Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
community. Their appearance and interest in themselves improved as they
took a greater interest in those around them. . . . The patients lost many of the
features of chronic psychoses; they were less violent to each other and to
the staff, they were less dishevelled, and their language ceased to be obscene.
The nurses came to know the patients well, and spoke warmly of them.” Second,
we can return to the image of interacting homeostats searching for some joint
equilibrium and note that the nurses as well as the patients changed in the
course of their interactions. In the first few months, the nurses tried giving the
patients orders, sedated them before they walked over to the allotted space,
and so on. But after some time (1385), “the [two] nurses [became] less worried
and on edge. They both felt that the patients were becoming more 'sensible,'
From a survey of what the patients were saying at this period, however, it is
clear that the change lay with the nurses, in that they were beginning to un-
derstand the patients better. They ceased always to lock the stair door, and to
feel it necessary for the patients to be sedated in the mornings. They began to
report more phenomenological material. They became more sensitive to the
patients' feelings and more aware of their own anxieties.” Third, this change
in nursing practice again points to the fact that ontology makes a difference.
Giving orders and sedatives and locking doors were standard ways of han-
dling “chronic deteriorated schizophrenics” (1384) (who were presumed to
be beyond the help of ECT, etc.), but in the new experimental setup, nursing
grew away from that model as the nurses and patients adapted to one another.
Fourth, we should note that this experiment provoked institutional frictions,
inasmuch as it departed from the usual practices of the hospital (1386): “The
problems which arise when a patient is felt to be 'special' caused difficulty.
Comments that all the 'rumpus room patients' were being specially treated
were common among the staff. The group nurses, who did not work on a shift
system but were free in the evenings and the weekends, were considered to
have a cushy job. The group nurses reacted in a defensive way to this, adopting
a protective attitude when their patients were criticized during staff discus-
sions.” This quotation points both to the fact that symmetric psychiatry dif-
fered in institutional practice from orthodox psychiatry and to the frictions
that arise when one form of practice is embedded within the other. Laing and
his colleagues remarked, “Tensions of this kind are lessening” (1386), but they
will resurface below.
4. We can contextualize the rumpus room. British psychiatry in and after
World War II included a variety of developments in “social” or “communal
psychiatry.” These entailed a variety of elements, but we should focus on a
leveling of the social hierarchy and a transformation of power relations within
