Too much religion

Disclaimer: All persons, places and things in this document are imaginary; any resemblance to actual persons, places or things is purely coincidental.


In response to my "commenter", (thanks for your comment, by the way), it's not so easy. The problems at this hospital are just an expression of our current social attitudes and priorities. State budgets got tighter and tighter, and we all (in our collective identity as "the state") cared about these people less and less. Used to be flowers and landscaped lawns here; now the patients can go for weeks (this winter on one unit), without hot water in the showers. And the problem isn't only with this hospital. Here's another story for you:

There's a patient that we know well. The patient's been in and out a lot over the last few years and has a serious psychotic illness. When the patient is psychotic there are various ritualistic behaviors...like walking in a particular pattern, or spitting on the floor....
"pft! pft!" ,the patient spits.
"Hey, don't spit" we'll say.
"Oh, sorry", the patient will say...but needs to do it...chasing away bad spirits, blessing the good ones, I don't really know...

The patient might also kneel down in the hallway or the dayroom and pray...in spite of our injuctions that this behavior would be frowned upon in public here in America....and will come over and kneel down and kiss your feet if you're not careful. Since none of us are actually sharers of the patients culture or particularly familiar with it, the significance of some of the religious expressions are lost on us, but we know from long experience, that when psychotic, the patient will do these things; when we get stability, the behaviors stop. We like this patient; ... a nice person that can get really really sick.

So we discharged this person a while ago, after they got stabilized again. About a month later, the patient's back. Seems that after leaving us, the patient stopped taking meds (where was the out patient case manager?) and, becoming psychotic, kissed the feet of a woman on a city bus. The patient was promptly arrested and jailed, charged with a sex offense. The court appointed attorney arranged a plea bargain for in which the patient would plead guilty and agree to register as a sex offender, and they'd discharge the prisoner to the hospital.

Here the person is, young...speaking a foreign language, living in a foreign culture, has shizophrenia; now saddled with a sex offender label, and has to register. This patient will be extremely unlikely ever to find an out-patient placement...and, although this person is, perhaps, crazy as a bedbug, he/she is NOT a sex offender, in our experience...and by now we'd probably know.

This is apparently unfixable.... a public defender allowing a psychotic person to plead guilty to a sex offense in order to get out of jail, is apparently unassailable...

Here the problem isn't just this institution, it's several...it's inadequate out-pt case management, it's inadequate legal representation, it's an attitude in the society about crazy people, sex offenders, immigrants, the poor. The result is a life locked up in a place that is poorly maintained, haphazardly staffed...even when this patient is stabilized and not in need of hospitalization, he'll be stuck here...what a life, eh?

Is this the best we can do? And what does it do to us to do this to others? What kind of society do all of us want to live in? Who do we want to be? Yikes.