The Ancora and the Ecstasy
Sep 26 2008 | Comments 3
Yet … more … on … Ancora:
Drug tests OK’d for psychiatric hospital workers
liz | 12:11 PM | Uncategorized
The Trouble with Spikol | Make Major Moves | PW Style | Cup o'Joel
Yet … more … on … Ancora:
Drug tests OK’d for psychiatric hospital workers
liz | 12:11 PM | Uncategorized
Liz Spikol was born in Philadelphia sometime in the 20th century. She started writing about her experience as a person with mental illness in 1999, while employed at Philadelphia Weekly as the paper’s managing editor. Aside from serving as that paper’s web editor, music editor, staff writer, senior editor, executive editor and a host of other random roles that she couldn’t make up her mind about, she has also worked as a Spanish teacher, as a Certified Peer Specialist during Philly’s system-wide transformation and as a communications specialist for a prison reform organization. Currently, she works at the Mental Health Association of Southeastern Pennsylvania and writes book reviews for PW. This blog — named one of the Top 10 Bipolar Blogs of 2007 and 2008 by PsychCentral — is about medications, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, OCD, PTSD, SAD (and many other acronyms), mad pride, Big Pharma, celebrities, hospitals, stigma and the recovery movement. And other stuff.
Too bad New Jersey’s legislators can’t enact the very reform most needed at Ancora ….. Improving the quality of care and the quality of the caring. There would have been little need for reform if they had established a mechanism to reasonably insure compliance with the statute governing care at New Jersey’s state psychiatric hospitals, N.J.S.A. 30:4-27.1(c): It is the policy of this State that persons in the public mental health system receive inpatient treatment and rehabilitation services in accordance with the highest professional standards and which will enable those hospitalized persons to return to their community as soon as it is clinically appropriate.
Honestly, they need to make a trailer about this monster of a hospital.
Imagine, if you will, going to the movies and hearing the Movies Voice-Over Guy start with:
“Ancora….If you’re not sick when you go there….You will be….You have no choice….You can’t escape….It’s you against them….No end in sight….The only hope is death….Or….”
Scenes of five-pointing, drooling patients, staff laughing it up, padded rooms, hero/heroine looking through caged window. The music of Kronus Quartet building.
The last time I was on a lock-down ward, it was at Belmont. They were short of pillows and bedding. Only one nurse applied the ointment the ER had sent with me, to my three inch long third-degree burn. Oh, and I scored a scalpel’s blade from another patient.
I’d been there three months. So, it made a lot of sense that they released me three days after I’d had my wrists newly sewn up. On 600mg of Thorazine a day, with other meds.
When I was on another three-month stay at Wright-5, one of my room mates told me how she “hooked up” with techs at Friends. I was in there the first three times I was hospitalized. The only thing that happened to me there was the loss of memories.
They had me so doped up that I agreed to ECT, despite pleas from my boyfriend and several old friends. After more than twenty shocks, I still sliced myself. But I couldn’t remember why I felt so shitty. I couldn’t remember anything.
To me Ancora and Napa State are synonymous.
California and New Jersey are no different as far as I am concerned…
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