Christmas in a Psychiatric Hospital
Think of your joy but don’t forget the forgotten
As the end of the year is now in sight and several meaningful holidays are nearing, our thoughts may turn to presents, celebrations, and happy reunions with family and friends. In prior years, if we were working in offices, there might be that highly memorable company Christmas party that, too often, turned into something we wanted to forget.
But for me, I have one outstanding memory that I shall never forget. No, it’s not of a major loss or a historical event like the mythic Christmas truce during one of our too-many world wars. It’s a memory of sadness and staff who were too poorly trained to know what they were doing.
When I was a psychology intern, patients who had become long-term residents of state psychiatric hospitals could expect a few things at Christmas, if not family coming to visit. An employee on one of the wards was tasked with ordering gifts for them from a man who had managed to receive the contract.
In years gone by, probably before many of us were born, they would have been the guys selling from the trunk of their cars or small vans that wended through the hinterlands in the US to sell inexpensive gifts of clothing for scattered families living in a rural area. It was an era before malls or shopping centers…
