Dear Young Therapist: Consider Your De Rigueur Requirements | The Post-Doctoral Tie Incident

image credit: Nicholas Ruiz. Bow Tie #10. Assembled November 2011.
 Acetaminophen pills, multiple adhesives, plastic knife. Forest Hills, Queens, New York.

The man interviewing me for a postdoctoral fellowship unwrapped the aluminum foil encasing his dry turkey sandwich and proceeded to stuff it into his mouth.

"Do you mind if I eat? Not that you really have a choice. I'm doing the interview and have the power in this situation."

He continued to masticate and fill his office up with the seasonally incongruent smell of Thanksgiving. This was going to be a fun filled interview.

"I'd like to ask you why you aren't wearing a tie today for your interview. Before you answer, I want you to know that as a psychologist I think everything has a meaning. I hope you have thought about the meaning of why you didn't wear a tie. If you haven't, then you aren't what we are looking for in a post-doctoral fellow. We'll end the interview here and I'll wish you good day."

I had a variety of inside-thoughts that I considered sharing. They included:

• Asshole. 
• Drop dead. 
• Who the hell do you think you are? I just had fucking brain surgery, a post-operative infection, and joint damage from an adverse reaction to the antibiotics that treated my infection. 
• Your turkey sandwich is making me want to throw up. 
• I'm scared because I can't find a job. 
• Do you know who the fuck I am? 
• Am I going to fail as a psychologist?

I took a middle course and smiled politely. I noticed the air flowing in and out of my nose. I watched as my agitated thoughts floated like clouds in the wind from the center of my awareness, to the edges of my mind, and then off into places where I can no longer notice them.

Titicut Follies: An Asylum for the Criminally Insane

"They was gonna take my balls out of me... I told the doctor before I come here that I didn't want my balls taken out of me, so they took the cords out instead."

Titicut Follies, a 1967 documentary film by Frederick Weismann, depicts the miserable and inhumane existence of inmates living in Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

 It's not easy to watch. It hasn't always been easy to find a copy of the movie to watch, either.

Shortly before screening at the 1967 New York Film Festival, Massachusetts sought a legal injunction banning the release of the documentary. These actions come at a time when there was significant negative press about the institution and the state's handling of people with mental illness.

Despite the filmmaker getting permission from all the people shown in the film as well as the superintendent of the facility (who appears to have used the documentary as a tool to try to get more funding), Massachusetts claimed that the permission was not valid. In the end, the film was screened at the New York Film Festival. However, a year later Massachusetts Superior Court judge Harry Klaus ordered the filmed removed from distribution because of claims that the film violated the patients' privacy and dignity.

Wiseman appealed the superior court decision to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. The court allowed for a limited distribution of the film allowing it to be shown only to doctors, lawyers, judges, health-care professionals, social workers, and students in these and similar fields. Further appeals to the US Supreme Court were refused.

For years hardly anyone saw this film. For years, the men at Bridgewater languished, often naked and in solitary confinement. This institution was one of the myriad examples of  people with mental illness being treated like unwanted animals.

Who were the men at this institution? How about the man who painted a horse? One inmate was sent to Bridgewater in 1938 because he painted a horse with stripes to make it look like a zebra. He was a fresh fruit vendor and in order to increase sales and get more attention, he though it might be a good idea paint his horse. He was arrested for public drunkenness at age 29 and died at Bridgewater from old age. He was supposed to serve two years.

Unbearable: Asylums in Serbia and Kosovo circa 2002

I was looking for some vintage images of advertisements for psychiatric hospitals this evening. Instead, I broke my heart. These haunting images were taken within the walls of a modern psychiatric facility in Serbia and Kosovo between 1999 and 2002 by the photographer George Georgiou. He writes:

For me, after the initial shock at the conditions and total lack of care, it became clear that the patients from all ethic backgrounds were able to display more community affection and care with each other, than the sad situation their "sane" countrymen were displaying to each other on the outside.

I have nothing to say other than this: we must do better.