During the 1960’s, America’s solution to the growing population of mentally ill citizens was to relocate these individuals into mental state institutions. While the thought of isolating mentally ill patients from the rest of society in order to focus on their treatment and rehabilitation sounded like a smart idea, the outcome only left patients more traumatized. These mental hospitals and state institutions were largely filled with corrupt, unknowledgeable, and abusive staff members in an unregulated environment. The story of Lucy Winer, a woman who personally endured these horrors during her time at Long Island’s Kings Park State Hospital, explores the terrific legacy of the mental state hospital system. Ultimately, Lucy’s documentary, Kings …show more content…
Park: Stories from an American Mental Institution, highlights our society’s inability to properly treat mentally ill patients in America through Lucy’s effort to find closure.
From the moment Lucy Winer was admitted to Kings Park on June 21, 1967, following several unsuccessful suicide attempts, she experienced firsthand the horrors of mental institutions during this time period in America. As Lucy stepped into Ward 210, the female violent ward of Building 21, she was forced to strip naked at the front desk, symbolizing how patient’s personhood status was stripped from them as soon as they arrived into these institutions. During her second day at Kings Park, Lucy started crying and another patient informed her not to cry because “they’ll hurt her”. This instance, paired with the complete lack of regulations, instilled a fear in Lucy that anyone at this institution could do anything to her without any punishment, which had haunted her throughout her entire stay at Kings Park. Dr. Jeanne Schultz was one of the first psychiatrists to examine Lucy and diagnosed her with chronic differentiated schizophrenia. In an interview with Dr. Schultz decades later, Lucy found out that many patients were …show more content…
misdiagnosed and a large majority of patients were being labeled under the broad category of schizophrenia because the doctors were not even trained to diagnose what illness they had, if any. Lucy further understood why patients never really experienced proper treatment in that the physicians made little effort to know their patients when she obtained her medical records and saw that she was referred to as “this female” instead of her real name. Instead of fostering a healthy physician-patient interaction which is one of the key components to improving any illness, physician’s abused the patients with their authority. Lucy’s individuality was completely taken away from her as she was forced to sleep on the floor, fed like chickens, and granted only one shower a week. Lucy came to realize that only the patients that were strictly obedient and gave themselves to the system, successfully made it out of the mental institution. Lucy’s interviews with many of the staff members and patients at Kings Park, reinforced the notion of how unregulated, corrupt, and unprofessional of a manner the institution was operated under, leading to the maltreatment and negligence of the mentally ill patients. From any outsider, Kings Park would have appeared to been a professional institution to provide services for the mentally ill with its massive high-rising brick buildings and extremely well kept grounds. However, Lucy’s interviews with the workers and former patients of Kings Park proved that the environment inside those brick buildings was analogous to a prison in which patients were at complete mercy to the staff. While some attendants genuinely did want to help patients, a large number of them abused their power since they knew that there were no rules to follow. One attendant was reported to hang patients out of the top floor window in a straightjacket as a punishment. A former patient even revealed to Lucy that one of the attendants sexually assaulted him, and he was too petrified to speak out against this. The doctors at Kings Park refused to listen to the few attendants that actually did care about the patients and were often reported to be too lazy to do their jobs. They were also unknowledgeable regarding their field of profession and as a result misdiagnosed and gave patients the wrong medicine or, in most cases, no medicine at all. Kings Park harvested an unregulated environment of unpaid labor, overcrowded facilities, cruel patient treatment, and unknowledgeable and undermanned staff. On top of all this, doctors and attendants would perform cruel experiments, including electric shock and drilling into patient’s skulls. Some patients who were admitted into mental institutions simply because they were poor, an orphan, old, chronically ill, or had an alcohol addiction and most of these patients, in addition to the mentally ill, were sentenced to this abuse every day in America without the public’s knowledge. While Lucy Winer’s documentary focused specifically on King’s Park mental institution, it at the same time represented all of the unethical treatments and living conditions of the mentally ill in all mental institutions during this time period in America, and more importantly it expresses how we need to find a better solution regarding the crisis of mental health care.
