Honestly, I am a psychiatric nurse, and I had the same reaction you did. Mine is a locked facility, some criminal elements, but mostly schizophrenic/psychotic type cases. The ONLY things I saw that I had a problem with was the lack of dignity the patients had - where I work that is of utmost importance. I mean, give them some shorts, at least! The tube feeding, from a medical standpoint, was ridiculous - I doubt that guy was a nurse or a doctor. (BUTTER???? to LUBE the tube??? - I nearly fell outta my chair...) That one guard taunting the guy about his room was uncalled for, but he was the minority, and I agree with you he probably wasn't there long. Psychiatry is such a hit and miss science/art - if this pill doesn't work, let's try this one...And we must consider that it is one of the newest fields in medicine, and the least understood, as you said. But overall, I have seen worse, in nursing homes, no less, and in the 21st century. I liked the in your face aspect of it, and no narration made the viewer judge for themselves what they saw, instead of being told what the filmmaker interprets.
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chuck-526
11 years ago
As someone from the other side of the aisle (a former mental patient), I had a similar reaction.
I know from other reading and viewing there were some really serious abuses going on at Bridgewater State at that time.
But we don't see them (at least we don't understand them) from this film. What we do see looks sensational, but is in fact mostly typical mental treatment with solid reasons.
For example keeping the patients naked looks very demeaning and is sensational. But in fact patients were naked largely because they were incontinent, and they didn't wear paper suits (the usual solution) only because the guards protested that cleanup was easier without the paper suits. What stood out to me were i) the high level of staff smoking on the job, ii) all the thick accents, and iii) the crazy psychiatric theories about "logic flaws". But all three of those things are about 1966 vs. 2013, not about Bridgewater State.
I found the real key point of the film to be that nobody was seriously trying to "treat" these people - making their warehousing "comfortable" was the highest the staff aspired to. That's fundamentally awful, but not immediately shocking (and it's arguably still true to a large extent).
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