Home, Sweet Home

It's been reported that Oregon State Mental Hospital is reopening. Yes, the movie set for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is going to be opening for business once more.

The report on www.ctv.ca said the hospital was a place where real psychiatric abuse occurred. What a brilliant journalistic description. It got me thinking. If I'm reading that correctly, that means unless a psychiatric hospital was featured in a movie like Cuckoo's Nest, then it was or is a hospital where real psychiatric abuse took place or takes place.

Apparently, a hospital designed to facilitate modern theories in mental health treatment will be put in place of the old one. As far as I know, modern theories in mental health treatment still rely on drugs, shock treatment and a bit of brain-digging now and again, just like Cuckoo's Nest all those years ago. Here's the new modern theory: walking round an imaginary town inside the hospital. That's the new stuff shrinks are trying to pass off as treatment. That got me thinking too: isn't that the sort of thing shrinks normally accuse their patients of doing? Hot-footing it off into the land of make-believe? That normally gets a label banged on it followed by a bit of 'treatment'.

So now, when it suits the shrinks, going to the land of make-believe is being called 'treatment'. Beats me.

On a lighter note, I wonder who'll be the first to emulate Mac. Anyone got a yellow bus?

Psychiatric nurse 'filmed up women's skirts'

The Western Morning News in the west country, has reported on a psychiatric nurse who went around town filming up women's skirts.

It seems there are loads of these types of stories that come out of the psychiatric swing doors, or should that be locked doors? Sure, my admiration for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest has a bearing on my view, and reflects in what I write about psychiatric nurses. Funny thing is, while Cuckoo's Nest was a movie based on Ken Kesey's brilliant book, it turns out there really are psychiatric nurses like Nurse Ratched and nurses who get into all sorts of dubious stuff, like looking up women's skirts, sexually assaulting patients, rape, and flashing.

Confession time. I knew someone who had an experience in a mental hospital and I didn't believe them. They were having problems, had gone in there for help and ended up getting treated in a way that doesn't belong anywhere near a hospital. I thought the 'experience' I was told about was a bit of made-up stuff that was part of the 'illness'. Turned out the experience was real.

It's a fine line that's walked between believing something someone says and chucking it out just because the person's a bit 'out-to-lunch.'

Please don't dismiss what a patient says. Hence the blog.