The One Asylum

DBT Stands for “Dialectical Behavioral Therapy”. It’s a type of therapy consisting of skills that help an individual cope with difficult situations. Radical acceptance is a DBT skill that is basically used if you can’t change a negative situation or a rude person. I consider it a skill that can be used when nothing else works and there is nothing I can do to improve the situation. It’s a way of making peace with a person or situation that you cannot possibly change and move on. I use this skill when someone is an asshole and there is nothing I can do to change this person because most assholes will always be assholes. I also use this when I fail some sort of school assignment, and think something like, “I can’t change the past and will do better next time.” It is best to use radical acceptance and then think of something positive that can happen or you can do in the future.

Bipolar I: This is the most known form of Bipolar. An individual with Bipolar I will feel either manic or depressed. When a person is in a state of mania, he or she will feel happy beyond belief and will usually do impulsive things. Depression is a state in which an individual will feel hopeless and beyond sad. 

Bipolar II: Bipolar II is similar to Bipolar I, but a person with this condition will have ups that are hypomanic and not manic. Hypomania is like mania, but not as extreme. A person experiencing hypomania will be in an intensely elevated mood, but will generally be less impulsive and have better control over himself or herself.

Cyclothymic Disorder: A person with this condition will have elevated or low moods, each mood is felt much less intensely than Bipolar I or II.

Rapid-Cycling Bipolar: This form of Bipolar is characterized by an individual will experience at least four mood episodes in the span of a year. Some people have one of each mood episode in a year, while others have a different mood episode each month or even day.

Mixed Bipolar: Mixed Bipolar has the same states as Bipolar I or Bipolar II, but the episodes of hypomania or mania and depression occur at the same time. A person with Mixed Bipolar may be hypomanic or manic, but be irritable at the same time.

The cafeteria staff always found a way to make some sort of food for someone with a special diet. They did pretty well to make food for people with a specific diet that restricts them from eating certain foods.They made food for patients  (the patients are supposed to be referred to as “residents” since Willow Springs is a long-term facility, but everyone still says that they’re patients) who were lactose intolerant, vegetarian, and even vegan. There was one girl who was allergic to gluten. She would complain about the cafeteria staff not making her food and how she would always need to eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. When the staff would make her an actual meal, she would tell them that she didn’t like whatever they made her and dramatically say, “Well I guess I’ll HAVE to have PB&J AGAIN!” Then she would continue to whine about the cafeteria staff supposedly neglecting her. Despite this strange girl’s complaints, I believe that the cafeteria staff did an exceptional job at trying to make food that everyone could eat. 

Hospital food can never truly be good, but Willow Springs had some fairly good food. The only food that I really did not like were what were supposed to be blueberries in sauce. They were basically little black balls that tasted like metal, but in a blueberry flavored sauce. No matter what hospital I was on, I was always satisfied just as long as they had little cups of Smucker’s peanut butter. All four of the hospital settings I have been in had cups of peanut butter. Honestly, those cups of peanut butter had to be one of the only things that kept me alive during a hospitalization. 

There was always a snack served in the morning and after dinner on the unit. They didn’t have very many vegan snacks, but someone would always get me a piece of fruit if I asked for one. Even though there were decent snacks, I didn’t like how the snacks weren’t distributed as loosely as the snacks at short-term hospitals were.

(3.5 out of 5 stars)

Willow Springs is a residential treatment facility in Reno, Nevada for children and adolescents. The residents’ age range from 5 to 17. Even though Willow Springs is technically a long-term mental hospital, the patients there are called “residents” because they usually stay there for over a month. I stayed on the DBT unit at Willow Springs from October 27, 2011 through January 4, 2012.

Most of the DBT staff were helpful when I talked to them about a problem. The staff member whom I was talking to would tell me how to effectively handle the problem I was faced with in a skillful way. Even though the staff consisted of only adults, they were surprisingly understanding and gave realistic solutions to a resident’s issue. Nonetheless, there were some staff members who I had no idea as to how they were qualified to work with mental patients. Those staff members were completely insensitive to the feelings of emotionally unstable teenagers. When there was a problem on the unit (such as too much drama or gossiping), the staff would resort to radical solutions, such as forcing everyone on the unit to be silent. There will most likely never be an actual solution to this problem because, for whatever reason, mental patients like to cause drama and will stop at nothing to break each others’ spirits. However, the staff need to feel like they are accomplishing something, so that is their only way of doing so. (3.8 out of 5 stars).

