Dear Editor,
The closure of beds for patients suffering from severe mental illness is the worst news possible for those in the midst of a psychotic episode. In 1960, I spent five months at Forest Hospital in Des Plaines, Illinois, living through a horror that, in the end, turned out to be a gift to all my relationships: with my husband, three tiny daughters, parents, brothers and a host of extended family going through their own agony.
If there had not been a hospital for me, I don’t know whether I would be the healthy, contributing individual with a loving mate, devoted daughters and sons-in-law, four grandchildren, two great-grandchildren, and friends and colleagues on both coasts today, who are inspired by our longevity. I give talks all over Vermont and California, our winter home, to encourage Americans to recognize the need for hospitals.
With the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act going into operation in 1972, large state psychiatric hospitals closed due to the general opinion that they violated patients’ rights. Psychotic and schizophrenic patients are a hard population to deal with, as any family who has suffered along with their affected loved one can tell you. We see those patients homeless today on the streets. Among that population are some like me, who could have been living productive lives if there had been a hospital bed for them at the critical moment.
A major reason private hospitals like Forest and metropolitan facilities closed was the improvement of medication and diagnosis, which were far cheaper options for governments. The thought was that medication would supplant hospitals, and all those suffering from mental illness would soon be well, if the diagnosis could just zero in on the right medication.
We see the failure of that hope today.
Some of our brightest and most sensitive human beings are being lost due to the lack of hospital beds in the early stages. Psychosis is a wild, altered reality, an extreme aberration, and tends to settle down after a period, like any overly excited condition. The missing element today is a place apart for that first wildness to spend itself, so the patient can be worked with through the marvelous therapies available now.
Julie Howard Parker
Granville, Vt.
