A shocking video shows a woman dying on the floor in the psych ward at Kings
County Hospital, while people around her, including a security guard, did
nothing to help.
After an hour, another mental patient finally got the
attention of the indifferent hospital workers, according to the tape, obtained
by the Daily News.
Worse still, the surveillance tape suggests hospital
staff may have falsified medical charts to cover the utter lack of treatment
provided Esmin Green before she died.
"Thank God for the videotape
because no one would have believed this could have happened," saidDonna
Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union.
This is for real. This is what is happening in our hospitals and institutions for those with mental illnesses, developmental and other disabilities, and the elderly. This is not an isolated case.
This kind of mistreatment and abuse did not start with our generation or with the one before ours. It has been so since, I imagine, the beginning of the existence of such disabilites. Since the beginning of human weakness and false human strength.
I have lots of ideas about solutions, but I am no expert and really haven't the energy right now to cover them.
Some day I'll share my experience as a patient in various psych hospitals. The one thing I will say now, is that sometimes people in attempt to be sympathetic will show horror that I had to be in there with 'those' kinds of people, meaning of course my fellow patients. And I try as best as I can, without getting into much detail with them, to explain that the patients were not a source of fear or terror for me. It was the staff, well, to be fair some of the the staff, not all of them. More than them personally, though, it was the 'system'.
Years later, I became a 'staff' working in care facilities and group homes for those with developmental disabilities. Their stories and long term experiences in care facilities and institutions were mild compared to my short time spent in psych hospitals. The first facility I worked in was so bad and my experience in the psych hosptitals was still so fresh in my mind that I quit working there only a couple of weeks after I started and steered clear of that kind of work for many years. But I went back because something in my heart pulled me back there.
Thankfully, all of my other jobs, working with those with developmental disabilities have been in small care failities and group homes. Those places weren't perfect by far, believe me, they had their share of problems, but even a small care facility of three to sixteen beds makes all the difference in comparrison to large institutions and nursing home sized facilities.
While working for a six bed care facility, a nursing home sized facility in a town nearby us for men and women with developmental disabilities was shut down. After two deaths and untold amount of abuses.
Several of the former residents came to our facility with such emotional scars that my heart won't let me write anymore.
But here's an old news article about the facility: Choctaw Had Legacy of Abuse
This says much. From the above article, "The things that go on out there, while they are not excusable, they are somewhat tolerable because of the alternative," then-Deputy Health Commissioner Brent VanMeter said after the body of the resident who had been dead for six days was discovered. "What are you going to do with these people if you don't keep them there and hope that that facility is doing the best that it can?"
Here's a related news article: Care Center Bear History of Abuse
It's hard to blog through tears.
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