Lab Reports

Yahoo! More pix! Grabbing cup of coffee to sip while I enjoy these. Thanks for posting more! :-)

Great find!

Thanks Motts, I love these empty places which no one has seemed to have touched since closure!!!

Your killing me Mr Motts! I need to know what they say on them!

just found yuor site and gotta say the stuff is awsome. I dig what you do w/ the color in these. The composition reminds me a bit of some shots from The X-files, when the series was still good. Rawk on.

hey motts, do you know which camera you shot this one with?

It's so hard to fathom that these have been sitting here for over 35 years...Its like they're frozen in time...

nothing i say

Motts, have you ever found files? I mean, things that describe the patients?
Things like, er...

"Patient H. Philips has been exceptionally violent today. Dr. Moores applied sedative. Put into isolation. Release date yet to be planned."

I actually write them and they aren't that interesting most of the time. And after the 500th one they are DEFINITELY not that interesting. And if they are, I always hope to God no one ever gets to read them for the sake of the person I have written up. To me, the idea of someone you don't know having access to documentation about the lowest point of your life is extremely regrettable and depressing.

This seems like it would a great place to go looking through the files- they seem so intact. I would love to look around in those and see what sort of patients were there.

I can answer that for you. They are files of people who were undergoing some pretty rough times who would be have been humiliated if they ever thought that anyone would be able to access this paperwork.

I wish I could convey the respect I feel for Motts when he leaves these intimate details out of the public realm. Even though much of this is truly boring in its day to day detail, it still names people by name and at times gets down to the nitty gritty.

Cheers and thanks for protecting these folks, my friend!

I am thinking there some places on the web where people who are undergoing psychiatric treatment write blogs and don't mind sharing them with others. As well, I am sure there are books that people have written about the time they spent in a mental health facility. Of course, once you know that someone else is going to read whatever you write, whether you are the patient or the staff, you tend to censor yourself. And if anyone is going to publish you for the "masses," they want things to be pretty exciting.

I will look and see if there are any resources or references for folks who have an interest in this.

I've seen some websites that showed pics of records up close but they were kind enough to black out the patient's name. I also read a couple blogs of those with severe psychiatric illnesses and sometimes they are interested and many times they are redundant as if they're brains are stuck.

something like this I would love to read through, just to see the comments on them.

Unless you are a doctor with an obsessive interest in the composition of the blood and urine of a person who may have died 10, or more, years ago, I doubt you are going to get much exciting insight into the patients from lab reports. Blood chemistry isn't very thrilling. I don't even bother to read my own.

If these papers or reports are of no interest, then why hold on to them? It still baffles me how a place can close up and everyone just walks away and everything; mostly everything; in some cases, just gets left behind. No wonder vandels get their hands on things. This stuff shouldn't be laying around in the first place.

I wanna read about the blood chem!
Lynne and Motts, Kudos for your ethics though regarding the privacy of those lost souls.
They suffered enough in real life without being made a spectacle again!
Seriously though, someone should file those.
It's such a shame that all these relics are just rotting away!

Consider the patients today, what do they do with ALL the records of everyone? Both my parents are dead; surely they don't have any records from their doctors, hospitalizations, etc. I mean, how long do they hold on to those things? The 70's weren't THAT long ago; couldn't there be some relatives that are still surviving?

hey motts do you ever read any of the things you find around places like this???

just had to let you know. Great to find a place where i can relate to so many others. love this stuff. motts. you have truly made me a happy man.

does hippa know about this? :)

I work at a hospital, not in the medical records dept., but lately everything has gone paperless. All old files have been put on chips. Not sure just how long they keep them.

SR with capital letters, You are the best.
take care and keep up the good work, Later.

breaking HIPPA

I am thoroughly enjoying your photos. I really like the gallery design too. Baroque without being too intrusive.

Thanks for sharing!

If anyone is still interested in patient file related things, Geoffrey Reaume has written a book by the name of Remembrance of Patients Past, which uses case files from 1880-1920 or so to give a more humanized history of the Toronto State Hospital (with pseudonyms to protect peoples' identity). Its a bit hard to get a hold of, but a library could probably get a copy through interlibrary lone.

