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From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 26, 28 June 1948, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Using the tragically appropriate title, Minnesota Bedlam, Geri Hoffner of the Minneapolis Tribune recently completed a series of feature articles exposing the sickening conditions in Minnesota’s mental hospitals. But the story of bad food, barbaric restraints, inadequate medical care, poorly-equipped and over-crowded buildings is not just a Minnesota story. Actually, Minnesota is about average in the amount of money spent on mental patients in state institutions. It is “American Bedlam” that is exposed in these articles.
In most state hospitals for the mentally ill, the patients get very little, if any treatment. They are prisoners, not patients! Restraints of all kinds are in use – leather mitts, cuffs, sheets, and even chains. This, despite the fact that modern psychiatrists declaim against the use of such and point out that physical force is unnecessary if the hospital has trained personnel, proper equipment and scientific methods of treating disturbed patients.
Here is one heart-breaking description of a tortured patient in one of Minnesota’s mental hospitals as told by Geri Hoffner:
“At one hospital, a thick door was unlocked for us and we looked in at an emaciated woman. Iler wrists and ankles were tied to the bed posts. Her hair was disheveled and her thin body strained at the tight sheets, which were used as one more restraint.
“At another hospital, we saw a man in his ’30’s, tied to his bed in much the same way. ‘He’s a bad one,’ the attendant murmured. ‘He’s had to be tied up like that for years. We never take him out.’
“‘How do you know that he still needs to he tied up like that if you never take him out,’ we asked. But the attendant just shook his head and repeated, ‘He’s a bad one.’”
And this is a story from Minnesota, one of the “free” states in “free” and rich United States.
These and other terrible conditions described are not the fault of the doctors in charge. There is only an average of one doctor for every 500 institutionalized mental patients, whereas, the ratio should be one doctor for every 132 mental patients.
Nor can the attendants be blamed for these conditions. Overworked, underpaid and almost completely uninformed about modern methods of handling mentally disturbed patients, the harassed attendants in mental hospitals are nearly as miserable as the unhappy patients.
No, the fault lies with the outrageously insane rulers of our society, who spend our money for cruel and senseless wars, rather than for the humane and reasonable treatment of the mentally ill. Some day, we will restrain them!
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