OSH

I hear so much negativity about what happens at Oregon State Hospital. It makes it sound like an old school insane asylum where people are locked away in chains. So often news reports take the facts without background information and those of us who are ethically required to secrecy are stuck knowing the truth. I wish people would realize how many positive things the State of Oregon has in place for those with mental illness. I'm too tired to even think this through, BUT...there's always room for improvement in mental health treatment, and it has come SO far, but there are so many barriers. It seems that most are legal and involve judicial systems that have no knowledge of the basics of mental health care. I just wish people would recognize the good care that OSH does provide its patients.

‘Cuckoo’s Nest’ hospital to be torn down
125-year-old Oregon State Hospital will be replaced with a new complex


SALEM, Ore. - So long, Cuckoo’s Nest.

Oregon State Hospital, the mental institution where the 1975 movie “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” was filmed, is making way for a new complex. Most of the dilapidated, 125-year-old main building will be torn down and replaced starting this fall.

Although mean Nurse Ratched was pure fiction, the Oregon State Hospital has struggled with some very real troubles over the years, including overcrowding, crumbling floors and ceilings, outbreaks of scabies and stomach flu, sexual abuse of children by staff members, and patient-on-patient assaults.

‘The room of lost souls’
Politicians had been talking for years about the need to replace the hospital, but didn’t get serious about it until a group of legislators made a grim discovery during a 2004 tour: the cremated remains of 3,600 mental patients in corroding copper canisters in a storage room. The lawmakers were stunned.

“Nobody said anything to anybody,” said Oregon Senate President Peter Courtney, who dubbed the chamber “the room of lost souls.”

The remains belonged to patients who died at the hospital from the late 1880s to the mid-1970s, when mental illness was considered so shameful that many patients were all but abandoned by their families in institutions.

“It just created such an emotional momentum” for replacing the hospital, said Courtney, who led the effort to build a new institution.

Although “Cuckoo’s Nest” was filmed here, neither the movie nor the 1962 Ken Kesey novel on which it was based makes any specific references to Oregon State Hospital. Kesey drew on his experiences working at a veterans hospital in Palo Alto, Calif., and set his satirical story at an unnamed institution in Oregon.

Behind the scenes
Actor Michael Douglas, co-producer of the movie, scouted various West Coast locations and chose the Oregon institution because then-Superintendent Dean Brooks agreed to give the moviemakers unfettered access.

“They wanted to make it on location with real patients,” said Brooks, now 91, who was given a speaking part as a weak-willed doctor who acquiesces to Nurse Ratched. Brooks said 89 patients were hired as extras.

Douglas, Jack Nicholson (who played the rebellious Randle Patrick McMurphy) and Louise Fletcher (Nurse Ratched) were regulars at the hospital during shooting.

Milos Forman, the director, lived for six weeks at the institution and had his actors study real patients, according to a 1975 account in Rolling Stone magazine. Nicholson became depressed because of what he saw, including electroshock being administered to a patient.

State leaders decided in 2006 to build a new, $300 million, 620-bed hospital at the site of the oldest and most dilapidated part of the complex, the J Building, a yellow-painted brick structure with brown trim, a towering cupola, and iron gratings on the windows.

The front section of the building, including the cupola, will be preserved as a museum on the history of mental health care.

A ghostly sight
Other parts of the building were abandoned decades ago and are now a ghostly sight. The paint has been scoured off the bricks by the weather and the passage of time, and the wings are cluttered with old equipment, fallen plaster and piles of pigeon droppings. The third floor is so rotted it is not safe to walk on. The building is also contaminated with lead paint and asbestos.

Construction of the new hospital is set to begin next spring and should be completed by the fall of 2011.

It is not just a bricks-and-mortar exercise Oregon is undertaking to improve care for the mentally ill. State leaders have pledged beefed-up staffing levels, new treatment programs and better living conditions.

Among the 590 current patients is 44-year-old Mike Wyffels, who has been at the hospital for five years with bipolar disorder. Wyffels said he welcomes the state’s plan to give most patients their own rooms in the new hospital. In some cases, he said, as many as seven patients share a room.

“When you’ve got a bunch of people in one tiny room, it’s chaos. I can’t even study in my room because I don’t have the privacy to do it,” he said in a conference room while other patients milled around outside in the hall, talking or listening to music.

In May, Portland resident Debbie Osborne came to the hospital to collect the canister containing the remains of her great aunt Clara Johnson, who died of pneumonia 60 years ago. Osborne plans to give the ashes a proper burial this summer.

“It’s really sad that we still have a stigma” about mental illness, Osborne said. “But it’s changing; it’s a lot better.”

Courtney wants the museum to include a display of ashes not yet claimed by relatives. “You’ve got to remember your past to make the future better,” he said.

© 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Reversing the "Brain Drain"

I like stories like this one from MSNBC...

Kenya village gets clinic from brothers it helped
Residents sold chickens and cattle to send siblings to college in the U.S.A.
Christopher Williams / AP


Milton Ochieng' visits the clinic he and his brother Fred founded in their home village of Lwala, Kenya. The Erastus Ochieng' Lwala Community Memorial Health Center was named after their father, who died of AIDS.


