*** Sadly, Manning is still breathing air. ***
I guess our differences of opinion reflect that one of us worked in the prison system, and one of us at a psychiatric hospital.
I worked for about six months in a psychiatric center in Syracuse, NY. I left to take the job in Corrections. I figured if I was going to have to restrain individuals with the possibility of getting hurt, I might as well do it at a higher grade in the prison system.
Mario Cuomo dumped the majority of residents from the psychiatric centers in NY State. He turned some of those facilities into prisons. The one I transferred back home to had once been Marcy Psychiatric Center. The facility for the criminally insane is on the same grounds. Inevitably, those people he dumped into the streets came into the prison system, and created even more problems for staff. When I retired in 2003, the facility was in the process of setting up a whole building for the convicts who were taking medication for psychiatric issues. It was easier putting as many as they could in one building, on the same side of the prison as the infirmary where they had to report to for their meds. Prior to that, when they called the med run it was like a mass exodus from the other side of the prison, because there were so many of them that were on meds.
When I first took the job as Correctional Officer in 1980, officers were still handing out drugs to the inmates. At night, on the count, we had to drag armfuls of boxes filled with large glass bottles of drugs such as Sinequan, Levaquin, etc. The meds were dispensed in liquid form via droppers. Each bottle was for a different inmate. At some point during my first three years at Auburn Prison, the Union filed a grievance over C.O.'s having to hand out meds...afterall, we weren't medically trained. That ended our responsibility in the process. In honesty, there isn't much difference between psych centers and prisons these days.