Word: ward
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...volunteer, the ward program is as much an educational experience as it is a humanitarian effort, and he will learn more if he plans his own activities in the ward and finds his own best method of communicating with patients, without too much professional advice. Volunteers have occasional group discussions with psychologists and members of the hospital staff, but they are not junior theraputists, and in most cases do not even look at patients' illness records. They concentrate on bringing fresh ideas to patients who are accustomed to an impersonal machine that merely gives them pills and locks them...
This is not to imply that patients have exalted notions of the volunteer. As Pitzele has observed, "they may regard the students as a source of food and cigarettes, as entertainers, as a way of getting off the ward for a while, or as employees extraordinary of the hospital and therefore as people who are potentially dangerous and should be impressed." Hours of group activities, therefore, often produce only casual friendships, and may seem little more than a good way for patients to kill time...
...first half hour in ward E-3 was spent playing bingo with three or four elderly patients. One of them mechanically placed bits of paper on her card, without saying a word or responding to suggestions that she was putting them on the wrong numbers. The other women were talkative enough, but the conversation never went beyond calling out numbers, and occasionally commenting who was winning. No one enjoyed the game--least of all the patients...
...these initial obstacles are overcome, the volunteer usually finds one good topic for conversation--memories; eventually he will probably ask the patient about her family and her past experiences, and some patients have much to say in return. But there is a problem--almost all the women in ward E-3 are chronic schizophrenics, and their memories may have little connection with reality. Over long years of hospitalization, they have discarded experiences which they cannot face, and their minds have substituted huge barriers of fantasy...
...talked for half an hour with one of the most uncurable psychotics in the ward, a friendly old woman with a very intelligent face who spoke like a senile politician, using clear but sloppily elegant sentences. She informed me that she knew the entire Kennedy family intimately, and had worked for 23 years on the Massachusetts State Democratic Committee with both John Kennedy and his father, looking up the records of men who wanted to run for office. Later, she said, she had been Director of the Occupational Therapy department at the "Met," and was in charge of buying materials...