Of all the experiences of my long life, nothing comes close to my two years of serving as an attendant, really a guard, at the Texas State Mental Hospital in Austin, from 1960 to 1962.
After six months as an attendant in an older male ward filled with many patients suffering from end-stage syphilis, I was transferred first to the white maximum security ward and, after a year, to the black maximum security ward. These were still the days of segregation and the hospital wanted me on the security wards because I was 6'5" and a veteran.
I was finishing up college at the University of Texas and it was a good job for older students like me, paying $225 a month for 44 hours a week, with plenty of study time during the night shift while the patients slept off their heavy doses of Thorazine and other major tranquilizers.
But in another way it was one of the worst jobs of my life.
Both wards held some fairly dangerous and seriously disturbed individuals, but mostly the two wards were filled with simple unfortunates who had befallen the police or other authorities, winding up in a mental hospital rather than jail, never to see the light of day outside for years, often for the rest of their lives.
It was an unforgettable experience, first in learning about how serving as an attendant with such helpless populations can bring out the worst cruelty among some employees and also learning how humans can come to adjust to awful conditions, like life confinement, with a kind of quiet, stoic acceptance.
I won't spend much time on this but what struck me was how the luck of the draw and a judge could result in being sent to a state hospital for decades for, say, fighting Austin policemen instead of being sent to jail for six months for resisting arrest.
Back then there seemed to be absolutely no judicial review for these gulag-like determinations.
It is my impression, rightly or wrongly, that the Governor of California, Ronald Reagan, during the 1960s, was among the first to began ending this ridiculous travesty of justice and psychiatry. And I've also read that far too many in California were released to life on the streets after years of 'hospitalization' with little follow-up and assistance.
I came into contact with many, many patients who were simply helpless in their hallucinations and paranoria and needed to stay somewhere inside, but what happens there for those who must be held in confinement badly needed changing.
After helping lead patients into a small room and watching a physician administer shock treatment for no more than bad behavior, as a sort of routine punishment, you never forget it. After a while I flatly refused to help and I knew my days of working there were numbered.
I have only watched "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" once because it brings back such bad memories.
There is one story that helped me learn that things had improved in Texas after I left in 1962. I visited Austin a few years after leaving. Walking on the lovely grounds of the state capitol, not far from the University, suddenly a man raking leaves nearby yelled hello. It was one of my former patients on the black ward, a man who had been in for many years for killing a man in Houston.
I had helped him get a pass a few times in the past for a few hours on weekends, to do odd jobs for me and to eat a good meal in a restaurant. At any rate, he told me he had finally been released a few years after I left and they had found him a job working on the grounds crew for the Capitol.
He seemed happy and said he saw his family in Houston from time to time but had decided to stay in Austin, to live out the rest of his days.
These memories were brought back in a recent article by John Pfaff in Slate on rates of imprisonment and their relationship to housing in mental institutions.
It's a good article, one that makes you think and another reminder that, while we hold the highest rates of incarceration in the world, changing that isn't going to be easy.
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