“You Can’t Talk to a Psycho Like a Normal Human Being.”

I don’t know what I expected a psychiatric hospital to be like.  Probably a cross between “One Flew Over The Coocoo’s Nest” and “Girl, Interrupted.”  I know I really didn’t want it to be like Arkham Asylum, because I knew I’d probably get stuck changing the Joker’s bedpan instead of watering Poison Ivy’s begonias.

My job was to keep an eye on patients and make sure they stayed out of trouble.  If needed I would also take vital signs, change adult diapers, talk violent patients down, wrestle them to the floor if they couldn’t be talked down, change adult diapers, make sure no one killed themselves, make behavioral notes in patient’s medical records, and change adult diapers.  It was both the most rewarding job I had ever had, as well as the most horrible job I had ever had.  I saved several lives while working there, made an impact on many troubled youths, and became so emotionally scared from the whole experience that I can still get upset if I think about certain events.  And if anyone mentions how crazy someone is, I’ll go into a thirty minute monologue about crazy.  I used to joke that the main difference between the staff and the patients was that staff had a key.  It’s not that much of a joke, really.

Poplar Springs was a single story facility surrounded by peaceful trees.  Some might even have been Poplar Trees.  It would have been an amazing coincidence.  Looking at the outside you wouldn’t necessarily think it was a psychiatric hospital, but you would definitely knew it was some institutionalized animal.  It just screamed public functionality and cafeterias with floor tiles from the sixties.

Once you entered the lobby you would get a better idea what was going on.  Every door had a key lock with one of those red-green lights that let you know if it was unlocked or not.  Most of the larger doors also had a camera over them so someone could either buzz you in, or ignore you ruthlessly.  The carpeting was that tight, poodle colored stuff that was easy to clean bodily fluids out of yet hard to rip out with your teeth.  Although you wouldn’t have known, some of the walls had a reinforced Kevlar-like material built in to make it harder to kick through.  Paintings in the lobby were bolted to the walls[1].

The floor plan was a bit confusing, as it was designed to be opened up or closed off to change the size of the units – what older hospitals would have called “wards” – depending on demand.  If you were out sick for an extended period of time, you could find yourself walking onto the adult unit when you thought you were still on the children’s residential unit.  In fact, one escape attempt from the boy’s residential unit, using the drop ceiling as a passage over the locked doors, dropped the little scamps into the part of the adult unit where we were keeping some real loonies, instead of the open hallway the kid’s had expected.  Scared them so badly the kid’s never tried again, and were the model of good behavior the rest of their stay.

Escape attempts were usually pretty entertaining. Once a group of girls dug a hole in their bathroom wall and tunneled through the building’s crawlspace until they made it out.  It took them a while so they kept a nightstand in front of the hole while they were working on it.  It really only worked because of the high level of staff apathy.  In hindsight everyone wondered why they didn’t think it odd that the girls had put a piece of bedroom furniture in the bathroom.  I guess the staff at the time just figured that crazy kids will do any sort of crazy kid sh*t.

When they discovered the girl’s missing, they had a bunch of staff pile into one of the hospital van’s and go hunt them down.  It wasn’t that hard, since they were teenagers who had been stuck in a psychiatric hospital for months.  They bee-lined for the closest McDonalds where those with no money attempted to trade sexual favors for a Big Mac combo meal.  The capture was something out of the movies, or possibly a Wal-Mart.  The staff members came in from each door, a couple actually dressed like you would expect with white pants and white shirts (it wasn’t a uniform or anything, a couple guys just seemed to like dressing that way).  The rest were fairly casual in cheap polo shirts and slacks[2].    They surrounded the four girls, aging from fourteen to seventeen and wearing what were essentially pajamas, and asked them if they would quietly.  With all the adrenaline pumping through everyone, there was probably little chance of anything going quietly.

One of the teenagers, an adopted Korean girl who’s parents were rich white folks and classed her joining a local gang as a mental illness (I can see their point, actually), shouted, “Rape gang!  Help!”  And all hell broke loose.

The staff fell on the girls like hungry wolves with aikido training.  Meanwhile an old woman carrying an umbrella when it wasn’t raining began yelling at the staff to let those poor girls go, with a chorus of, “Rapers!  Dial 911!  Rapers!”

There was scuffling and grunting as the girls were dragged off, pajama pants – never proper attire for a fight – sliding completely off one girl and getting pushed so high another that it looked like she was wearing a sumo diaper.  A staff member ended up with a torn t-shirt, like always seems to happen to Captain Kirk whenever there’s anything close to a fight, and one of the nurses had a nasty bite mark on her forearm.  Human bites take forever to heal.  We have such nasty mouths.  There are more germs in the human mouth than in a dog’s mouth, and they lick their butts for recreation.

Luckily this was America, where no one really gives a f*ck about anything not happening to themselves, or else things could have really gotten out of hand.