Read Online Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital by Eric Manheimer - Free Book Online
Authors: Eric Manheimer
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cramps, and migraine headaches, along with birth control pills.
I watched her through the glass. She was so young. As she sat drawing with Tanisha and the younger child, I found it hard to believe that she’d been medicated for most of her life. In fact, watching them, I was struck once again by how very difficult it is to grow up in our environment. Both of these young women thought actively about dying, about taking their own lives. Money did not cushion all blows.
For Emily, the problem maybe consisted of too much “care” rather than too little. The kinds of therapies she had received were as diverseas her diagnoses and medication lists. There was a prominent Freudian Manhattan psychoanalyst. There was a Jungian analyst, a psychotherapist, three different psychologists who specialized in personality disorders, one who taught Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), and another Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), a third specializing in neurocognitive testing, and a fourth at the bottom of the page involved in investigational work with a new treatment group modality for personality disorders at Columbia. The social workers included therapists from Brooklyn to Queens, Manhattan’s lower reaches, and its northernmost enclaves near the Cloisters. I was totally baffled by Ingrid’s list—and at the same time it gave me a deeper insight into Emily’s problems and her parents’ frustrations, hopes, fears, and feelings of hopelessness and helplessness in the face of the diagnostic and therapeutic overkill. There was another column labeled “misc” for miscellaneous. This column included gynecologists, internists, neurologists, gastroenterologists, pulmonologists, acupuncturists, Chinese herbalists, and some I couldn’t interpret.
I arranged to attend a group meeting on 21 West, the inpatient adolescent unit, a few days later. The floor is for kids only, in the middle of our 350-bed psychiatric hospital within a hospital.
The head nurse, Jane Tyler, unlocked the unit for me and then locked me in when I went through the gray double metal doors. She put her finger to her lips and waved me over to her, whispering, “We are just starting the unit daily meeting. Come in and join us.” She pointed to an empty seat between the art therapist, Julie, and a young skinny Chinese boy whose age I could not guess. Twelve? Fifteen? He sat quietly drowning in the folds of his hospital gown, looking down at his hands in his lap.
We went around the room for introductions. A 21 West unit head nurse ran the meetings. She was firm and established rules of politeness and respect that were repeated in unison. At the same time she was tuned in to every gesture and emotional nuance in the room. Tanisha and Emily sat next to each other opposite me. They each had black speckled notebooks in their laps. They opened them during the meeting. They appeared to be reading from them or taking notes from time to time.
In the middle of the meeting a boy named Tyrone, who appeared to be eighteen from his size, began shouting and stood up in the middle of the room. He felt one of the other boys had looked at him and said something disrespectful. Several behavioral health aides got up at the same time and surrounded him. One RN left the room and came back three minutes later with a psychiatrist, Tom Tregerman. When Tyrone saw the psychiatrist, he looked at him and started to explain what had happened. At the same time he relaxed, put his arms down, and walked with the physician from the room. Tom was the one person who had an immediate calming effect on Tyrone. He was enormous for his age and had caused serious property and bodily damage to another patient and an aide during a flash outburst. As I remembered Tyrone’s “story,” his childhood had been like living in
Apocalypse Now
.
Tyrone talked about his father all the time, asking when was he going to come and visit? When did he call? Did he know the phone number and address of the hospital? Those
I watched her through the glass. She was so young. As she sat drawing with Tanisha and the younger child, I found it hard to believe that she’d been medicated for most of her life. In fact, watching them, I was struck once again by how very difficult it is to grow up in our environment. Both of these young women thought actively about dying, about taking their own lives. Money did not cushion all blows.
For Emily, the problem maybe consisted of too much “care” rather than too little. The kinds of therapies she had received were as diverseas her diagnoses and medication lists. There was a prominent Freudian Manhattan psychoanalyst. There was a Jungian analyst, a psychotherapist, three different psychologists who specialized in personality disorders, one who taught Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), and another Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), a third specializing in neurocognitive testing, and a fourth at the bottom of the page involved in investigational work with a new treatment group modality for personality disorders at Columbia. The social workers included therapists from Brooklyn to Queens, Manhattan’s lower reaches, and its northernmost enclaves near the Cloisters. I was totally baffled by Ingrid’s list—and at the same time it gave me a deeper insight into Emily’s problems and her parents’ frustrations, hopes, fears, and feelings of hopelessness and helplessness in the face of the diagnostic and therapeutic overkill. There was another column labeled “misc” for miscellaneous. This column included gynecologists, internists, neurologists, gastroenterologists, pulmonologists, acupuncturists, Chinese herbalists, and some I couldn’t interpret.
I arranged to attend a group meeting on 21 West, the inpatient adolescent unit, a few days later. The floor is for kids only, in the middle of our 350-bed psychiatric hospital within a hospital.
The head nurse, Jane Tyler, unlocked the unit for me and then locked me in when I went through the gray double metal doors. She put her finger to her lips and waved me over to her, whispering, “We are just starting the unit daily meeting. Come in and join us.” She pointed to an empty seat between the art therapist, Julie, and a young skinny Chinese boy whose age I could not guess. Twelve? Fifteen? He sat quietly drowning in the folds of his hospital gown, looking down at his hands in his lap.
We went around the room for introductions. A 21 West unit head nurse ran the meetings. She was firm and established rules of politeness and respect that were repeated in unison. At the same time she was tuned in to every gesture and emotional nuance in the room. Tanisha and Emily sat next to each other opposite me. They each had black speckled notebooks in their laps. They opened them during the meeting. They appeared to be reading from them or taking notes from time to time.
In the middle of the meeting a boy named Tyrone, who appeared to be eighteen from his size, began shouting and stood up in the middle of the room. He felt one of the other boys had looked at him and said something disrespectful. Several behavioral health aides got up at the same time and surrounded him. One RN left the room and came back three minutes later with a psychiatrist, Tom Tregerman. When Tyrone saw the psychiatrist, he looked at him and started to explain what had happened. At the same time he relaxed, put his arms down, and walked with the physician from the room. Tom was the one person who had an immediate calming effect on Tyrone. He was enormous for his age and had caused serious property and bodily damage to another patient and an aide during a flash outburst. As I remembered Tyrone’s “story,” his childhood had been like living in
Apocalypse Now
.
Tyrone talked about his father all the time, asking when was he going to come and visit? When did he call? Did he know the phone number and address of the hospital? Those
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