dehumanizing process. [ ======================================================= [In his book, entitled The Shoe Leather Treatment, referring to the common "treatment" of kicking patients until they were compliant or too injured to resist, former patient Bill Thomas relates that after years in state hospitals, a brief stay in prison after an escape attempt seemed an immeasurable improvement in his quality of life.] ============================= Vandalism has severely damaged the buildings of the hospital in Maryland. Doors are broken, windows smashed and graffiti covers nearly every wall. Coupled with the push to reintegrate patients into society, this flagrant abuse and neglect finally led to the closure of many asylums. Even this process was messy, however. Under President Ronald Reagan's policies, which often led to dumping clients out of hospitals with inadequate aftercare, the homeless populations soared. When the closure of Byberry State Hospital was initiated in 1986, three hundread patients drowned in the Schuylkill River before the Pennsylvania Governor decided to slow down the process to a manageable level. This process continues to this day and the problematic nature of providing care for the mentally ill continues to haunt us. Harrisburg State Hospital in Pennsylvania recently shut down, forcing communities and mental health providers to scramble to find alternatives for patients with higher treatment needs. Many patients now in communities may require assistance for the rest of their lives in dealing with mundane chores most take for granted, such as buying groceries and paying bills, because they were never exposed to these problems during their hospitalization.
A pile of discarded shoe coverings lies at the foot of the basement staircase in Athens State Hospital. The ever-present issue of what to do with state hospital facilities is also difficult. In many cases, the land and buildings will be almost immediately reclaimed, sold to developers or used as state agency offices. Several facilities, such as Danvers State Hospital in New York, are being converted into high-priced apartment buildings, although some ex-patients and mental health workers view this as a move only slightly more tasteful than making apartments out of Auschwitz. Other facilities like Dixmont have been completely demolished by large companies, which see the sites as development gold mines and have no problems bulldozing unmarked gravestones in patient cemeteries to make way for their projects. Some, such as Pilgrim State Hospital in New York, were partially used, abandoned and demolished. Countless more sites have been completely abandoned, standing until the roofs collapse under the weight of years of water damage or until they are burned by arsonists. Almost none are protected historic sites that visitors can enter to learn about their checkered past. The wings of a Kirkbride hospital are designed to house progressively psychotic patients, so that the further one gets from the centre (and exit), the more difficult it is to escape. Two examples stand out, however, as thoughtful ideas for reintegration of the properties into the communities. The state hospital in Fairview, Connecticut, has been turned into a public park-the buildings are well secured and the grounds well kept-where during the day one finds community members jogging, picnicking or walking their dogs. Ironically, by being open to the public, theft and vandalism have taken significantly less of a toll on the buildings compared to other state hospitals whose grounds are off-limits. The theatre of this asylum is in poor condition, yet large, old projectors in the booth still rest relatively unscathed. Athens State Hospital is a fantastic example of proper maintenance of an historic site. The university uses portions of many of the buildings and as such the grounds are well-maintained, beautiful and secure. It has an excellent section on its website dedicated to the history of the facility; the wings of the old Kirkbride hospital are in better condition than nearly any other state hospital in the country. Also unlike many other asylums, Athens State Hospital sits securely on a hill overlooking the small college town. While entering it requires a respirator and permission from the faculty, its rich and multilayered past remains intact for now, serving as a poignant reminder and an epitaph to the many shattered lives that passed through its doors. Reply to this post Reply Poster: abandonedamerica.us Date: Jan 31, 2011 2:37pm Forum: texts Subject: Re: Albert Deutsch, CRAZYIER then NOT, NOW more MEANEY The Shame of the States 362.2 D48S HC MorpheusOne, Please read the notes I wrote at the bottom. Boxcaro added their own opinions (hint: they're in all caps) into my text. Matthew Murray Reply to this post Reply [edit] Poster: boxcaro Date: Jun 29, 2013 9:42pm Forum: texts Subject: Re: Albert Deutsch, CRAZYIER then NOT, NOW more MEANEY The Shame of the States 362.2 D48S HC NOTICE: Matthew Murry actually TOOK ANOTHER'S ARTICLE and PUT HIS NAME ON IT! This is THE REASON He Cannot OBTAIN the Text from AMAYZONE! HE WAS NOT THE WRITER! HE STOLE IT! Reply to this post Reply Poster: elijahradioprophet Date: Mar 26, 2011 2:22pm Forum: texts Subject: Re: DID YOU SAY YOU WERE