As a result of the lack of regulation in state mental institutions, most patients were not just abused and harassed, but also did not experience the treatment they came to these places for. While the maltreatment of patients did end with the downsizing and closing of these institutions in the 1970’s, the mental health care system in America merely shifted from patients being locked up in mental institutions to patients being locked up in actual prisons. The funds that were supposed to be saved from closing these mental institutions was never really pumped back into treating the mentally ill community. As a result, many mentally ill people were rushed out of mental institutions and exposed back into the real world with no help where they ended up either homeless, dead, or in trouble with the law. Judges even today are still forced to sentence those in the latter category to prison since there are few better options for mentally ill individuals to receive the treatment they need. The fact that America, even today, has not found a proper answer to treat the mentally ill really speaks about the flaws in our
public mental health care system and shows that we really have not made that much progression. After watching this film, I was completely shocked to learn that patients at Kings Park were subjected to such unjust, inhumane conditions and treatments, and that mental institutions were allowed to operate all across America like this for so many years without the public’s knowledge. The fact that many patients came out of mental state institutions like Kings Park traumatized and in a significantly worse condition than when they arrived is appalling. For Lucy, despite how much she tried to repress these horrible memories from her past, this experience continued to haunt her up to thirty years later. Fortunately for her, this film provided her with closure from her past and I believe her documentary should be viewed by everyone as to fully expose the cruel treatment mentally ill patients went through, remove stigmas about the mentally ill, and most importantly reveal how we still have not solved the mental health care crisis. I agree with the main statement that Lucy’s film makes about how treatment of the mentally ill in America has made little progress and should be one of the leading societal issues we should be solving. In the end, Kings Park represented just one of the many cruel institutions that held mentally ill patients during this time period in America. Unfortunately, Lucy’s exploits in tracking individuals disestablishment of these mentally ill institutions revealed that many of the patients who were in need of help still have not found it. For many, the prison-like environment of mental hospitals, like Kings Park, was simply replaced by actual prisons. Lucy’s story does, however, show some promise of improvement regarding the treatment of the mentally ill in our society in that we are realizing our past mistakes. Many individuals with mental illnesses and relatives of the mentally ill have taken it into their own hands to provide the correct treatment for these people and self-service community organizations like HALI, suggest we are taking steps in the right direction. Ultimately, Lucy Winer’s visitation of her past at Kings Park Psychiatric Center through this film finally served as a healing process and provided her with closure of the past she sought so desperately to leave behind. Her final words of “thank you” in regard to describing Kings Park suggest that she now understands that society is gradually making the necessary movements towards finally providing the mentally ill with the treatment they truly deserve and that Kings Park was a misguided stepping stone towards reaching that goal.
In the book “The Mad Among Us-A History of the Care of American’s Mentally Ill,” the author Gerald Grob, tells a very detailed accounting of how our mental health system in the United States has struggled to understand and treat the mentally ill population. It covers the many different approaches that leaders in the field of mental health at the time used but reading it was like trying to read a food label. It is regurgitated in a manner that while all of the facts are there, it lacks any sense humanity. While this may be more of a comment on the author or the style of the author, it also is telling of the method in which much of the policy and practice has come to be. It is hard to put together without some sense of a story to support the action.
The Kings Park Psychiatric Center has had a large effect on the social changes of Long Island. A small town grew larger and prosperous from the direct effect of this State hospital from the time of 1885 to the present. The history of the town, the patients and court cases held, and the concluding plans for the land after its closing have all had a significant mark on the social changes of the town.
The 1930s was a tough time for all of the mentally ill people. They were not treated the way that they do now. The mentally ill were called names like satans child, or they were not expected or very frowned upon in many religions. So because of all of the people who were mentally ill they started to create asylums. With these asylums they could hold almost all of the mentally ill people during that time. All of the asylums were overcrowded and sometimes there would be around 1 million patients. WIth all of the people in these asylums the staff and doctors became very understaffed so the patients living within the asylums were not treated how they should have been. Then doctors had found ways that they thought could cure these mentally ill people, whether it would be cruel to them or not. The treatments ran from major brain surgery to taking baths for multiple days.
...centrates more on the patients daily lives rather then what the asylum does to the women, how she hid the women’s real names, and the fact that her work did not really effect the women’s lives to a great extent. But she nonetheless showed us a world unseen to many. She revealed disturbing practices done at the asylum. Her photos essentially became documents of Ward 81 that no longer exists. Mark’s “intimate glimpse of life in confinement turned out to be affecting,” she changed the way some viewed the mentally ill, and the asylum. And they untimely had an effect of the shutting down of Ward 81 in November of 1977 (Jacobs). Many articles and essays about Ward 81 usually reference Mark’s work as documentary (Fulton). Even though Mark strived for Art, she also left a documentary footprint in history. Ward 81 ultimately must be viewed as both artistic and documentary.
The fight for improved health care for those with mental illness has been an ongoing and important struggle for advocates in the United States who are aware of the difficulties faced by the mentally ill and those who take care of them. People unfortunate enough to be inflicted with the burden of having a severe mental illness experience dramatic changes in their behavior and go through psychotic episodes severe enough to the point where they are a burden to not only themselves but also to people in their society. Mental institutions are equipped to provide specialized treatment and rehabilitative services to severely mentally ill patients, with the help of these institutions the mentally ill are able to get the care needed for them to control their illness and be rehabilitated to the point where they can become a functional part of our society. Deinstitutionalization has led to the closing down and reduction of mental institutions, which means the thousands of patients who relied on these mental institutions have now been thrown out into society on their own without any support system to help them treat their mental illness. Years after the beginning of deinstitutionalization and after observing the numerous effects of deinstitutionalization it has become very obvious as to why our nation needs to be re-institutionalized.
