At one point, Connecticut’s three state mental health asylums held approximately 2,000 clients each. Many more people were held in other facilities that operated under the direction of the Connecticut Department of Mental Health.
Connecticut Valley Hospital is over 100 years old and still active today. Whiting’s forensic division was recently severed by the governor amid allegations of abuse.
Dr. Steven Madonick, in his CT Viewpoints article “We can do better for those with mental illness,” seems to want a return to this time of 6,000 people inside state asylums. The fact that he does not mention any negative aspect in these asylums indicates that he was never a consumer of these facilities.
Asylum = 1. A shelter from danger or hardship 2. A hospital for mentally incompetent or unbalanced people. The words exchanged depend on your relative view on the subject.
Some examples in so-called mental health: 1. Asylum – Hospital – Institution – Prison.
2. Patient – Resident – Consumer – Prisoner.
Mental health treatment is not an exact science. The first expectation in mental health facilities is the first that you as a patient should ignore.
Connecticut Patients’ Bill of Rights:
1. Be treated humanely and with dignity at all times, with full respect for your personal dignity and privacy and participate in the development of your specialist treatment and discharge plan and be given reasonable notice of a impending leave.
2. If you become a patient housed in Connecticut’s mental health system, you must completely ignore the above law or face horrific consequences.
Another reality in today’s world is the separation of psychiatric hospitals from regular medical hospitals, which leaves a lot of room for discrimination. An example of this is that social norms are either limited or completely banned. The only privacy I’ve had in the past 26 years is in the men’s room or the shower stall. So where is this right to privacy?
As a client, you are expected to be honest at all times, when your appraisers constantly exaggerate the lack of insight and judgment you possess. You are automatically distraught if you have a belief system that involves an unseen living creator. On paper, you should be listed as dangerous to yourself and others, even when you are helpful and respectful to others.
Connecticut Valley, Norwich State, and Fairfield Hills hospitals all had beautiful properties on campus. To a visitor, it seems that those inside are being helped to recover. The reality in most past and present cases is that they are warehoused. In other words, they are kept out of sight and out of mind. This is the real reason for incarceration for sanity.
Shock treatments, lobotomies, cold water wraps, restraints and strong medications with major side effects are elements of mental health systems. The respect and dignity found in most medical hospitals is not at the same level in the mental health system.
Dr. Madoncik wrote: “We in psychiatry have known, without exception and for decades, how to promote the recovery of our patients with serious mental illness. This implies that they are great for getting people to recover. The past and present reality is that they must warehouse and isolate a population to provide employment and retirement at six-digit levels.
In a 2007 Department of Justice report on Connecticut’s mental health facilities, it was concluded “there is no progressive movement out.”
This lack of movement is still true 15 years later. Discharge is rarely mentioned if someone has committed a crime. For this person, the average stay as a patient here in our state is 22 years. It’s far from five-day stays.
Anthony Dyous has spent the past 38 years engaged in Connecticut’s mental health system. He is a patient at Whiting Forensic Hospital.
