by Ted Chabasinski Ted Chabasinski, one of the founders of the psychiatric survivors movement, is on the board of Support Coalition International, a nonprofit alliance of 50 grassroots groups. Ted recently investigated Metropolitan State Hospital and was horrified. He's quit his job in order to shut Met State down.
This is a very personal account because I myself spent most of my childhood in a state hospital in New York. Forty-three years ago, I was released from Rockland State Hospital at the age of 17. I had spent 10 years there. I went on with my life, struggling with the effects of what had been done to me. I worked my way through college, got married, became an attorney. I never forgot what happened to me at Rockland State Hospital, but I never had to look this experience in the face again. Until now.
A few months ago, as an advocate for the Office of Patients' Rights, I was asked to go down to Los Angeles and assist the regular advocate at Metropolitan State Hospital. Early in June, many children had been transferred to Metro from Camarillo State Hospital, where most of the kids in the state hospital system had been. Camarillo, a prime piece of real estate in a beautiful setting, is being closed. The facility is being sold to developers.
Half of the children shipped to Metro are black, about a third white, about 15% Hispanic, and virtually all of them are from poor or broken families. The overwhelming majority are sent by Los Angeles County, which has purchased many beds from the state for the children in its charge who "need longterm care."
One third are girls, two thirds are boys. The program is described by the hospital as designed for kids ages 7 to 17. At present, I believe the youngest child is 11, although younger ones are expected to arrive soon. Bed space is available for 120 children. About 75 are there now. This number will increase, as more children, some of them disabled, are expected to be shipped down from Napa State Hospital in the next few months. The plan of the State Department of Mental Health is to concentrate all of the children in the state hospital system at Metropolitan.
The only outdoor space the children at Metropolitan have is tiny patios with barbed wire fences. The hospital has interpreted state law to require that the children not be given grounds passes because this would put them into contact with adult patients. So the children are locked down most of the time. Over the last few months, under some pressure, the hospital now has had the kids, at least those who have reached certain "levels," taken for escorted walks. These walks, like most of what is done there, are called "therapeutic." As you can imagine, there is much anger and pent-up energy.
The regular advocate had heard of an incident in which a fourteen-year-old girl, L., had experienced a life-threatening situation in restraints. ("Restraints" means that the child is tied spread-eagled to a bed with leather straps and left there for several hours.) We went to one of the two girls' units to investigate. L. told us she had been put in five-point restraints (tied down at the wrists, ankles, and waist) after getting into a fight with another girl. When she continued to struggle and tried to sit up, staff came in and tied a sixth strap as tightly against her chest as they could, and left her there. L. has asthma, and was wheezing as she spoke with us. Soon after the chest strap was tied down, she started choking and gasping for breath. Staff were nowhere in sight. Some of the other girls ran for help, but staff took their time getting there.
L. reported she was put in restraints frequently. When I looked at her chart later, it confirmed that she was tied to the bed several times a week. There was little explanation of why, and of course no note that her life had been endangered.
The first thing that struck me as I spoke with L. and the other kids who were witnesses was how little they would fit the stereotype of "mental patients." They were some of the most appealing kids I had ever met.
I spoke with T., a very articulate seventeen-year-old. She was able to tell me very clearly what had been done to L. One of the first things T. said to me was that she expected, when she reaches her 18th birthday in a few months, to be sent to one of the adult units and spend the rest of her life there. It was very hard for me not to burst into tears because this is exactly what I myself faced at age 16 in Rockland. I looked at the despair in the face of this young girl and felt more anger at the system that had done this than I've felt in many years. T. has spent a year and a half in state hospitals.
Shortly after I spoke with T., I saw a figure walking down the hallway, stumbling around like an eighty-year-old who had had a stroke, and I wondered what an old woman was doing on the children's ward. As she came closer, I saw that it was T., so drugged that she had trouble walking properly. She is being given five kinds of psychiatric drugs. Her body is bloated and her hands shake. If she is ever allowed to leave the hospital, she will be sent out into the world with tardive dyskinesia at age eighteen (Tardive dyskinesia is a very common kind of brain damage caused by psychiatric drugs. The most obvious outward sign of it is that the victim's mouth and tongue twitch uncontrollably.)
I skimmed T.'s chart. Among other nonsense, it said that she is "resistant to therapy" because she sleeps much of the day. I remembered how I too had slept as much as I could at Rockland State Hospital to block out the horror of my surroundings. But I never had to deal with the horror of having my brain burned out by psychiatric drugs.
As I went around the units trying to speak to as many children as possible, I noticed many kids passed out on the sofas and benches in the middle of the day. Virtually all the children are drugged, though few have diagnoses that would really justify it. Restraints are used liberally for the slightest infraction.
But the worst abuse (I know because I have experienced it) is to spend years of your childhood locked in a mental institution with the constant message that you're worthless, that you're nothing, that nobody cares about you, that you're important to no one. And because you are so young and have no other picture of the world, you have no way to resist this indoctrination in self-hatred -- then, after years of this, you're sent out into the world if you're lucky.
California's state hospitals are being used more and more to lock up people committed by the criminal justice system. As the population changes, these institutions, never humane in the first place, are rapidly becoming places of unspeakable cruelty. Patients languish for years, heavily drugged, treated like sub-humans, transformed into burned-out shells of human beings whose only function is to consume powerful (and profitable) psychiatric drugs. Into this death camp of the spirit L.A. County and the State Department of Mental Health have placed scores of children. These kids need love and nurturing, but all the mental health system can offer them is drugs and despair. And this publicly funded child abuse costs the taxpayers of California approximately $125,000 every year for every child.
Working with the Coalition for Alternatives in Mental Health, organized in 1984 by me and Sally Zinman, another psychiatric survivor, I will be starting a campaign in L.A. to bring the abuse of children at Metropolitan State Hospital to public attention.
Even the most dedicated advocates become numb after a while to the abuses of the mental health system and come to accept these terrible institutions as a given because we think there's nothing we can do. But it doesn't have to be this way. Just a few months ago, East Bay Hospital, one of the most abusive facilities in California, was closed down after a campaign involving many people that began when articles in the homeless newspaper "Street Spirit" exposed what was going on. No human being should have to endure life in such institutions, especially not children.
How YOU CAN Help
Make a tax-deductible contribution to the Coalition for Alternatives in Mental Health, 3234 Adeline Street. Berkeley, CA 94703. Indicate clearly that your contribution is for the "Children's Project." For more information, please e-mail dendron@efn.org
--Excerpted from Turning the Tide, Winter-Spring 1998