Word: doored
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...hospitals. Gates were guarded to prevent escapes. An attending doctor or nurse had to go through what Dr. Herman B. Snow, director at St. Lawrence, calls "the ritual of the key" to enter a building. Then, jangling a fistful of hardware, he had to repeat the ritual at the door of every ward, at every staircase and elevator. That this security fetish is an illusion is shown by St. Lawrence's experience: it never had many escapes compared with most hospitals, but now has only half as many as previously...
...long, as Maxwell Jones puts it, we worked on the unconscious belief that 'the role of the patient is to be sick.' If he senses that we expect him to be suicidal, or try to get away, or to be violent, he will oblige us. The open door is a symbol of our new-found belief that we expect patients to get better. It is only a symbol and not a panacea. It must be used in combination with every other form of treatment we know...
Locked Out. Private hospitals are generally even more reluctant than the states to unlock doors, for fear of damaging incidents and lawsuits. Yet in San Francisco, at the opposite extreme in size from the giant state hospitals, a tiny (14-bed) unit at Stanford Hospital* applies the open-door system with outstanding success. "When we speak of patients as being 'locked up," says the psychiatrist in charge, Dr. Anthony J. Errichetti Jr., "what we really mean is 'locked out'-we are using lock and key to exclude them from society. When we used to put a patient...
...open door on the second-floor psychiatric ward of this old (1908) building does not mean freedom to walk in and out at will-any more than a patient in the adjoining medical or surgical wards can do so. But nobody is restricted because of mental illness alone: he must show definite signs of disturbance. When he does, the patients (at daily meetings) are usually the first to complain of it, vote to restrict him "behind the clock" (on the boundary wall between ward and corridor). It is by the patients' own decision that razor blades and pointed knives...
...While the open door is no cure-all," says Dr. Hunt, "it is the most important thing that has happened in treatment of the mentally ill in our lifetimes-not even excepting the ataractic drugs. With this, we can prove to the public as well as ourselves that incarcerated madness is really unnecessary...