[Magdalen] Washington Post article on involuntary hospitalization of the ...

[James Oppenheimer-Crawford]

One of my friends, a nurse named Janet, recalled in the fifties in nursing
school how they began using chlorpromazine hydrochloride, and immediately
things changed.  The ill were no longer out-of-control ranting and raging,
and it was possible to do things with and for them. To the day of my
retirement there continued to be a place for a stat IM of chlorpromazine
for a really out-of-control patient.

Was it good treatment? Hell yeah, it was good treatment!  Before that, the
person was untreatable, in constant intractable pain.  True, "the big T"
made most people feel like they were in a fog or in an emotional
straitjacket, but it was an improvement.

Just like when LiCO3 first appeared on the scene, it was a major
improvement.  Now, it isn't expected to be the miracle cure it was hoped to
be (my best friend from high school was taking Lithium when he killed
himself)

Mellaril helped a lot of people, even though it did tend to make you go
blind.

And even though new meds came out every year, there were always some who
just did not respond to the medication.  I will never ever, ever forget
encountering Louise, a bright woman who has been a inpatient for several
years.  As we met on the stairwell, she looked at me and screamed, "Is
there any way any of you can stop the pain!!" And I knew there was not.
Had to go back to my office and do paperwork for a while after that.

Being at a state facility, you saw the worst.  Those who had insurance got
to go to a private facility, and in many cases, they could be stabilized
and returned to the community relatively quickly (think Tom Eagleton). We
only saw the uninsured and those whose insurance had run out.

James W. Oppenheimer-Crawford
*“If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better
for people coming behind you, and you don’t do it, you're wasting your time
on this Earth.”  -- *Roberto Clemente

On Sun, Feb 15, 2015 at 12:23 PM, Cantor03--- via Magdalen <
magdalen at herberthouse.org> wrote:

>
>
> In a message dated 2/15/2015 11:35:12 A.M. Eastern Standard Time,
> oppenheimerjw at gmail.com writes:
>
> Mental  health care has generally been pretty decent; it's only that the
> electorate  (you and me) absolutely will not pay what it costs to run it
> correctly, and  never really has.>>>
> I'm old enough to remember the transition from essentially no
> drug treatment of mental health issues to the advent of Thorazine  which
> I think was the first widely utilized psychotherapeutic drug.
>
> As a senior in UW-Madison Medical School, we had required day  trips
> to the three State "mental" hospitals and the "Hospital for the  Criminally
> Insane"
> for those with violent medical problems.  In every case, I  remember the
> hospital administrators extolling the wonders of this new drug,  Thorazine,
> with comments like "If you had been taking this tour a year ago
> (pre-treatment)
> you would get the impression that mental hospitals are all Bedlam."
>
> Pretty much all of that screaming and sometimes violent acting out of
> patients
> had been replaced with tranquility.  Was it good treatment for the
> patients?
> Probably questionable.  Was it nice for the hospital  staffs?  Quite
> certainly.
>
> In the succeeding years, the population of these four mental  institutions
> has dropped sharply, with better drugs used on an outpatient basis,  plus
> the development of "half-way houses" in which an attempt at  ordinary
> life is arranged for mental patients.
>
>
> David Strang.
>
>