Our Visit to the Hospital in Wichita Falls

.   It was an unnerving experience for a 16 year old boy.  Mental health hospitals were pretty primitive in those days, and they were primarily there to protect the “sane” public from the “crazy” people.  That was not an altogether bad thing.  When we got there, we realized the water pump had malfunctioned on the car.  I managed to find some water to fill up the radiator.  While I was doing this, a resident was standing on the other side of the chain link fence yelling at me.  I was glad there was a fence between the two of us.

As a minister, I’ve had the experience of visiting maximum security prisons.  There’s really not a lot of difference in the way people are treated in today’s prisons and they way mentally ill people were treated in the fifties.  In today’s prisons, inmates are called “residents.”  I don’t remember what they called the patients in a mental hospital, but it all boiled down to a complete loss of freedom.  There were several doors that had to be unlocked for us to get through, and those same doors were locked behind us.  The only difference between that visit and a prison visit lay in the fact that visitors to a mental health facility weren’t frisked in the fifties.

When we finally got to my mother she was in good spirits, and rational except for some memory lapses caused by the fact that she was recovering from electric shock therapy.   She was terribly lonely and wanted to come home.   She believed there were people in the hospital who were completely sane, but had been committed by family members to get them out of their lives.

In the early fall, she was thought to be well enough to go home.  She was in good spirits, and she was extremely glad to be home.  She was aware of what she had gone through.  She said, “If I ever get that way again, just lock me in a room until I’m all right again.”  Of course we couldn’t honor that.   

From that point on her life satisfaction was often interrupted with periods of psychotic behavior.  These episodes tended to last longer with the passage of time.  Conversely the periods of rational thinking got shorter.  Mercifully, mental health science reached the point in which widespread use of electric shock therapy was used less and less.  Drug therapy became the treatment of choice.  It’s didn’t solve the problem, but it greatly reduced the severity of the attacks, and eventually made institutionalization unnecessary.  At least my father viewed it that way.

After college I moved away from home, so I did not have to deal with it on a daily basis.  To be quite honest, I don’t think I ever learned to manage that situation very well.  I didn’t know how to relate to her.  I didn’t know how to manage the situation in the public.  Her public behavior could be embarrassing at times, and my conscience bothered me because I was ashamed of what was happening.  On the one hand I knew she couldn’t help it, but I was also wishing we didn’t have to go through this.    That’s not a self-pity statement.  It’s just an honest assessment of the way things were.