Word: warded
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Just inside the entrance to ward E-3 a patient in her early thirties sits on the floor most of the day with her face buried in her hands, rocking back and forth and moaning; another woman looks blankly into space and pats her on the shoulder. In the center of the room, women in shabby dresses walk up and down, waving their arms. One of them stands and shifts her weight slowly from foot to foot. Other women just sit quietly and stare at the walls...
...twelve PBH volunteers who enter the ward each Tuesday afternoon face the task of communicating with these people, who have been left to spend the rest of their lives in the chronic section of the Metropolitan State Hospital. Only a few of the fifty patients in ward E-3 have much chance of leaving, but the volunteers, if they are successful, can move them a long way toward recovery. At the very least, they can bring friendship and social contact to patients who may have been in the ward for 20 or 30 years...
...usually manic-depressive, and get excited only occasionally. I met one 20 year old girl with a quiet sense of humor, who offered me a limp hand in greeting. She seemed depressed. I was surprised when one of the volunteers told me that on his last visit to the ward she had been beating her head against the floor...
...Some of the patients remain hunched over in their chairs or lying on the floor and will not even look up when they are spoken to. Confronted with this, even the most determined volunteers become discouraged. But if individual approaches fail, group activities--singing, playing checkers, strolling outside the ward--can sometimes draw a patient out of his shell and reaccustom him to communicating, at first without words, and later verbally...
Peter A. Pitzele '63, Adult Unit Head at PBH, recalls a catatonic patient in one of the men's wards who lay under a chair all day, wrapped around one of its legs "like a puppy." He had not spoken for four years, and would look up only when he had to take medication. But at a Christmas party in the ward the volunteers induced him to make a greeting card, and as he wrote "Merry Christmas" on it he said, "I can't write too well. I can't write too well." Once the barrier had been cracked even...