This is for Lynne if she is still around..

Could you please e-mail me @ celticrose1976_28@hotmail.com

I'd like to discuss volunteer opportunities for those of us who have a mental illness( medication compliant and getting stabilized).

Thanks

Mags

Were lobotomies done more for schizophrenic or Manic Depressive patients?( I seem to recall for schizophrenics more, but it's been 10 years since my psych classes)?

Lynne and/or Big Ed, your input would be very helpful.

Damn I remember that "A" well from the movie "Session 9"

I work as a part time teacher's aide in a private learning center and I do this also; raiding dollar stores to give our kids a bit of holidays( due to the fact that many of the kids are on a specialized diet due to Autisim and ADHD we are not allowed to give out food/candy)
(many of the kids I work with are ADHD, autistic, childhood bipolar and other DDs)

That looks like a slightly less fancy version of the caf @ my old community college!!

Lynne
This is SO true... the grandmother of a friend of mine in NYC was buried in an unmarked grave( and this was the 1980's!!) . Her family was poor, so they just purchased space in someone else's plot.
On a personal note, my own great great grandmother was buried in a "potter's field" somewhere in NY state in 1909. My grandmother's family was dreadfully dirt-poor( her father was an abusive alcoholic who squandered his salary on the "creature') and when my g-grandmother died of typhoid , there was no money to bury her. Though my grandmother was only 9 @ the time, she remembers being taken to the funeral in a "surrey with the fringe on top" but the funeral itself taking place in a bleak field sans headstones or markers.
Unfortunately, the location of my g-grandma's grave has never been found.
In later years, my grandfather, who worked for the NY court system and had access to tons of records, tried in vain to find the location through burial records for the year 1909.
Unfortunately my grandmother herself died in 1995, before the largest advent of the internet, but I intend to keep searching for her mam's grave

On an aside Lynne, THANK you for what you do, from someone who suffers from a mental illness...

Thank you Motts/.. this pic has indeed moved me to tears.. Thank you for bringing out the loneliness, yet humanity,
I am bipolar, as are 3 other close family members. I can only think that in an earlier age, when the stigma and shame were so great, that I or my family members could have ended up in one of these facilities for life, abandoned in life and death

To those on the board who feel it necessary to mock and dehumanize the mentally ill and developmentally disabled, you have no idea what might lurk in your own family trees and circles of friends.


M
"a looney" finding her way back into the world of sanity

For about 2 years, I was an outpatient @ a Behavorial Health clinic @ a county hospital/medical center.( I also had a close friend who worked as a CNA @ the same hospital for a year) They serve clients psychatric, developmental and physical disabilities. One of the long term patients i used to see on my weekly appointments used a similar sort of wheelchair/walker combo, only in pink( I THINK he might have had either Downs syndrome or CP)

As someone who suffers from bipolar disorder( though only recently diagnosed) I can truly empathize with the pain and feelings of the long forgotten patient or patients who left these scratches.
I am truly thankful to be living in an age where those with mental illnesses and developmental disabilities are not hospitialized long term( except in extreme cases) but, through therapy and drugs, are able to live in the community and achieve.


Truly haunting m

Motts,
I love the play of light and shadow here.
Back in the summer of 06, my best friend and I visited this place. My friend lived in upper Passic county only about a half hr's drive from this place( however he was familiar with the area, his mother having grown up in Haverstraw).
We mostly walked around the grounds and took pics like this one, of the facades of the buildings.( this was an impromptu exploration trip and neither of us were sufficiently clothed for UE). We DID enter a basement in one of the buildings, which house a variety of old beds, chairs ect.
Unfortunately,we didn;t make it back that summer or last.