Walter Jackson Freeman II was the founder of the Transorbital Lobotomy, or more commonly known as the Ice-Pick Lobotomy. He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1895 and was known to be the first neurologist in the city. He attended college at Yale University and moved on to University of Pennsylvania Medical School. Walter performed lobotomies by drilling holes into patients’ skulls. He developed the Transorbital Lobotomy after hearing about an Italian doctor named Amarro Fiamberti who operated on brains through a patient’s eye socket. Walter found this to be more convenient than drilling holes into a patient’s skull, so he performed lobotomies in this fashion. Walter charged $25 per lobotomy and had given around 3,400 lobotomies in a span of forty years. Once the Transorbital Lobotomy had become popular, Walter traveled around the United States in his van that he nicknamed the “lobotomobile”. He went performed lobotomies in State Mental Hospitals in twenty three states. He retired after his final surgery in 1967. Even though he used controversial methods that are illegal now (praise the lord), he was thought to have transformed the community of neurology.

McLean Hospital was established in 1811 in Charleston, Massachusetts through a charter from the “Massachusetts General Hospital Corporation”. Its original name was Asylum for the Insane. It was first opened on October 1, 1818 and its first patient was admitted five days after it first opened. In 1892 the superintendent of the hospital, Edward Cowles, changed the name of the hospital to “McLean Hospital” because he found the word “asylum” to be demeaning to the patients. The hospital was named after John McLean because his wife and he donated around $120,000 to the hospital. Construction for the new location of McLean In 1895 the hospital moved to Belmont, Massachusetts. The Bell Path by Sylvia Plath and Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen are both memoirs that are based on the authors’ stays at McLean. James Taylor wrote a song called “Knockin’ Round the Zoo” that includes events that occurred during his stay at McLean.

Schizophrenia is a mental disorder that is usually characterized by no perception between reality and what is not real or what does not exist. Many people with it experience hallucinations and delusions and generally withdraw themselves from the “real” world.

Peter Green: Peter Green was a guitarist for Fleetwood Mac. He was an avid acid abuser, which caused him to develop drug-induced schizophrenia. This condition is when someone develops schizophrenia from heavily abusing amphetamines. Peter spent many years in and out of psychiatric hospitals. He underwent a series of electroconvulsive therapy treatments. He admits that he still hears voices in his head. He said that the voices sound like the voice of a woman he met in a hospital.

Mary Todd Lincoln: Mary Todd Lincoln was President Abraham Lincoln’s wife. She did not show symptoms of schizophrenia until 1871, the year of her son’s death and six years after her husband’s assassination. Her son Robert noticed her strange behavior sometime in 1875 and had her admitted to Bellevue Insane Asylum. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia and was released into her sister’s care four months later after being declared “sane”.

I stayed at Sutter from October 12, 2011 to October 18, 2011. Based on everything except for some other patients I met there, my stay at Sutter went pretty well.

The Food: The food served in the cafeteria was still greasy, but not as greasy as the previous hospital I had stayed at. Unlike the other hospital I stayed at, Sutter had a salad bar that was surprisingly good. The salad bar always had romaine and iceberg lettuce, and sometimes had kidney beans, spinach, beets, and other salad toppings. The veggie burger patties at Sutter did not have cheese in them as opposed to the patties at Heritage Oaks that did. I had become a vegan shortly before I went to Sutter, so this was very convenient for me. What was even more convenient was that the dayroom of the adolescent unit had a locked refrigerator where patients with special diets (lactose intolerant, allergic to gluten, vegan, etc) could store their own food. Like Heritage Oaks, there was a lot of food on the adolescent unit. The staff would occasionally give the patients bags of chips, which many patients liked. (5 out of 5 stars)

The Staff: Most of the staff were friendly. There was this one staff member who was extremely friendly and led a lot of groups. Sometimes he would let the patients listen to music on his iPad with him. Student nurses would try to create small talk with other patients, and most patients appropriately responded back. Towards the end of my time at Sutter, however, the staff had a few difficulties that they could have had more control over. On my second to last day a patient escaped and on my last morning another patient who had snuck in a lighter lit balls of paper he threw on the floor on fire. Eventually the patient who escaped was found and sent to higher security unit of the hospital and the fire was quickly put out. Even though the staff didn’t do too well at preventing these incidents, they did well at stopping them. (4 out of 5 stars)

The Rooms: The showers were not operated by a single button, so the temperature could be adjusted and the person using the shower didn’t have to press a button every minute to continue to shower. The beds weren’t comfortable like most beds at psychiatric hospitals, but at least the average stay is 3 to 9 days. The rooms looked more like rooms in a retirement home than a preschool classroom like Heritage Oaks. Hospital rooms can never really look cozy, but I liked the “retirement home” look better than the “preschool classroom” look. (4.5 out of 5 stars)