heâd see a patient get that look in their eyes. The panic-stricken look of impending doom. It would take him right back to the clearing in Xuan Loc, lying nose to nose with the injured soldier while Sergeant Wagner handed him the hot pistol reeking of burnt cordite. He would begin to tremble, just slightly. And he would become Dr. Pussyfoot all over again.
His first staff position was at a state mental hospital in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He was twenty-seven, a credited psychiatrist ready to rid the world of mental illness. It was the midseventies, and America seemed to be pulling out of its collective state of insanity, normalizing itself. Except in the institutions, where the living conditions were approaching historic lows.
The Chief Medical Director of the Tuscaloosa Sanitarium was Dr. Walter Francis, an acclaimed physician who switched to psychiatry in order to satisfy an intellectual curiosity, more than a genuine desire to cure the mentally ill. The hospital was grossly overcrowded and equally underfunded. The staff was comprised mostly of poorly educated security guards with bad attitudes. They lacked compassion. Worse, they lacked understanding. To them, the patients were subhuman, deranged beasts in need of taming.
To Dr. Francis, they were merely test subjects, human curiosities for his medical experiments. He did not pretend to understand the nature of mental illness, as did so many of his contemporaries of the time. Rather, he sought to discover its cause by way of identifying its cure. His thesis was that the cure would inform the cause. Thus, he explored all the various forms of therapy known at the time, including many of his own imagining.
In many ways, the environment inside the asylum was worse than any battlefield Eli had ever experienced. More gruesome and far more traumatic. This was a one-sided war waged against patients who lacked the weapons to fight back. And neither side ever won.
As in Vietnam, Eli began to sympathize with the patients, fighting to protect them from the treatments that were designed to cure them. In one case he got too close.
Her name was Miranda. She had been committed to the hospital by an adulterous husband complaining of excessive excitability and paranoid delusions. She wasnât suffering from delusions; her husband was cheating. The excitability part was true, though. She was pissed.
She was strolling through the gardens when Eli first met her, smoking. It was early August and she was sweating, her frizzy, blonde hair clinging in dampened strings to her face, blanketing her back. When she walked up to Eli, she twisted her hair into a bun and held it on top of her head. Her neck was slender and smooth, blemished only by the fading bruises seen under the jawline. A bead of sweat trickled down her neck in mesmerizing spurts and joined the pool collecting in her clavicle. Eli was struck with a shocking desire to suck it dry.
âWhat this place needs is a swimming pool,â she said, taking a last, long drag from her cigarette before grinding it into the garden soil with her shoe. âRight over there.â She pointed to an expanse of grass framed by flowerbeds.
It has several, Eli almost said, thinking of the submersion pools where they held patients underwater until they lost consciousness. Surprisingly, patients experienced a relatively high rate of recovery after submersion therapy. It helped them overcome their fear of death, by showing them its face.
âIâm not sure that would be such a good idea,â Eli said instead.
âAnd whyâs that?â
âWell, what if someone drowned?â When he blinked he saw a snapshot of Miranda tied to a submersion gurney, inches below the surface, eyes wide with panic as she thrashed against the straps.
Miranda looked back towards the long brick building and scrunched her nose. âThat would be a welcome relief for most of the people here,â she said. Then she shifted her weight and fanned
His first staff position was at a state mental hospital in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He was twenty-seven, a credited psychiatrist ready to rid the world of mental illness. It was the midseventies, and America seemed to be pulling out of its collective state of insanity, normalizing itself. Except in the institutions, where the living conditions were approaching historic lows.
The Chief Medical Director of the Tuscaloosa Sanitarium was Dr. Walter Francis, an acclaimed physician who switched to psychiatry in order to satisfy an intellectual curiosity, more than a genuine desire to cure the mentally ill. The hospital was grossly overcrowded and equally underfunded. The staff was comprised mostly of poorly educated security guards with bad attitudes. They lacked compassion. Worse, they lacked understanding. To them, the patients were subhuman, deranged beasts in need of taming.
To Dr. Francis, they were merely test subjects, human curiosities for his medical experiments. He did not pretend to understand the nature of mental illness, as did so many of his contemporaries of the time. Rather, he sought to discover its cause by way of identifying its cure. His thesis was that the cure would inform the cause. Thus, he explored all the various forms of therapy known at the time, including many of his own imagining.
In many ways, the environment inside the asylum was worse than any battlefield Eli had ever experienced. More gruesome and far more traumatic. This was a one-sided war waged against patients who lacked the weapons to fight back. And neither side ever won.
As in Vietnam, Eli began to sympathize with the patients, fighting to protect them from the treatments that were designed to cure them. In one case he got too close.
Her name was Miranda. She had been committed to the hospital by an adulterous husband complaining of excessive excitability and paranoid delusions. She wasnât suffering from delusions; her husband was cheating. The excitability part was true, though. She was pissed.
She was strolling through the gardens when Eli first met her, smoking. It was early August and she was sweating, her frizzy, blonde hair clinging in dampened strings to her face, blanketing her back. When she walked up to Eli, she twisted her hair into a bun and held it on top of her head. Her neck was slender and smooth, blemished only by the fading bruises seen under the jawline. A bead of sweat trickled down her neck in mesmerizing spurts and joined the pool collecting in her clavicle. Eli was struck with a shocking desire to suck it dry.
âWhat this place needs is a swimming pool,â she said, taking a last, long drag from her cigarette before grinding it into the garden soil with her shoe. âRight over there.â She pointed to an expanse of grass framed by flowerbeds.
It has several, Eli almost said, thinking of the submersion pools where they held patients underwater until they lost consciousness. Surprisingly, patients experienced a relatively high rate of recovery after submersion therapy. It helped them overcome their fear of death, by showing them its face.
âIâm not sure that would be such a good idea,â Eli said instead.
âAnd whyâs that?â
âWell, what if someone drowned?â When he blinked he saw a snapshot of Miranda tied to a submersion gurney, inches below the surface, eyes wide with panic as she thrashed against the straps.
Miranda looked back towards the long brick building and scrunched her nose. âThat would be a welcome relief for most of the people here,â she said. Then she shifted her weight and fanned
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