My OSH Experience

[ChibiSnorlax]

When admitted to OSH, you are handcuffed as you are led up a narrow, dingy, cold concrete stairway and walked into a long, narrow, crowded locked ward. You are told to get in the shower, told to strip naked, and the shower lasts as long as the staff member wants it to, usually about 10 minutes in scalding water and a room reeking of bleach. Oftentimes, your eyes or face will swell from the bleach fumes.

You are then ordered to put on “state clothes”, which are the cheapest sweatpants, underwear, sweatshirt or T-shirt and socks available, and given cheap foam-rubber thongs, also known as “shower shoes”, even though certain members of staff will object to it. After that comes an hour of being questioned about everything possible by a nurse with the worst bedside manner imaginable, and you are forced to eat a tasteless meal formulated to be cheap and cause constipation, with up to two tiny glasses of watery juice and one mandatory carton of skim milk.

Then comes sitting on cold grey vinyl couches for hours, being perused by certain other patients as “fresh meat” or a future shower rape victim, and watching educational television at a very low volume. You are scrutinized by staff for every little thing, your body language, voice volume and inflection, any signs of anxiety and any signs of rebellion, really anything and everything conceivable are logged in a blue vinyl three-ring binder whose contents will never be destroyed or deleted. The state owns you. You have no freedom, no civil rights, no control over anything including yourself.

You are then told to eat dinner, which will almost universally be less appetizing than lunch, the foodservice department can and will mess up things as seemingly foolproof as spaghetti, fettuccine Alfredo and Reuben sandwiches, let alone more complicated dishes, and you have to eat whether you want to or not. One often cheats by requesting stale breakfast cereal or moving their “food” around on their plate, or by eating a large meal in visitation if they have approved visitors and are on a ward that allows visitation.

Then comes even more of the same as what happens before dinner, followed by evening medication time. A rent-a-cop contracted by the state, with the looks and demeanor of the Illinois state trooper who pulled over Dan Aykroyd’s Dodge Monaco before the mall car chase in The Blues Brothers, will select patients for medication, seemingly on a random basis, but as time passes you will notice that light-skinned, English-speaking people with Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian surnames are picked first. Certain ethnic and religious minorities and people who do not speak English regardless of race or creed, are picked last, this in flagrant violation of state and federal law!

Then still more perusal, scrutiny and educational TV at such a low volume that it is not worth paying attention to, until 9pm, when you are directed to a bedroom designed for 2 to 4 people but holding 4 to 8 people and given a bundle containing one thin rubberized cotton pillow, one bottom sheet, one top sheet and one very thin blanket, all smelling of formaldehyde, and if you are lucky you will not get a bed-wetter, a Nazi or Ku Klux Klan sympathizer, a gang sympathizer, a child killer, a property thief, an adult with the mind of a child and libido of a pornography actor or a creepy sexual deviant for a roommate. Usually you will get at least one of the above. Then you will try your hardest to go to sleep amid mumbling, heavy breathing, snoring and staff members uncovering your face if you like to sleep completely covered, logging any kind of sleep disturbance, or waking a whole room of people just to untangle a headphone wire from a patient’s head when there was no reason to wake up the whole room.


Chapter 2: Life Goes On

Morning comes about 10 hours later. And what do you see in the doorway flashing the eye-searing fluorescent lights and calling out “It’s time to wake up! Rise and shine!” over and over loudly? Another rent-a-cop, this one just as racist and nasty as the ones in the evenings but typically somewhat less harsh on the eyes. You are directed toward a lousy breakfast with more watery juice and more mandatory milk, then the medication routine with a nurse whose bedside manner is up there with Nurse Ratched of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, being called by reverse alphabetical order, in which case everyone with half a brain, about 3 people on a ward of 40 patients, would wish their surname started with an X, a Y or a Z. You have to stick your tongue up and out and gag on your pills, making yourself look as silly as possible for Nurse Ratched and showing no regards for gag reflex or aspiration risk, and you are always denied your medication if you don’t do it- spit out your pills or syrup, and go without your dosage while feeling bad and being a possible risk to yourself and others.

Then after medications are handed out from Z to A with no regard for the severity of a patient’s illnesses or the possible consequences of the tongue stunt, you are herded into the “dayroom”, home of the grey vinyl couches and inaudible educational TV, for a “ward meeting”. Nurse Ratched runs the show, and all kinds of staff drama, union drama, administration drama, contractor drama and random irrelevant chatter are hashed out for up to an hour while little to no regard for the patients is paid, some of it violating state and federal privacy laws. On some occasions you will find that your roommate got so many years for this and others saying that so and so is getting dropped a privilege level for something that everyone knows they didn’t do.

