Patients

Two Different Views of Former Patients

"The hospital staff there are mainly concerned with keeping people quiet. If psychiatrists really did their jobs, they wouldn’t have jobs.

 - "Beverly"  

"The people are very humane, very sympathetic. Everyone talked to me, they were all very nice... I've been to larger hospitals where they've had more elaborate facilities and more entertainment for the patients, but this one [Lakeshore] is just as good, even though it's smaller... I'm very grateful that they've tried to help me here... People have complained about this being a concentration camp. Well, they don't know what a concentration camp is." 

 - "G.K."

The cases of two patients, nicknamed Beverly and G.K. in order to protect their privacy, were presented through a set of interviews in the Etobicoke Guardian on January 20, 1972. It was a part of a larger investigation entitled "Two Different Views of Mental Health Treatment."

The two former patients were interviewed by the news editor, Roger White. The patients were treated for different disorders: Beverly for addiction, and G.K. for a manic depressive state, commonly known as the bipolar disorder.

Beverly grew up in the Lakeshore area. She was addicted to heroin and first started experimenting when she was fifteen, and stopped at twenty-two. During that time, she travelled around Canada and the United States, touring such cities as San Francisco and Boston. Beverly explained that "[Addiction] became a second nature to me. It does to a lot of people. For a while, I was high all the time." In 1969, while in Boston, she took drugs every day for three months, and after this experience, she decided to quit. She came back to Toronto and got in touch with a psychiatrist at the Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital. Beverly was admitted in summer of 1969, having stayed there for a month and a half. As a patient, she stated, "I don't think that they were used to anyone in there with heroin habit. They looked at me like some sort of freak as if I were there just to get high on the treatment drugs." During the treatment, she was prescribed a drug called methadone. Beverly claimed that she was given too little medication to help her recover. In general, the "screwed up " methods of therapy did not cure her. On the day of her discharge, she started all over again. After a month, she quit on her own.

Beverly decided to apply to Humber College, but the office of admissions demanded a letter of recommendation from her former psychiatrist at Lakeshore, which she refused to do. "I made the big mistake of telling them my story," she admitted in the interview. Discouraged, she returned for the same addiction treatment at the hospital, where she remained for the next five months. Beverly became involved in the recreational program during her stay, but left it shortly, having convinced herself that she was not good enough and could not accomplish anything. During her treatment, she was administered tranquilizers and sleeping pills and felt that she received no support from the staff. Beverly finished the interview, concluding that there is a heavy social stigma unfairly and unjustly attached to mental health patients: "People with a problem are treated as insane."

G.K., on the other hand, had a set of completely different, more pleasant experiences at Lakeshore. He was a Holocaust survivor and he had been in a concentration camp during World War II, where his entire family had been murdered. After the war ended, he immigrated to Israel, but left soon afterwards due to the armed conflict with Palestinians, and relocated  to Canada with his fifteen-year-old daughter.

Prior to having been referred to Lakeshore, he had been treated at various mental health hospitals all over Ontario for fifteen years. He described himself as having been born with extreme mood changes. 

Both insulin treatment and electroshock had been included as part of G.K.'s  therapy, but as he became older, he found that gradually they became less effective. The interview does not mention how long he was a patient at Lakeshore and what type of therapy he received, but at the end, he had "nothing but praise for the Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital."

It is challenging to compare the two conflicting views of the patients on the treatment they received at Lakeshore. It is important to remember that they were treated for different  disorders: in Beverly's case, it is possible that the hospital staff did not have much experience in treating addition, while G.K.'s illness was most likely to be encountered by the staff. Furthermore, both patients were of extremely cultural different backgrounds and had different a set of expectations for their treatment at Lakeshore. Therefore, their experiences turned out to be different not because they were patients at the same hospital, but because their disorders greatly varied, requiring two essentially different types  of treatment and expertise.

Reference:

	White, Rodger. "Two Different Views of Mental Health Treatment." Etobicoke Guardian, January 20, 1972: 7.
	Retrieved from the Archives of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, January 30, 2005.