Okay, back on my soapbox: real mental hospitals are nothing like One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest!
Bedlam Asylum, 1800s
Yes, there are occasionally nasty nurses, or doctors who can't be bothered (and the food is relentlessly terrible). I know they chose the hospital for dramatic effect, but I would be seriously disappointed if they choose to show Mayfield as some sort of torture chamber. When one is mentally ill, the stigma is unbearable enough in real life. To say, as they did in one ep, that House would be unable to practice if he was on psych meds, is untrue, as is the idea that he would be given shock treatment. It makes it that much harder for those of us who live with it to have people think that's what the reality is, when it is nothing like that.
If anything, psych wards are often eerily quiet, mostly because so many of the patients are heavily drugged. (There are levels of lockdown, too--some wards have no locked doors except equipment closets, nurses stations, medication room--in the wards for the more violent patients, every door is locked, and there are small windows to look in on the patients. There's no reason for House to end up in a ward like that, he's more "Insanity Lite," as I once dubbed it.)
I can't imagine House clean and sober; I'm guessing it would be like when Foreman had his near-death experience and was briefly "happy," until House ruined it for him. This is a deeply damaged person, and one stay in a hospital cannot cure someone like that. It can help, but it can't cure.
Just today I was talking with another bipolar friend. She went public about it in an article, and the backlash has been tremendous. Suddenly everybody's attributing everything to her being "crazy." This is a smart, perceptive, hard-working person who has nothing outwardly wrong with her, but now the finger is pointed. She regrets her actions and has always told me never to go public about my illness.
I'm also disappointed because Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie's friend, has spent time in psych wards, and I'm sure HL might have done a little time in one during one of his mega-depressed periods. So why do they perpetuate this myth that psych wards are antique hell-holes filled with dangerous lunatics?
There is one thing...if he is perceived as violent or disruptive he will be placed in a "quiet room," as they like to call them. Used to be called "the rubber room" because the walls and floor ARE padded, and there is usually only a mattress with no bedding on the floor, so there is nothing to hurt yourself with. I've never been put in one, thank God, but at the last hospital (in April of this year) they were in frequent use and it was highly disturbing, since my room was in the same small wing and I could hear EVERYTHING. The daily sounds in a hospital are disturbing enough, even if they are very quiet.
I haven't thought about this for a long time...once there was a gent who would walk up to you and say "Good MORNING!" in your face at least fifty times a day, and never said anything else, at least in front of the other patients.
Then there are the schizophrenic religious maniacs--you have to watch out if you think they're addressing you! One woman sat next to me at breakfast muttering about how when Jesus returned he would kill all the women, and I said something stupid like "I beg your pardon?" She started screaming at me and the nurses had to come calm her down. This same woman hogged the one working VCR/TV watching "Jumping Jack Flash" with Whoopi Goldberg EVERY SINGLE NIGHT because she thought the movie was sending her special signals.
This was while "House" was in season, so a bunch of us who were "House" fans planned a take-over of the other television set, in the patients' lounge. We waited quietly, and then at 8 pm turned the channel and refused to change it!
You see? You can find "House" fans ANYWHERE!
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