NASHVILLE, Tenn. — When residents of a tiny Kenyan village sold their chickens and cattle to buy Milton Ochieng's $900 plane ticket to Dartmouth College, they told him they wanted something in return.

Eight years later, he's a Vanderbilt University Medical School graduate preparing for his residency. In his home village of Lwala, a clinic he and younger brother Fred established serves about 100 patients a day.

A documentary about their struggles to raise $150,000 to build the clinic — while attending school full-time and coping with their parents' deaths — will soon be screened at universities across the country.

"It's not common to have a couple of village boys come to the U.S. and advocate for a clinic to be built in their country," said Barak Bruerd, program director of Blood:Water Mission, a Nashville-based nonprofit that has contributed to the clinic. "The fact that they were able to bring so much support to their community is amazing."

Wheelbarrow transportation
Before the clinic, Ochieng' says, sick villagers often had to be carried for miles just to get to a paved road.

As a child, he remembers seeing a friend's mother taken away in a wheelbarrow during a difficult labor. Neighbors pushed her for 45 minutes before she died.

The image stuck with him. His father, high school chemistry teacher Erastus Ochieng', emphasized the need for health care closer to the community. It was his dream to see a clinic in Lwala, a village of about 1,500 people in southwestern Kenya.

It wasn't until a college service trip to Nicaragua, where students worked alongside villagers to build such a facility, that Ochieng' started to think his father's dream could become reality.

The elder Ochieng' would not live to see the project completed. He died in 2005 of AIDS, the same disease that killed Ochieng's mother the year before.

Medical school in Tennessee
For several years, Ochieng' made plans. Fred followed him to Dartmouth and then on to medical school at Vanderbilt. By 2005, Ochieng' was ready to build, except he had no money. So he put Fred in charge of fundraising.

That weekend, Fred Ochieng' raised $9,000 at a conference for a Christian ministry group. But it took another two years to raise the $150,000 they needed.

They were finally able to open the clinic in April 2007, helped by a $45,000 donation from Blood:Water Mission, which was founded by Christian rockers Jars of Clay to reduce the impact of HIV and AIDS in Africa.

In its first year, the clinic saw 20,000 patients at a cost of about $100,000.

"It's important for people to get a sense of how far the U.S. dollar can go," Ochieng' says, noting that one woman had emergency surgery for an ectopic pregnancy at a cost of only $250. A similar procedure could cost at least $10,000 in the U.S.

Growing number of patients
The volume of patients is growing, Ochieng' says, because of the high standard of care the clinic provides, even without running water or a consistent electrical supply.

Many relatives of Lwala residents come from other communities. The clinic, which serves about 4,000 residents of Lwala and the area surrounding it, turns no one away and treats about 85 percent of its patients for free.

The clinic now benefits from a U.S.-based nonprofit, the Lwala Community Alliance, but Ochieng' says it struggles to raise operating funds, even as staffers plan to expand with a maternity ward and HIV/AIDS wing.

Babies are currently delivered in the kitchen.

"It's not ideal," Ochieng' says.


The sun sets on the Erastus Ochieng' Lwala Community Memorial Health Center in Kenya.


The clinic is also getting help from former television reporter Barry Simmons, who quit his job after interviewing the Ochieng' brothers to work full time on a documentary about their struggles to build the clinic. "Sons of Lwala" has so far raised about $230,000.

"It was always the plan to give them a platform to raise money and spread their story," Simmons said.

Residency plans
Ochieng' spent April in Lwala, but the clinic also employs two clinical officers — the equivalent of a physician's assistant in the U.S. — and three nurses. Ochieng' hopes to be able to shuttle between Kenya and the U.S., where he will do his residency at Washington University in St. Louis.

"There's such a sense of love and people feeling they've gained so much from the health center," he says. "It keeps me going. ... It makes you realize how great it is to be a doctor, how great it is to be serving humanity."

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Defenestration

Defenestration - The act of throwing something or someone out a window (American Heritage Dictionary).

I had never heard this word before I began reading guidebooks for the Czech Republic, but apparently hurling two Catholics out a castle window into a moat was such a prominent event in Czech history that, according to some sources, it required a whole new word. Even better, it appeared to become the modus operandi for those who wanted to visibly demonstrate their frustration at the status quo, even leading to the 30 years war.

In six days my cousin and I are leaving for Prague. At this point we have no plans for defenestrating, but if you want to follow along to find out for sure, the link to our blog is on the side bar ----------------------->>>

Dear future employer....I'm great at assessment, group and individual therapy and some of my clients think I'm God...

Today I accepted a position for postdoc at the University of Rochester! This means 1. future employment...2.Once again I get to pack everything I own and move...3.I get to work with an entirely new population and...4.I'm one step closer to being a licensed psychologist!

The downside is that I will no longer get to listen to Chopin with Anastasia Romanov, discuss astrological compatibility with Jesus Christ's girlfriend (He's a scorpio by the way...), and be given glimpses into Escher-quality pseudo-realities that boggle my mind.

Here's my future employer.
University of Rochester