The other thing with actual case files (and I've done some research with 19th century ones) is that by and large they tend to be written by people who were doing so as part of their job, and in order to maintain concise records for future treatment. Consequently, even the most interesting things in them tend to be conveyed in a somewhat sparse style (sentence fragments, brief notes, etc) which often comes across as incredibly detached. That said, some of it *is* quite interesting (though nothing nearly as exciting as the "files" that show up in, say, Session 9), but there's also a marked difference between reading the files of people who have been dead over a century (and who may well have left no other record) and those of people who may even still be with us.

All that said, I can also read enough of the cards in this photo to see that there's nothing especially interesting written down on them.

1971 rough year

Depends where you go or work, nature of the place, whose file you read under what circumstances.Some doc accounts will make you rub your eyes, shake your head and say 'Wha Tha!!" or "Oh Man!!!"

I've been fired a couple of times for copying things I shouldn't have.
But I will say this: just leaving shit behind open like this after the fact is a disgrace.
Its' like the time this video rental place behind where I was living went out of business, and ,as I would say, it was the WAY they went out.They were in there every night with the lights on as if they were open but they were not.After that by a few weeks they threw everything out and just let the people's file cards blow all over the street for everyone to see. Disgrace.
In office today they scan info onto disc,but the docs are shipped to a place that specializes in holding on to them for 7 years.

Disgraceful and disrespectful to leave patient records lying about.....You took a great picture, however!

I work with Medical records...Legally, Drs etc are to keep patient records for 7 years. If they are not going to keep them they either should be stored properly or destroyed properly. It is against the law to leave patient records for all to see. They should be burned or shredded not left in old buildings for people to find them. I think its wrong. I don't care if its 100 yrs ago or yesterday. If it was your records would you want 'all the world to see'?? Just think about that. Its wrong...period. Hospitals etc can be fined lots of $$ if records are not destroyed of in the correct manner. Even with records going on computers I don't ever see this being a paperless country. I actually think theres more paper being used. Anyway, old records need to be disposed of in the proper manner period. No expections period!!!!! IMO

I had always wondered about that. I would hate for my medical records to just be left where anybody and everybody would be able to read them. Not that there is anything there that would really be of interest but still the idea that somebody could know about my conditions and not be my doctor is kind of creepy.

never bored with these pics of all the stuff that is left behind. so amazing. it's like they said “ok everyone, you all got two hours to get out.take it or leave it"

Where I worked we kept records for at least 7 years after the case was closed. In practice it was much longer--if not forever--simply because there wasn't anyone to go through charts just to see which ones had been closed for the required length of time. As long as a case was active, we had to keep the entire record, although only the current volume and the one preceding it would be in the active records room. Others were stored in secure storage in the basement. For some of our long-term people, the record for just one person would fill two banker's boxes.

When these people aban these places why don't they pack all there stuff with them?...the courts I'm sure gave them time to leave...why not pack everything up?..or have a state sale

Wayy up there on the comment board, Motts, Lynne, and Judderman were discussing how it seems kind of disrespectful to read about a stage so horrible in a person's life, but i personally think that if they are no longer with us, and they are from a long time ago, i would read them to see how they were being treated/the conditions they were in/what was happening. I think, although i'm probably looked down upon for saying this, i would go through it for the sake of knowing how that time was, not to gain information about them, but for information about the conditions.

I would so open them and read them

What can I say about records? When I called my attorney several years after my case supposedly closed, he said he had destroyed my file. I was livid that he didn't at least offer me what was there, even though I had copies of most everything, there was a lot that I didn't have and for him just to heave ho and toss 5 years of my life away I think was wrong. Not to mention the fact that we were pretty close friends, this was a shock to find out I was just tossed out. Then on to the doctors office. When this office I had been going to for years closed, I asked for my file. They REFUSED and this was MY file! I raised holy hell and demanded my file which I eventually got a COPY of for several hundred dollars. The originals I was told were going "into storage". I often wonder where they are now and who has had read them. Nothing interesting but sometimes funny when they would write that I was "conbatative" or "irratating" today. I think there needs to be a whole revamping of these file systems and who has access to them and who decides what to do with them when they're finished. I think patients should have some rights to have their own records especially if a doctors office is closing.