The Gas Chamber

The Smoking Room
For many years the smoking room could be immediately identified by its fire door, which was invariably wedged open with a soupspoon, or flattened against the wall by a convenient armchair. Now, a splendid extractor fan had been installed to provide ventilation and the fire door was generally shut (box ticked). However, because people forgot to turn the fan on, the room was almost always fog-bound on entry and sometimes residents could only be identified by the whites of their eyes.
After fifteen years of replacing burnt carpets, management had decided to tile the area and it now resembled a rather cold changing room at the public swimming baths. The chairs were scorched leatherette, with parallel brown lines running down the arms like notches on an outlaw’s cudgel. Cigarette ash covered the floors in drifts of grey snow, the walls were stained a bright nicotine-yellow, and the aluminium ashtrays remained pristine and empty. There was always a collection of seven or eight scummy half-empty cups on the floor – the arcane mysteries of washing-up continuing to baffle most residents.
This was the haunt of hard men, where solitary self-poisoning was occasionally augmented with sanguinary violence, as tab ends were rifled from buckled bins, and pecking orders ferociously restored. One window was nearly always boarded up, adding to the charm.
Just as a single, hard pea could always be found somewhere on the dining room floor, the smoking room would always yield a shard of broken glass to the assiduous cleaner, looking in a corner….www.windowsofmadness.co.uk

Good Morning

The period between 7.00a.m. and 8.30a.m. was always something of a false dawn at the unit; a preamble before the main story. By 8.30a.m, most of patients were up and any additional staff, such as the cleaners, housekeeper, manager, and extra nursing assistant were beginning to arrive. The administrators and medical staff around the hospital would also be starting work, and the ‘phone would be springing into life. Visitors and deliverymen, porters and engineers, managers from elsewhere and people who’d lost their way, would all descend on the unit as though something important was happening. A growing cacophony of noise would echo up and down the corridors, sending the quieter patients fleeing into far off corners, while the more theatrical moved forward to button-hole members of their expanded audience with tales of woe, multiple requests, scenes of paranoia and exhibitionist acts. Voices were raised as each side attempted to master the other, orders were barked and complaints shrieked, while nursing assistants adopted their ‘lion tamer’ postures and patients gathered together in disturbing anthropological groups…..www.windowsofmadness.co

Perfect Management

A Funfair for the Common Man.

“Good morning Steven” said the unit manager.
“Oh, good morning Richard. I wasn’t expecting to see you on your day off.
“Yes, I’ve been here since 5.00 a.m. actually”.
“Well done, sir. ” I applauded “Will you be attending the staff meeting?”
“Staff meeting?” he laughed “Good Lord no, I’m far too busy with practical common sense matters to spend my life chattering.”
“Of course sir. I’ll cancel it immediately and get on with this morning’s discharges.”
“Good man.”
“By the way, we have three residents beginning part-time work with Parks and Gardens this morning, and one going to the Town Hall for office experience.”
“Splendid.”
“There have been no staff on long-term sick leave for twelve months.”
“Brilliant.”
“The new anti-psychopathic medication is working impeccably.
“Superb.”
“We now have copies of the new mental health white paper ‘Society Needs Care Too – Towards a Balance of Patient Rights and Patient Responsibilities’.
“Fantastic.”
“The Prime Minister has this morning announced strong new measures to combat what he called the ‘the parasitical, sick society of our times.’
“Fabulous.”
“He says the time has come to think as much about our community as ourselves.”
“Unbelievable.”
(pause)
“And while I have the opportunity, may I congratulate on your recent promotion, sir?”
“Promotion?”
“You appear to be dressed as an Archbishop today.”
Oh….I see…. actually it’s because I’m joining the vigil for humankind recommended by the Aging Rockers’ Special Executive (ARSE). Why not join us on our remarkable journey, Steven?”
“Absolutely, sir. Nothing on God’s earth would prevent me from…..”

“Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!” “Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz”
“Oi!” shouted Sidney. “Stop day dreaming, there’s somebody at the door”……..www.windowsofmadness.co.uk

Eat, Drink and Be Merry…..

I moved through to the dining room with my anti-sceptic spray, dishcloth and fork to clear up the mess. The fork was a personal innovation, which I used to scrape off the thick residues of dried-out corn flakes which invariably glued themselves to the table edges. All in all, it had been a fairly relaxed breakfast of only two broken plates, one spillage, two lost tempers and one puddle of frothy urine, so I allowed myself the privilege of standing at the front door for a few minutes rejuvenation. The air was clear as crystal and I drew it into my lungs with an epicurean relish, while for a few moments my slightly sweating body stood wonderfully impervious to the frost and whirling sleet…….www.windowsofmadness.co.uk

Learned helplessness

Sacrilegious as it may sound, our patients were often incredibly skilled at dodging personal responsibility, even to the extent of putting more energy into the avoidance of the task, than its completion. Indeed, avoidance was really a longstanding attitude, rather than a skill, which had developed over many years of what the consultants called ‘inadequate personality’. Biographically, most of them were disinterested at school, withdrawn at home, intermittently employed at best, and over-reliant on parents, relatives or partners. They were generally self-centred, easily stressed, often melodramatic in relation to their needs, and characterised by a ’learned helplessness’ which ultimately led them into professional care situations. As one old timer put it, this was ‘his job’; a psychiatric career which had spiralled from vague anxieties and depressions about life’s challenges, to a full-on evasion of society through the psychiatric system. In many ways, it was the forerunner and quintessence of the modern ‘soft touch’ state, where benefit fraud and manipulation, lawsuits and compensation, voluntary unemployment, and spurious sickness and disablement have now become commonplace abuses…….www.windowsofmadness.co.uk

Normalising the Patient

Technology.
Unfortunately, this was one of the many examples of modern culture completely undermining modern mental health policy. It was hard enough for the average person to keep up with the ever-changing catalogue of CD players, DVD’s, mini-disc players, and I-pods etc., but for many people with mental health problems, it was simply asking the impossible. They were invariably bamboozled by the instructions which accompanied these ‘must have’ gadgets, and in many cases could not master the basic controls even after scores of demonstrations and reminders. After a while, they would become understandably frustrated and appear in the office with fists full of cassette tape, jammed CD player drawers, crushed earphones and ferocious tempers, or they would give up the struggle entirely and use the staff as butlers every time they needed the machine turning on. Money, of course, was no object and it became an almost weekly occurrence for staff to replace terminally damaged equipment with the latest (and even more incomprehensible) hi-tech equivalents at high street shops.
It would have made more sense for us to simplify the situation as far as possible, rather than complicate it, so that the residents had a realistic chance of retaining their skills. Instead, those residents who had spent years typing on mechanical typewriters were suddenly given portable word-processors, which quickly baffled them and spent their lives being thrown into distant corners during fits of pique. The sensible solution, according to one enlightened key worker, was to upgrade the portable word processors, to laptops. “The package would be much more consumer friendly” he informed us in a voice synthesizer monotone. Like hell it would…….www,windowsofmadness.co.uk

Good Morning

On opening the fire door to the landing, we were immediately overpowered by the silage-like stench of fresh, loose faeces, so we donned our imaginary gas masks and began our search for the source. We soon noticed a trail of orange-brown smears on the lino leading to a bathroom, and in the bath we discovered a large amount of bedding, covered liberally in excrement, blocking the plug-hole. The taps had helpfully been turned on, the floor had an inch of water over it, and we were just in time to see a large turd slipping over the side of the bath, heading in our direction. The room from which the bedding had been taken was of course heavily soiled, as was the laughing, naked lady responsible for the incident. She had carefully placed a full set of brown handprints around the walls, like a nursery frieze……..www.windowsofmadness.co.uk