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Who Is Robert Blakely Inhumane

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After nearly a century of housing thousands of people with mental and physical disabilities, “The Hospital for the Mentally Insane” located in Gardington, West Virginia has been shut down. The patients who were formerly housed in the institution are being de-institutionalized, rehabilitated and reintegrated into society. Meanwhile, further research of the treatment methods of patient care are being investigated by authorities. “The horrors of this institution are indescribable.” Officer Bart Steinberg reports. “These people were treated with such appalling neglect and inhumane practices, it makes me sick just thinking about it.” Steinberg explained. “The first thing I noticed walking into the institution was the smell. The overpowering …show more content…

Blakely is undoubtedly one of our most severe cases of patient neglect. His parents left him at the institution as an infant because he was born blind. As a result, Blakely was subjected to the maltreatment and severe neglect of the facility for the next 45 years of his life. For the majority of the day, he was chained to his bed, only being moved to a sitting position to be fed. In addition to being blind, he developed a multitude of other disabilities because of the neglect he experienced. Limited human interaction caused him to fail to thrive. Muscular dystrophy of his entire body was the result of never leaving his bed. He never learned to walk, never learned to talk and had never experienced anything outside the confines of the life he had known in …show more content…

When Robert first came here, he was withdrawn and completely overstimulated by everything. The patterns of his behavior were very subdued and we were unable to communicate with him at all. He couldn’t understand anything that was going on. Even the feeling of the breeze on his skin would startle him. He had never known anything outside the walls of the institution. We have been working with him on a daily basis, and he has gradually come out of his shell. We’re finding out that he has quite the personality and he even has started to try communicating with us! I tell ya, this man is incredibly strong to have made it this far. His recovery has been a combined effort of therapists, doctors, caretakers and friends. It’s been a long road to undo the damage that was caused, but for him to have gotten this far into recovery is truly a

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Origins of this Facility: In Morris Plains New Jersey the “Greystone Parks Psychiatric Hospital” is located. This facility goes as far back as 1876 in which this facility was operated from an older building and under different circumstances. Never-the-less this facility became over crowed, housing 7000 consumers and employing 14 000 staff members. During this period, patients were free to walk around the facility and patients who were in the “backward wards” were more symptomatic.

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In the 1800s, the mentally ill and prisoners were forced to live in wretched conditions and often were not even treated as regular citizens. Patients of mental institutions were operated on so they were more controllable. The mentally insane that did not live at home were kept in prisons, few were in faulty poorhouses, and even fewer were in hospitals. Many hospitals had mental wards, but they were inadequate for patients. In the 1840s, Dorothea Dix visited many prisons where the deranged were kept and found that these conditions were unsuitable for living quarters (“Dorothea Dix Biography”).

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During treatment, the criminally insane are cared for by nurses, psychiatrists and other hospital administrators. For the treatments to be effective, the hospital staff must adapt to the way of life in the psychiatric hospital. In the article “Inside a hospital for the criminally insane” by Caitlin Dickson, posted on The Daily Beast, Dickson shares her readings of a book written by Dr. Stephen Seager about the inside of the Napa State Hospital. Napa State Hospital is home to approximately 12,000 patients and a majority of the patients are rapists, killers and mass murderers (TheDailyBeast). Everyday the hospital staff endures violence and personalities of the patients.

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Annotated Bibliography Mass incarceration of the mentally ill: Should we revert back to Institutionalization? Etter, Gregg W. Sr., et al. " The Jail as a Dumping Ground:

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This story was often common practice with these type mental faculties. The patients then were treated so poorly. This is how psychiatry began in our country; with practices indistinguishable from torture (Leupo). American doctors have made great strides since the early 1960’s; but does society know what is going on inside the walls our mental hospitals? We didn’t in 1962, that’s for

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Many psychiatric hospitals have closed down, which the only option left for the mentally ill was to be taken in jails and prisons. In the documentary we learn

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Shocked to see prisoners devoid of medical and moral treatment in damp, cold quarters, Dix vowed to end the barbaric and revolting degradation. Very little of the population knew or cared about the mentally ill’s peril, and Dix’s crusade changed the way the mentally ill were received. Dix not only shed light on the nation’s most perplexing problem, she fearlessly shoved the issue squarely into the center of public policy, broadcasting the issue through her written account On Behalf of the Insane and Poor. Dix constructed 32 hospitals and 13 asylums throughout America and Europe (Reddi, 2005, para. 6). Most of these symbols of hope and progress are still standing today.

