Canteen was more than just a job for Sinclair

Curtis Sinclair fought the closing of the Canteen at the Vermont State Hospital where he worked as the manager.

After months of waiting for the axe, Curtis Sinclair was officially laid off today. He ran the Canteen at the Vermont State Hospital and was downsized with five other people who worked at the snack bar in a basement room adjacent to the mental health facility. The Canteen was shuttered on Friday.

Advocates fought the closing of the Canteen because they say the snack bar was the only place for mentally ill patients from the hospital to get a break from the wards. Last month, former patients, VSH workers and activists embarked on a letter-writing campaign and held a press conference at the Statehouse.

It looks like they retaliated against me. There was no porn on that computer. There’s no good explanation for it.”
~Curtis Sinclair

Sinclair was the unlikely crusader who led that charge. The soft-spoken 46-year-old from South Burlington wanted his job back, but he was also infuriated that the state was closing the Canteen, because he knows firsthand what it has meant to patients.

Sinclair was held involuntarily at the hospital for two years; volunteering at the Canteen, he says, was his only outlet.

When he was released in 1996, after a drawn-out battle with the hospital over its forced medication policy, he again turned to the Canteen as a refuge – this time for work. He started out as an assistant, and seven years ago he became the coordinator, effectively managing the snack bar.

“When I was a patient, they let me work there,” Sinclair says. “I would have gone nuts if I hadn’t had a job. How was I going to get a job with two years in the psych ward?”

Sinclair now faces a labyrinth of daunting new obstacles in the wake of the canteen’s closing.

He must try to find work after being part of the VSH system as a patient and employee for 15 years. Perhaps even more devastating is the fact that he’s been in limbo since last summer; on June 22, he was put on administrative leave, allegedly for computer misuse. The investigation went on for more than six months, Sinclair says. He asserts he was never told what he was accused of.

He requested a copy of his personnel file, and in performance evaluation reports, from 1999-2003, Sinclair was commended for his work ethic and given excellent or outstanding ratings by his supervisor. Sinclair says his last evaluation was in 2003.

“It looks like they retaliated against me,” Sinclair says. “There was no porn on that computer. There’s no good explanation for it. They could have said there were some personal e-mails … but everybody does that. They don’t want me back because I was upsetting the apple cart.”

Michael Hartman, commissioner of the Department of Mental Health, wouldn’t comment on Sinclair’s case.

When Sinclair fought the closing of the Canteen, he wanted to prove that the nonprofit snack bar’s budget had been break-even until a few years ago, but because he was locked out of his work computer, he didn’t have access to the budgets he’d kept for VSH.

Sinclair doggedly sent e-mails to Hartman and his VSH supervisors questioning their budget figures, arguing that the snack bar was an important outlet for patients, and insisting that the Canteen would have broken even had he been allowed to raise prices.

This isn’t the first time Sinclair has fought the system. In a series of articles that ran in the Sunday Rutland Herald and Times Argus in 1995-1996, former Herald reporter Yvonne Daley recounted the battle he waged against doctors who wanted to forcibly medicate him while he was involuntarily held at the Vermont State Hospital.

The story of how Sinclair ended up in the Vermont State Hospital in the first place, and the personal odds he has overcome, help to explain why his job at the Canteen is so important to him.

Sinclair’s parents were both alcoholics. One day, when his mother was drinking, she killed the family dog. Several times, he says, she set herself on fire and wound up in the hospital.

“I don’t remember a night she wasn’t drunk,” Sinclair says. He recalls feeling guilty about the relief he felt when she died after a stint in the hospital.
He was 13. “I remember thinking, ‘Thank God it’s over.’ Then I thought, what a terrible thing to think, but she was suffering. We were all suffering.”

At South Burlington High School, Sinclair says he didn’t make friends and was constantly teased by other students. He also claims he was bullied by teachers and the administration. The assistant principal, Sinclair says, made fun of his acne, called him a chronic masturbator and once sprayed him with Lysol. He wanted to drop out after several teachers told him they wouldn’t give him college references, but his chemistry teacher pressured him to finish his senior year.

Sinclair stuck it out and went on to study chemistry at UVM. After he graduated in 1984, he couldn’t find work.

“I thought I’d get a job where I didn’t have to work around people,” Sinclair says. “After a while, though, you haven’t worked and people won’t hire you because you haven’t worked. It became really humiliating.”

He bused tables for a while and helped his father take care of their house in South Burlington.

In 1994, Sinclair accused a teacher who lived in his neighborhood of failing to report that a colleague was molesting students at South Burlington High School. An altercation ensued, and Sinclair “struck him with a glancing blow,” according to the Times Argus report.

Sinclair was involuntarily admitted to the Vermont State Hospital and diagnosed with a delusional disorder, according to the Times Argus report.

He says he was misdiagnosed, and he refused anti-psychotic medications, including Risperdal and Haloperidol, known as Haldol. The side effects of such drugs, he says, scared him. Both drugs can cause involuntary twitching, drooling and anxiety, among other things.

Sinclair, who had vowed as a teenager never to drink alcohol, smoke or even drink coffee, was adamant.

“There was no way I was going to take these drugs,” Sinclair says.

For two years, Sinclair argued that he was not delusional and that the anti-psychotic medications “would do him no good,” according to the Times Argus account. At one point, an attorney for the Vermont Department of Mental Health told Sinclair he might never be released from the hospital unless he agreed to be medicated.

Sinclair eventually won his release under a 1985 Vermont law that guarantees the right of a patient to refuse medication unless a court finds that the patient is not mentally competent, according to the Times Argus story.

He says the one thing that kept him going while he was held against his will at the hospital was volunteering for the Canteen. And when he finally was released, he continued to work for the snack bar, eventually working his way up to de facto manager.

It was his first real job, and he is worried it will be difficult to find another one.

Related story:

Will the state save $156,000 when it closes the Canteen? Not Really