After ward meeting, some of you will go to school, which is a converted downstairs office block run by teachers with the intelligence of moldy cottage cheese and matchbook degrees, some of you to work, which would be a yard maintenance crew run by someone more at home driving hopelessly addicted slaves on a coca plantation than administering a work group for mental patients for some, a sheltered workshop for some, and for others a mill that produced wooden shipping crates and had safety regulations dating back to a hundred years ago. In all cases you are paid less than minimum wage under a law that basically serves state and federal institutions with the ability to pay able-bodied people barely enough for a Coke and a bag of cookies a day for a week, or a bar of cheap soap and a trial-size tube of toothpaste a month in the grossly overpriced canteen, but not both. State employees were running a Third World enclave dictatorship in a wealthy state and one of the world’s most well-to-do countries.

And after work or school came the routine of groups- anger management, sex offender treatment, “relapse prevention”, a drug and alcohol group based off of evangelical Christianity, legal skills for those who were committed because they were supposedly found “unfit for trial” but were really pushed off of their home county’s dockets, and medication management, all run by nurses’ aides with no qualifications to teach the groups in question. The smartest of patients would just wise up, move to a different state or country once their adjudication was up and avoid what got them committed in the first place, but most would be run through the double revolving doors of the state psychiatric care and criminal justice systems again and again until they were “civilly committed”, which is usually for life and always with the state cutting off contact with friends and family. After groups came the same old dinner and completely illegal rent-a-cop medication routines and the same routines with TV and bedtime. This could persist anywhere from the 6 month maximum sentence for a mid-grade misdemeanor to decades in the case of major felonies or a life sentence. Every weekend involved a linen change when you got more formaldehyde-scented bedding when you just wore the smell off of everything and you finally softened up your pillow, extended visitation and fun things like arts and crafts or bingo on Saturdays and little else beyond church (Protestant, Catholic and Mormon services only, much to the detrimental effects on all other religions and non-religions), cleaning the ward for the convenience of staff, another ward meeting and a G- or PG-rated movie on Sundays. Once again you are rehashing the same old routines again and again.

Chapter 4: Getting out of this hellhole? Good luck.

There comes a time in the sentence of any patient committed to this facility when they are put before one of three very biased review boards, one each for general criminally committed clients, sex offenders and civilly committed patients, and over half of the time they are denied placement into a locked group home run as cruelly or worse than the state hospital or put into “secure treatment facilities”, which are what amounts to warehousing the mentally ill in a razor wire-surrounded nursing home for the benefit of business and the detriment of everyone else. The review panels seemed to base their decisions on the notes taken by staff, which are often based on unfair judgments, racism, work or school performance, favoritism or dislike. The process can drag on for years, but some lucky people, often those with sentences for drug offenses or property crimes, or the wise guys who gamed the system, got out the first or second time. Adjudication after release involved restrictions that were unnecessarily harsh with no relation to what they were sentenced for, the majority of former patients who did not break their terms of release pulled up their stakes for greener pastures shortly after their sentence ended. Some of you lived the lives of itinerant gypsies, joined carnivals or the circus, went to college, or simply lived a relatively normal life in a more tolerant place.

Chapter 5: Rules

Rules in this facility were harsh: the music lover, audiobook fan (or anyone else) only allowed 12 CDs and no cassettes or records. The bookworm or artist only allowed 1 cubic foot of paper products, same for everyone else. A strictly limited amount of personal clothing with no advertisement, military affiliation or gang affiliation, this included bans on band shirts, camouflage, solid black, red or blue, and leather, not to mention bans on specific brands that included Harley-Davidson, Chevrolet, Ford, Dodge, Ferrari, Avirex, Volcom, DC Shoe, Etnies and Zumiez. No personal linens. Absolutely no metal or glass items. Only combination locks allowed and mandated on all places where items of value or legal papers were stored- if you are bad with numbers, tough luck. No food or drinks allowed on the ward. Staff will harshly rebuke you for any kind of profanity, any use of the names of God or Christ in vain, any deviation from the Queen’s English, or criticizing the system. You could be moved to super-maximum security for critiquing the system, civil disobedience, communicating with groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Legion, advocacy centers, Congress, the president, or even the Veterans’ Administration, NAACP and Anti-Defamation League, and in a stay of 11 months one person saw 20 people moved to “supermax” or put on a “constant”, which is being observed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for doing all of the above. If you had a stay in supermax or a constant before, you are far more likely to get one again, and you are very likely to get a civil commitment recommendation. You are forced to see a doctor who could have been an understudy of Josef Mengele based on the often baseless recommendations of staff who cannot tell the common cold from tuberculosis or a spider bite from the beginning of gas gangrene. And you were forced to use harsh soaps like surplus or rejected military lye bars whether or not you were allergic.

Redacted, put into third person and anonymized since it was on Facebook, where everyone who worked on Ward 50E during my time there subscribed to me only to get blocked, and on deviantART, where one of the 50E staff spied on my account there.

Chris Garza
Eugene, OR
Ward 50E/Quest Adult School/93 Bench 2007-08
PSRB 2008-2010
Supported Integration Services of Oregon/ODHS jurisdiction 2008-???