4 days in behavioral health

I've spent 4 days in the last two weeks at a small behavioral health hospital learning more about occupational therapy in that setting. Since my only exposure to psychiatric hospitals has come through books, TV and movies my rather vague expectations involved people who may be  unpredictable, a danger to themselves, possibly a violent towards others, or, at the very least, strange. In other words, they would be anything but normal and I didn't expect to be real comfortable. Reality turned out to be quite different from my expectations.

This hospital has 16 beds and at least 14 of them were full while I was there. The length of stay ranged from 7 months to new arrivals. It seems most people stay somewhere between 2 weeks and 2 months. Almost all of them are there by court order. It's not the kind of place one would want to spend a lot of time. Every half hour all night long someone is checking to see if you are sleeping. The only way to go outside is when a staff member unlocks the door to the patio, which is called the "dog kennel" by most of the residents. There are activities and groups during the day but pretty much there isn't a whole lot of structure to the day beyond meal times with food that comes from a local nursing home. There definitely isn't much opportunity to be productive. The most hated rule seems to be "no smoking." And often, the way out depends upon an opening in another setting and/or the funding to pay for it.

By the end of my time there I was thinking of the patients there as normal. That may sound rather odd. After all, one man said he was from Mars. A woman desperately needed the big handful of pens and pencils in her room for her CIA work and she needed extra linens for biopsies. Another woman was convinced the purpose of the medication she was taking was to drive all the Bible verses she knew out of her head. In reality that very low dose (2 mg when the doctor could go up to 100 mg) had calmed down the mania enough that she no longer needed to move furniture around or talk incessantly so you could actually have a conversation with her. None of that sounds very normal. But though these particular people weren't very connected to reality sometimes, they were nice people with a pleasant demeanor. The woman doing the CIA work was a sweet grandma who could tell you how to do canning and make sauerkraut. She could get a little intense/upset with those who checked her room and removed things that were "hers" and she "needed." But most of the time her blue eyes were gentle and she smiled readily. While there was one woman who made me uncomfortable because of her odd unpredictable behavior, I would have no problem sitting down and eating a meal with any of the others. They are all just normal people who happen to be dealing with a chronic illness that affects the brain rather than other organs of the body.