The Changes That Came About The Psychiatric Health Systems

The world of State Hospitals and Psychiatric Nursing, literally a world that horror movies are made of. The history of mental health treatment is barbaric, including lobotomies, being wrapped in wet sheets until hypothermia set in, the electric shock treatments, lest we forget the twisted experts thinking of incestual everything in who became the “father of psychiatry” Sigmund Freud. Patient Rights were nonexistent, people were disposed of at the “sanitarium” they were locked up, chained to walls, and left eternally alone. Through out the past century there were some reforms made. The last large reform with “Beers” in the 1800’s. Mostly, that patients who were mentally ill were not “possessed by evil demons.” Or, that one cure to insanity “dropping an insane person in a snake pit” rationale as to “dropping a sane person in the snake pit would cause insanity” – type thinking, to the current thinking that mental illness was of a biomedical cause and thereby needing orthodox medical treatment, and just some, humanitarian treatment.

These really were the last significant reforms, they included the use of lobotomies (up until 30 years ago) – ECT (electric convulsive treatment) and hydrotherapy are still however utilized to this day.

I had only been a Licensed Practical Nurse (LPN) for a few short years when I was transferred to Larned State Hospital in March of 1996. Topeka State Hospital, where I worked had been slated for closure as part of the much needed and sweeping mental health reforms being implemented in the ‘deinstitutionalization” and ‘humanizing’ of the State psychiatric hospitals. The much-needed reforms were making their way through the Kansas State Psychiatric Hospitals.

Some of the sweeping changes in mental health r...

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...d happened. Of course, there was a sense of relief, in that I never did have to “fight” the system itself, in doing what was obviously right, humane and just.

Not too long after this, I left the psychiatric nursing field in 2000. I have since heard that the major reforms we were implementing, such as the “deinstitutionalizing” in point, those outside services that were to be set in place to accommodate this, I have subsequently learned, were never created. Hence, my era of “deinstitutionalizing” is now recalled as the ones who “opened the doors” and being that no support system was implemented, those patients subsequently ended up on the streets. At present time, there are no sweeping mental health reform movements to better assist those who have mental health issues of the severest – such as schizophrenia. Perhaps, the system its self needs to be changed after all.