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This enabled the people to live in the community and exercise their freedoms. In the 1950s and 60s, close to 80 percent of all the beds in Ontario 's’ psychiatric hospitals were closed. A report in 1988 saying that the Provincial Community Mental Health Committee of Ontario, incited an important shift towards a community-based approach to mental health services. However, it is clear that Ontario’s community-based approach to mental health treatment is far from complete or acceptable. In less then 20 years from closing the beds, numerous people have began to recognize that without the necessary community services in place, deinstitutionalization has been a

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The insane are known to have been cursed with unclean spirits ever since the beginning of America who takes its views from the Old World. It was only during the Second Great Awakening that people, Christian activists and often women, sought to reform the prisons and asylums. For Americans, asylums are now remnants of the past; the mentally ill are now bestowed the right to live normal lives and they are now even given the choice to decide if they wish to seek help and take medication. Even so, it is undeniable that people with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder are unwillingly trapped inside a mind often not their own. Some of them, if left alone and uncared for, face dangers in society.

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Asylums for the “Insane” In the 1830’s to 1840’s there was a pursuit by activists to reconstruct the penal system in the United States. These activists advocated for prison reform towards the treatment of incarcerated poor and mentally insane populations. During this time, prisons were used to contain criminals as well as certain Americans deemed undesirable members of society. The prison reform activist believe there should be some type of instructional rehabilitation offered to the prisoners instead of confinement.

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The purpose of psychiatric hospitals is to assess people who suffer from mental illness and provide mental health treatment. However, through the documentary and the story, it is significant to note that the mistreatment of patients who suffered mental illness, is not significantly changed since the 20th century. Some inhumane treatments are the Electroconvulsive Therapy and brain surgery that cut off parts of the human brain. The horrible side effects are permanent damage to

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Introduction Prior to the mid-1960 virtually all mental health treatment was provided on an inpatient basis in hospitals and institutions. The Community Mental Health Act of 1963 was established with its primary focus on deinstitutionalizing mentally ill patients, and shutting down asylums in favor of community mental health centers. It was a major policy shift in mental health treatment that allowed patients to go home and live independently while receiving treatment, (Pollack & Feldman, 2003). As a result of the Act, there was a shift of mentally ill persons in custodial care in state institutions to an increase of the mentally ill receiving prosecutions in criminal courts.

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Patients would be chained to their beds at night, the ventilation systems were unexceptional, and the cleanliness of the establishment was inadequate. With the abundance of patients to care for, care became nonexistent, this is where the stereotype comes into play. Attendants would beat patients, sexually assault them, and would sometime perform unethical procedures upon them. One such treatment would be the ever so famous lobotomy. A lobotomy consists of either drilling into a patient's brain or using ice pick like instruments to stab at the brain through the patient's eye socket, these procedures had a variety of results ranging from successful to the death of the patient.

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1268 Words | 6 Pages

The mass incarceration of the mentally ill can be reduced by reverting to institutionalization Researchers and activists alike are concerned about the rate at which individuals with mental illness are incarcerated in the United States. Many consider that the increase in incarceration is a direct result of deinstitutionalization. In this essay, I will discuss how the solutions to the prevention of the incarceration of the mentally ill but ultimately lead to the common goal of improving the care of the mentally ill. This will be done by comparing and contrasting the key points of Knoll, Etter et al and Kincaid.

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Even of the patients are mentally disable and some cant express clearly, they still manage to form a strong social bond with the regular people. During the 1970’s President Kennedy passed a health reform act in which psychiatry was reevaluated, and insane asylums were shutting down. The given number 160,000 was lowest at the time as more asylums designed to isolate patients were converting to a therapeutic haling centers

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