politics, pre-marital sex, drugs and swearing. I was drawn to this man and his constant reiterations of love for his children—one of whom was deaf and had dreams of being a boxer. A raven-haired, part-lndian woman told a vivid story of a previous hospitalization. Travelling in England with her son, she took it upon herself to scale the walls of the Prince of Wales’ estate and break a window to make her entrance. Committed to an English hospital for four months, she told of monthly parties with ample punchbowls of wine to relieve the institutional regimen. Not all the patients in the group were serious criminals. There were shoplifters, window breakers and other misde- meanor.cases as well. Most of these patients had some previous civil commitment experience and had now stepped over the legal line. Each group member had their own personal version of their crime, which rarely matched the official police report staff accepted as gospel. It struck me as a bit “crazy” that so much staff time was spent going over minor infractions of ward rules—smoking in the wrong room, having too much money on your person, etc. During one session, it came to light that several patients were having clandestine sex in the linen closet. Staff responded that we patients were responsible for knowing what our neighbor was doing. My response was that I couldn’t do anything about what I didn’t know about. My efforts to influence staff opinion was a weary battle that was often interpreted as a “thinking error,” symptomatic of the ever present “anti-authority” complex that was said by some to be behind all my problems. I went over their heads at one point with a petition, signed by three fourths of the ward, objecting to the policy which suspended all patients’ privileges and canteen use for a week whenever their was an escape from the ward. When our petition got a response and some directives for modification of the program manual, signers of the petition and Iwere accused of criminal thinking in the form of a “power play.” I later modified my self- styled patient advocacy, deducing the error of my ways, and stopped raising issues. Newly arrived patients were initially open with staff about their mental illnesses, but quickly became guarded when they found their attempts to rationalize and make sense of their illness labelled by staff as “excuse making” or “minimizing.” The last thing I wanted was to be in the hospital longer than necessary. That conviction came to me in a cathartic flash one night. I was in a manic cycle, hyper and agitated about a radio documentary I was working on concerning life in the hospital. When I looked in my locker for the high-tech audiodeck that I had purchased for the project—it was missing. Enraged, figuring my redneck roommate responsible, Itookaswingathim. Before I could land a second punch he was pasting me with a flurry of jabs. I reaized in the aftermath that such assaultive behavior had kept him in the hospital for five years. Very consciously I made a decision to play ball and get along. The shortest road out of the hospital for me meant bending over backwards in my political beliefs. I remember clearly how my identification with movie star Fannie Farmer’s activist politics of the Ln one frantic manic effort to break down the walls and re^ establish relations with the outside, I ran up a four hundred dollar phone bill. Daily, I wrote letters to friends, relatives acquaintances. forties got me tagged “anti-social” by my one-to-one caseworker—a small town country musician who reminded me of my “give it all the gusto” father. Another staff woman was dead set against premarital sex as a way of staying out of trouble. I stood my ground for a while with a former high school English teacher who argued forcibly for psychosurgery as a remedy for some severe mental patients. Even though I had seen the pathetic outcome of lobotomy during a former hospitalization, I caved in when I sensed the conversation had passed the point of discourse and become a questioning of authority—staff were used to getting their way and had the full weight of the institutional status-quo behind them. Low staff empathy and insight isn’t too surprising. Though many were ostensibly hired as “security aides,” all staff were nonetheless pressed into therapeutic assignments. Some were painfully less adept than others at constructive guidance—not surprising since all you really have to have is a high school diploma to get a job at OSH. Most, like the ex-cop who cheated at ping pong, tried to be your buddy as an entrance into brotherly advice about life and how to live it. One of the few staff members with formal training in psychology was the swing shift charge aide. Equipped with a real skill for handling volatile situations like fights, patient arguments, etc., this aide seemed competent at everything he did. Often he would wax me and my ego over and over again at chess. It was a little disconcerting until I heard the aide had over fifty books on chess at home. I imagine he has a through library of psychology readings as well. One staff member whose entrance into group always elicited a collective groan from the patients was the social worker. Young, with straight blond hair falling past her waist, she looked like a peacenik from the sixties. Appearances to the contrary, the social worker was hard- nosed when it came to patients holding each other accountable and would often their crime, which rarely matched the official police report staff accepted as gospel. Clinton St. Quarterly 37
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