Oh, thank you dearest sister in Christ, for your very kind words of support!
Mind you, I wrote my last as a person whose "clinical experience" with bona fide, "certifiable" psychiatric patients consists of two summers spent during my college years as a nursing assistant at a Massachusetts State psychiatric hospital. My first summer was on the "chronic" ward. My second, on the "rehab" ward. [Whatta joke "Rehab" was. "Chronic" was a model of sanity in comparison, but only just barely.]
It was especially on my tour on the Rehab ward when I began to appreciate two things in particular. (1) The patients could be perfectly "reasonable" when the purpose suited them. [E.g., to earn "step privileges" for their defined "good behavior," which would allow them greater freedom to, among other things, go to the canteen at will to buy chocolate and other goodies.] (2) I began to wonder who was "more crazy" — the patients themselves or the professional staff, their supposed guardians and healers. [I can give examples of this; but I'm trying to keep this communication as short as possible, at least here. Ask questions, anyone who wants to.]
Anyhoot, this questionable status quo — keeping people who really were a potential danger to themselves and others, one way or another (from, for instance, drowning in a ditch, or freezing to death as the prize of a successful escape) on such an idiotic treadmill of futility did not seem to me at all "reasonable."
The Rehab patients had no concept, for all their skills at cunning yet self-serving reasoning whenever it helped them — of how to be "safe" from themselves.
And whenever "reason" didn't serve their purpose, as when they had accumulated so many "steps" (for "good behavior") that they became candidates for release into the larger community (which no one wanted!!!), thereby to lose all the institutional protections on which they had come to depend — they'd end up "acting out," soon to be in straightjacket and confined to the isolation room. And from there, upon release from IR, back to the status of zero steps, thus to begin moving upward again from there in the step-earning game — to the chocolate, but not ever so far as to risk release into the community — to a self-responsibility of which they were clearly incapable.
I still have not answered the question for myself, to this day, as to whom was "crazier": the patients, or the professional staff of psychiatrists and nurses, who believed the "rehab system" had any potentiality of success in the first place.
I just figure them folks were way too "Skinnerian" in their psychiatric ideology, and thus were totally out of touch with the realities of real human nature, disturbed or otherwise.
Anyhoot, mainly the patients "won" under this configuration of the psychiatric practice in effect at the time.
Governor Dukakis eventually took care of all that, as it turned out, with his "deinstitutionalization" program. He said: "Hey, these patients are perfectly fine in society as long as they take their meds." So he released most of them, into the wider community into which very, very few of them wanted to go. Then there were "problems": the releasees were not taking their meds. And THEN the state courts weighed in, and said: We cannot force these people to take their meds.
And so, if you ever come to Boston, and wonder who these people are who go about night and day with shopping carts loaded with whatever motley contents that the cart-pushers associate with their life, by which they in fact identify their current state of being — you are looking at the "street people" that Governor Dukakis created. The Pine Street Inn [May God ever bless them!] combs the streets for these people summer and winter, just to keep them from starving or freezing themselves to death....
Don't we just love the "tender mercies" of the Democrat party for the "downtrodden," the "disadvantaged?"
But I see I'm digressing here. Time to stop.
I'm wishing you a blessed "good night!" dearest sister in Christ!
[[Governor Dukakis eventually took care of all that, as it turned out, with his “deinstitutionalization” program. He said: “Hey, these patients are perfectly fine in society as long as they take their meds.”]]
And we all know just how much paranoid skitzophrenics love takign their medications by themselves (they’re tryign to poison me- I’ma no take my meds)- but a good ‘promise’ fro mthe soon to be released paranoid patient to take hteir meds is evidently ‘good enough’ for the release board.
[[And THEN the state courts weighed in, and said: We cannot force these people to take their meds.]]
And then the lawyers go after the victims families who were killed by the paranoid person, stating that the victim must have somehow triggered the poor paranoid fella to violence.
A family friend psych nurse working in the state rehab facility in San Antonio once told us that she got so fed up with patients gaming the system that she told a patient who had repeatedly slit her wrists - evidently for the attention and to keep herself institutionalized - that she was doing it all wrong. She said if you slit them left to right you won't actually bleed out and die before you're found. Slit them parallel with the bone and then you'll probably die before the nurses find you. After that the patient quit staging the regular suicide drama and went to other kinds of acting out.
Psych nursing must be an extremely tough job. She was way out of line with her advice to the patient, but the doctors weren't doing a thing to adjust her behavior and the drama was a super pain in the neck to the staff.
Moreover, few professionals known to me actually approach mental illness as a disease of the spirit and attempt to witness the patient. Mostly they treat it like a medical problem.
And no doubt some of it is medical - physiological imbalances and physical impairments. But surely not all.
May God bless you dearest sister in Christ. And thank you for you testimony.