Comments on: It’s Official: Kings County Hospital Is a “Hellhole.”

By: A survivor

A survivor — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 15:53:12 +0000

I am a rape survivor too. During more than one hospitalization I’ve felt very vulnerable. One time I woke up in my hospital bed in the middle of the night with a co-patient standing next to my bed looming over me. I screamed and ran to the nursing station; they just told him to go back to his room and told me to go back to sleep (but I was terrified, and couldn’t sleep the rest of the night). It set back my recovery. I’ve also been sexually harrassed and groped by men who were hypersexual from mania.

Not to blame it all on men: a female co-patient who was manic and disinhibited enjoyed kickboxing the rest of us. Staff would tell her to stay in her room but it wasn’t seclusion and she’d simply walk back out when the nurse left, only to kick someone else in the face. There were at least half a dozen victims while she was there (luckily not me, but I witnessed her doing it).

I don’t mean to give the impression that a lot of people with mental illness are violent because of course they aren’t, but a small number are, and the rest of the patients are seldom protected from them.

The problem is that when everyone with every sort of mental illness is lumped into one overcrowded, understaffed ward with no real security these kind of incidents will happen. Brooklyn isn’t unique at all. Definitely someone with PTSD or depression after sexual abuse shouldn’t be in the same ward as sexual offenders, but they are anyway. There’s nowhere else to go.

Worse is when someone is assaulted and rightly calls the police but the police won’t respond, because they or the courts won’t take seriously some crazy person in the psych ward. I’m glad to hear that man was arrested.

The hospital minimizing a rape as “inappropriate sexual contact” is pretty awful, too. I’ve seen and heard about actual inappropriate (or at least against the rules) conduct i.e. consenting co-patients having oral sex in a room. To equate that with sexual assault is offensive.

By: Joe

Joe — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 20:33:39 +0000

Where commissions, reports, initiatives, pledges, promises, statutes, task forces, and media attention have failed to insure humane care at our nation’s psychiatric facilities, I had believed that the threat of litigation or the actual filing of a complaint would lead to change. It now appears that institutions fear little knowing that they merely need represent change – “We are …”, “We will ….”, “We have …”

After the death of Esmin Green a spokesperson for the NYC Health & Hospital Corporation was quoted in the New York Times as saying, “We are committed to a transformation there that will address all aspects of the operation — including environmental, staffing, the culture, training, processes, security, etc. — to help prevent something like this from happening again.” Here there was going to be more then change; there was going to be transformation.

At Kings County transformation was more about words then deeds and given this persons continue to suffer needlessly and in some cases horribly.

NYCLU Compliant, filed May 2, 2007: http://www.nyclu.org/pdfs/KCHC_complaint.pdf

By: Alison Hymes

Alison Hymes — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 06:22:10 +0000

How can they allow this place to stay open while they investigate? If it were a medical unit they would close it, but since it’s “psych. patients” they keep it open. The rape is just one of so many instances that call out for the option of single gender psychiatric units and ER’s, including same gender staff but we seem to be going backwards on this in the U.S. instead of forwards. In the ’80’s there were many women’s psychiatric units, now hardly any are left.