The man in the shower grew angrier as he lathered up, washing with a lice-eradicating medicinal soap. I stood in front of the open stall, my face turned away from his naked body. I was caught by surprise when the man came boiling out of the shower and plowed into me. The two of us wrestled and rolled into the hall, where I reared up, cocked my arm, and prepared to strike the man. I was stopped by this cry: “Jon! Jon! You can’t hit him!”
I was a 19-year-old attendant in a psychiatric hospital, recruited by my future brother-in-law to watch over the patients. I was given no instructions, no training, and no indication of the potential for danger in my new job. I donned a white smock and was sent onto the locked ward, where among other shocks, I found a former high school classmate. I saw psychiatrists who seemed to need psychiatric counsel, nurses and attendants who were more attentive to each other than to the patients in their charge. And after the “angry shower man” incident, I was made to understand that patients who lose control are to be restrained, but never struck. But when I saw them “restrained,” it was the “dogpile” version, where as many attendants as could be summoned would pile upon the patient and carry him — or her — off to the seclusion room for shots of Thorazine, rest and reflection.
I set aside my street-fighting ways and employed a restraint technique that restricted movement without breaking any bones, or snapping tendons in the patient’s leg (as had happened to a previous attendant.) When I was twenty, I was recognized as one to call when trouble flared, and if I could not “talk down” the agitated patient, to employ compassionate restraints. When the call went out through the hospital for “all available attendants,” the charge nurses on my floor knew that I would not participate if there were more than three attendants responding. Most patients had no desire to harm others, but merely resisted being confined. I knew that three men could sufficiently cover the body surface of the average patient, and three more would be excessive. I had seen too many freelancing techniques and helped to organize a “collaboration” of attendants — not a union — that lobbied for training in patient restraint. That training included being locked into the seclusion room — a room with padded floors and walls — and being wrapped into a “cold pack,” a technique designed to immobilize the patient with strips of ice-cold cloth. In the four years that I worked at Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic, no doctor, nurse or attendant was harmed by a patient — though there was a close call with an ex-Green Beret — and no patient died while being restrained.
In May of this year, 16-year-old Cornelius Frederick, having been sent to a residential treatment facility, because his father could not care for him, threw a sandwich in the cafeteria. This behavior resulted in staff members, using “grossly inappropriate” techniques, restraining Frederick. The restraint was cited as the cause of his death, two days later. When the peacekeepers of society, both private and governmental, are brought to bear on the upsets of that society, fear is almost always a companion, and fear is often accompanied by anger. I’ve noticed that in confrontations — even those that start out as peaceful — anger often rules, when cooler heads should prevail.
In a psychiatric hospital in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, I learned an important societal lesson at an early age: When restraining someone toward whom you wish no harm, you use restraint.
cjon3acd@att.net