A PLAGERIST? The rise and fall of state hospital State school was dumping ground Robert Mielke, shown here during a stroll around the grounds of the Northampton State Hospital, said he struggled when patients occasionally asked why they were hospitalized. "Today, I'd probably have an answer," he says. Mielke worked in many different jobs at the now-closed hospital. CAROL LOLLIS Photo By THEO EMERY Staff Writer NORTHAMPTON - Re Or Search All APPI Journals d * Articles by Lynn, D. J. Psychiatr Serv 53:1189, September 2002 © 2002 American Psychiatric Association Book Reviews Gracefully Insane: The Rise and Fall of America's Premier Mental Hospital by Alex Beam; New York, PublicAffairs, 2001, 273, $26 David J. Lynn, M.D. Albert Deutsch "Madness in the Streets" How Psychiatry and the Law Abandoned the Mentally Ill Rael Jean Isaac Virginia C. Armat ISBN : 0-02-915381-6 Reply to this post Reply [edit] Poster: boxcaro Date: Jun 29, 2013 9:42pm Forum: texts Subject: Re: Albert Deutsch, CRAZYIER then NOT, NOW more MEANEY The Shame of the States 362.2 D48S HC NOTICE: Matthew Murry actually TOOK ANOTHER'S ARTICLE and PUT HIS NAME ON IT! This is THE REASON He Cannot OBTAIN the Text from AMAYZONE! HE WAS NOT THE WIRITER! HE STOLE IT! Reply to this post Reply Poster: micah6vs8 Date: Jan 22, 2011 5:33pm Forum: texts Subject: Re: Albert Deutsch, CRAZYIER then NOT, NOW more MEANEY The Shame of the States 362.2 D48S HC So the solution to de-institutionalization is to put the mentally ill on the streets or in prison where 90%+ of them are currently? No doubt crimes, abuses and indignities stained the prior system mightily, but what has replaced it is far worse. We need to reconsider how we as a society treat the mentally ill (I'm talking clinical diagnosis, not having a bad week). Societies are judged by how they help and care for the weakest among them. We are failing. It reminds me of this ending. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0Z0bu-swko
Re: Put Schizophrenica On Skid Row! Thank You Who SUpport a Old Man in Telling Truth. http://medically-brain-damaged.blogspot.com/ History of Ypsalinti State Hospital, Michigan, where Milton Wrote the Three Christs of Ypslanti in 1953
http://medically-brain-damaged.blogspot.com/ History of Ypsalinti State Hospital, Michigan, where Milton Wrote the Three Christs of Ypslanti in 1953 [or there abouts]
Home→Collections→Books o The Madness of Deinstitutionalization : OUT OF BEDLAM; The Truth About Deinstitutionalization By Ann Braden Johnson (Basic Books: $22.95; 296 pp.; 0-465-05427) : MADNESS IN THE STREETS; How Psychiatry and the Law Abandoned the Mentally Ill By Rael Jean Isaac and Virginia C. Armat e Free Press: $24.95; 414 pp.; 0-02-915380-8) September 09, 1990|E. Fuller Torrey | The most recent book by Torrey, a research psychiatrist in Bethesda, Md., is "Nowhere to Go: The Tragic Odyssey of the Homeless Mentally Ill" (Harper & Row). and The deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill that accelerated during the early years of the Reagan Administration--one of the more dramatic social experiments of 20th-Century America--is widely viewed as an abysmal failure. Many of the former denizens of state mental hospitals, liberated in theory but evicted in fact, have found their new homes either in jail or on the streets. For example, Boston's public shelter, the Pine Street Inn, has become Massachusetts' largest "institution" for the mentally ill. Almost half of its 1,000 nightly residents suffer from schizophrenia or manic-depressive illness. The largest "institution" for the mentally ill in California is the Los Angeles County Jail, where an estimated 15% of its 24,000 inmates are diagnosed with these same diseases. Not since the 1820s have so many mentally ill individuals been forced to reside in public shelters (then called "almshouses") or jails in the United States. Well intentioned though it may have been, deinstitutionalization has been a bad trip down a rabbit hole. "Out of Bedlam" and "Madness in the Streets" describe this bad trip and explain how we happened to embark on it. "Out of Bedlam" is the work of Ann Braden Johnson, a New York social worker who has spent many years working in the public sector with seriously mentally ill individuals. Johnson's tone is impressively warm and empathic: "Chronic mental patients are both more realistic about their condition and more graceful in failure than the rest of us, for their forced detachment from the normal world the rest of us inhabit has given them the wisdom that comes with tolerance of the inevitable." Johnson also excels at showing how New York's disjointed, illogical health-care bureaucracy manages to ensnare many patients each day. Getting someone approved for Medicaid, she writes, is like "having a root canal, a mortgage closing or a tax audit." Her derision of administrators who never see patients is both palpable and accurate: "Administration can be a refuge, a chance to dictate and control without having to expose the limits of one's own skills and abilities." Her descriptions of the nursing-home industry, finally, are poignant reminders that some businesses have profited handsomely from deinstitutionalization, at the patient's expense.
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