Dr. Sara Josephine Baker is the woman who originally “caught” her and put her into solitary confinement the first time (yes, she was put into solitary confinement more than once). Public health officials came knocking on her door in 1907 and dragged her away to a hospital, without a warrant or any form of warning. Dr. Baker actually had to sit on Mary while on the way to the hospital to restrain her. Dr. Baker wrote in a journal, that the ride to the hospital was “like being in a cage with an angry lion” (Baker, 1). They only spent a brief amount of time at the Willard Parker Hospital after they arrived.
Although Peoria State Hospital was a pioneer in mental healthcare, it was not the first hospital to try and treat patients. The treatment of mental health care had been going on for some time before PSH, but sending loved ones to one of these treatment centers was seen as a last resort. There were people in these hospitals, but most of the time the insane were either taken care of at home by family, housed in almshouses (houses for poor people) or they were sent to jail. In these places there was no treatment. The mental person, if violent, would be bound and or sedated heavily.
In the 1800’s people with mental illnesses were frowned upon and weren't treated like human beings. Mental illnesses were claimed to be “demonic possessions” people with mental illnesses were thrown into jail cells, chained to their beds,used for entertainment and even killed. Some were even slaves, they were starved and forced to work in cold or extremely hot weather with chains on their feet. Until 1851, the first state mental hospital was built and there was only one physician on staff responsible for the medical, moral and physical treatment of each inmate. Who had said "Violent hands shall never be laid on a patient, under any provocation.
Carla Yanni, The Architecture of Madness: Insane Asylums in the United States, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2007
As time goes on, the law has put more emphasis on facility just like Bridgewater State Hospital in which many of the actions of the facility workers can face legal consequences such as facing prison time, fines, lawsuits, and etc. Society has a better understanding of why certain people act the way that they do and being more knowledgeable about psychology and mental diseases allows us to have a different approach when dealing with these topics or these individuals. In today’s era, there are many normal individuals who are willing to stand up for those who do not have a voice of their own. I believe that this change in one’s ability to stand up for another individual or group of individuals is what brought about change to the medical environment of those who are mentally
Continuing budget cuts on mental health care create negative and detrimental impacts on society due to increased improper care for mentally ill, public violence, and overcrowding in jails and emergency rooms. Origins, of mental health as people know it today, began in 1908. The movement initiated was known as “mental hygiene”, which was defined as referring to all things preserving mental health, including maintaining harmonious relation with others, and to participate in constructive changes in one’s social and physical environment (Bertolote 1). As a result of the current spending cuts approaching mental health care, proper treatment has declined drastically. The expanse of improper care to mentally ill peoples has elevated harmful threats of heightened public violence to society.
Social justice has influence change in policies for the mentally ill. Opening the doors for political reform. Throughout history, the treatment of the mentally ill has taken many shapes. Influence by the time periods core values and ideas of social justice. Before the colonization, society did not see the mentally ill as human beings. This ideology was Influence by religion that considered them to be evil or demons. Especially during the Black Death when people were only looking for escape goats. Day, & Schiele, (2013) This would only make things worse for mentally disabled. Rendering them defenseless and at the will of society. Their disabling conditions would prevent them from self-advocacy. They would have to depend on family members to advocate; and demand social justice for them. The overwhelming societal norms influence by religion and fueled by fear punishment appeared to be the only solution.
Another man involved was the Dr. John Galt he himself worked at one of these insane asylums as the superintendent of the Eastern State Hospital in Williamsburg. Although there was a stream of terrible abuse in the asylum and prison movement towards the sick and insane he was one of the few that treated his patients with care he had very little use for restraints and preferred a calming medication. He was also the first influence in
The Mental Health Revolution is a progression of laws going into effect that are slowly changing the way that mental health patients are seen and treated. Nellie Bly, an early muckraker in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was an incredibly important influence on the beginning of that revolution. She did this by spotlighting Blackwell’s Island, an asylum for the poor in New York, for its awful conditions and abuse towards the patients living there. In addition, Nellie was one of the first influential women journalists, from which she exposed many other horrors and gave substance to the early feminist movement. By exposing the mistreatment of mental health patients at Blackwell’s Island, Nellie Bly began the mental health reform
There are around 2.3 million inmates in U.S. Prisons, whether the crimes committed were petty or serious. Approximately 20 percent inmates in jail and 15 percent inmates in state prisons have some form of a serious illness. When talking about how mental illness is a problem when it comes to the prison system it is important to start from the beginning. Before the 1960’s where mental institutions where called insane asylums there where many problems for those who were patients there. Problems such as abuse by those who were supposed to be taking care of them or the cleanliness of the establishment. They were so bad that if there was someone who was mentally sane going into an asylum undercover, within a month