Vent

Lovely shot. I love how dark the doors look in this. Sinister in a way.

Great colors and lighting.

Where are the light fixtures? wonder if they were ornate or just plain?

Long long days, nights, weeks, months, years, we were there, in all the hospitals in all the places in the world, while families ate meals at home, and people were at ball games, and while elections were held and wars waged, we were day by day every day in these institutions either giving aid and support to the wretched and suffering, or receiving the care. We were not one, but ten thousands, not just unhappy, but devastated, often feeling more abandoned than this empty place. We left an air of melancholy on the walls. Lives were lived out in these halls, lives twisted into shapes sometimes unrecognizable but human lives, and to the patients, and staff and supporters such as maintenance men, cooks, ward nurses and boiler room men, an army worked, and works, to care for the forgotten and pushed aside people who happen to suffer with the most dreadful of afflictions. In the most ordinary places acts of great compassion and devotion were carried out in private exchanges of human kindness. There were screams, and times of violence, but the main atmosphere of the psychiatric hospitals was that of hard arduous work to keep the wheels of daily life rolling for these burdened souls. One day a man who served food to patients and staff for one month on a job in a psychiatric hospital greeted me, an old retired social worker, 40 years later on the street, saying hello and remembering that we exchanged a pleasant word and a smile in the cafeteria line 40 years before. Small kindnesses, large efforts, now, as then continue. It's hard for the patients, and it's hard for the staff. It's an arduous and crushingly real world. These old places, well, they're not that far in the past.

Well said Roy. Well said.

That was a great read Roy.

Thanks for the insight Roy!! It does matter!!

Roy you put it beautifully.

Thank you so much for your most insightful words! How often many forget, and need to be reminded that while the rest of the world was doing whatever they pleased the people in these places lived out there lives in physical , mental and emotional pain, and longed for a difference that may or may not ever came.

Roy , that really touched my heart, thanks for speaking up and giving alittle insight.

Roy that was awesome!

that left a lump in my throat for sure -

Beautifully said, Roy, thank you.

On another note... yellow is not a color seen very often in psych hospitals. It looks more foreboding than cheerful now, shrouded in shadow and the air of abandonment.

Thank you, Roy! It fits this photograph, perfectly.

Pretty powerful stuff Roy, thank you! Really makes you think.

Beautifuuly said roy

this pic makes me wonder, motts, do you change things in the rooms to get the perfect picture?

Truely amazing composition. I have seen similar things in several different mental health centers.

In fact, places like this are still in operation and the patient abuses which many of us imagine in the past are still occurring today. Not all psych wards are like this, but this is not the past we're looking at - it's a blissfully abandoned version of the present.

Having just been discharged from a state psychiatric hospital due to major depression, I can speak to the fact that the things we think are in the past... the abuses, the torment both within oneself and from the outside, continue today - behind perpetually locked doors.

So much glass: on the doors and all the windows above the doors. Old-school ventilation. Like this picture so much; a lot to ponder about. Be well and stay in................