One enters the West Ward as though it is the death house.

One enters the West Ward as though it is the death house. (Apologies to Carl Solomon, who I love madly.) Agitation at confinement is met with further confinement. Crying, a healthy human response that lets bad chemicals escape the body through the eye ducts, is punished. One is told to calm down, but the pain is never acknowledged, the justification for one's emotions is never recognized, sympathy is never offered.

An autistic boy of seven, restless and sensory-overloaded, breaks down and cries, curled on the floor, kicking the air. He is dragged away by a red-haired thug. One of the kicks connects with the thug's leg. The thug responds by banging the boy's head against the wall. At this point I put my body between the boy and the thug. For this I was quickly locked in isolation. And I swear to you I heard disappointment dripping from the thug's voice when the nurse told him that this act of civil disobedience did not, in fact, require me to be sedated (again).

In the west ward one is held captive, a process directly opposed to healing. But if one wishes to leave, one must pretend to be healed by captivity. One is trained for hypocrisy. One is trained in the suppression of emotions, which is bad for the mind and body. Essentially, one is trained for neurosis and heart attacks. I wrote this essay on several paper towls with a stolen red crayon, stolen because all writing implements are contraband. Gone are the days when people would openly declare that madmen should be locked away indefinitely and punished for their condition. Now a veneer of treatment has been applied. But the system still operates on an essentially punitive basis, and most of its patients can sense this intuitively. Morality is perverted. One is conditioned to judge right and wrong not by one's own sense of good and bad but rather by the level of reward or punishment that authority responds with.

There is little solidarity between the patients of the west ward. No one wants to risk being locked in isolation for standing up for one of their fellow patients, so they remain silent as authority makes its unjust decisions. The most one will ever do is whisper the semi-helpful warning, "Don't let them see you doing that." I was looked at as crazy or stupid for being the only one repeatedly putting myself upon the wheels and gears of the machinery. The west ward deals with its captives solely in clinical terms, never in human ones. And when it is done with them it sends them out with nothing but some irrelevant formalities, without a word of objection to the status quo, with nothing changed, back into the world that drove them to the ward in the first place.

The ones in the West Ward are the lucky ones. Here are some of the not-so-lucky ones:



Naomi Ginsberg


Christian Palko ( AKA Cage )

We have a long, long battle ahead of us.

For the second time today... here's to unpopular truths. :toast:

:toast:

+ Chris started getting into all sorts of trouble, including getting arrested (for drug possession, fighting in the streets, etc). He was 16 years old at this point. He was put on probation for charges, but after several violations found himself facing real jail time. His mother convinced the judge that Chris was mentally unstable and instead of prison he was sent to the Stony Lodge Psychiatric hospital for a 2 week evaluation which turned into an 18 month stay.

+ During his stay at "The Lodge", Chris was part of a small group of medical guinea pigs who were chosen to be the test subjects for a new and untested drug called Prozac, which hadn’t hit the market yet. Misdiagnosed and placed on Prozac, Cage became suicidal and made several attempts to try and kill himself (first by hanging himself by his own shoe laces, then by saving up his mandatory lithium doses for a month and ingesting all at once). He was subsequently put on suicide watch.

+ He was restrained over twenty times for periods of up to 13 hours at a time (illegally), sometimes by straightjacket, sometimes by 10 point bed restraints. Cage would later refer to this period in his life as his "rap college". He would spend his time doing the only thing he could, which was go deep into his mind and hone his imagination into the visceral and dramatic writing style he has to this day.

More: http://www.definitivejux.net/jukies/cage/