Maximum Occupancy, and an enclosure with the July 9, 1987 greeting card

Bob handed me a bunch of files and asked me to review them. Each was a record of a mentally ill person currently taking up short-term residence on the psychiatric ward at the local hospital. I'd been in that ward once before for far more personal reasons, so the idea of going there again was intimidating.

The last time I'd gone there was about six months I'd gotten my job. I was working as an "arts counselor" at a Lutheran camp. The camp usually kept us locked in six days a week, but one Thursday, someone came and grabbed me and said I could leave. Since they were so Draconian about us staying on the grounds around the clock every day except Saturday and part of Sunday, I was confused about why  they were letting me go.

My father was there waiting in his car for me. His explanation was brief and ambiguous. My mother was in the hospital and he wanted me to go there. Through some stilted exchanges, he let me know that she was in the car with him and became increasingly incoherent and drowsy. He'd seen her popping pain pills, but hadn't realized she'd gotten confused and was overdosing until she'd passed out.

He rushed her to the hospital and they told him that they thought she wasn't going to make it. Oddly, rather than stay with his dying wife, he got in a car and drove to the camp to get me. I guess this was just part of being a parentified child with parents who couldn't face adult responsibilities.

When I got to the hospital, the doctors took me into an emergency room where my mother's eyes were open and blank and she was constantly having small seizures. Her body's twitching was the only sign of life in her. As I stood there looking shocked, the doctor told me to shout to her as that sometimes helped people who were on the brink come back. My dad stood back looking uncomfortable and helpless.

I walked up to my mother's twitching body and started yelling "Mom, we love you, come back!" I kept shouting and my dad weekly started saying her name somewhat loudly, but it was clear that he was fighting discomfort and vaguely following my lead. My mother kept seizing with dead eyes and showed no reaction to either of us. After a few minutes, the doctor said we should move along to the waiting room and we would have to wait and see if she recovered or died.

My mother pulled through, and the doctor said he felt it was because of what I did because he expected she wouldn't make it with the level of drugs in her body. After this experience, a psychiatrist from the hospital came by to talk to both my mother and me. He told both of us that he felt she needed a place where she could just relax and get away from her stresses for about a week before returning home. I think he had spoken to her first and she'd revealed some of the hardships of her life to him.

He pressured both of us to have her spend time in the psychiatric ward. I confirmed with him that this was just about getting her some rest and nothing else. He said that was so, but when we went to the ward, it was behind a locked door and her room was locked as well. There were hangers that were welded into the closet and nothing in the room with which she could hurt herself. It was clear that he believed her overdose was intentional and she'd tried to kill herself. My mother became increasingly freaked out by the rubber-room-feel of the space and begged me not to make her stay there.

Since it was clear that we'd been tricked, I told the psychiatrist that we'd changed our minds. She didn't want to stay there and I wasn't going to force her to do so. He argued with me calmly at first, but became angry and started shouting at me when I didn't back down. In the end, he told me that it would be on my head if she killed herself as he was certain she was a suicide risk.

My mother hadn't tried to kill herself and, in fact, refused to take any strong pain medication after this incident. One of my cousins told me that she'd noticed some signs of confusion in my mother before this happened. She said she'd noticed my mother trying to eat, but sometimes struggling to hit her mouth because she was clearly over-medicated. I wished she'd told me about this before my mother nearly died.

About eight months after this incident, I took my pile of files from Bob and went to that very same local psychiatric ward. This time, I was there to interview people whose families committed them to see if they were ready to leave the locked rooms and ward and move into our halfway house's residential program. There were certain criteria that people had to meet to get in, and I had to assess them. When I arrived, one of the first people I saw was the psychiatrist who'd tried to browbeat me into keeping my mother in the ward. He looked at me quizzically, but didn't seem to connect me with what had happened. He just knew he'd seen me before.

I conducted interviews at that ward on a fairly regular basis because we needed to fill any empty slots in the halfway houses. We got money from the state and county for each bed that was occupied. On July 9, 1987, I got a copy of a letter from the board of directors telling us we had to first have full occupancy before we could get a raise in our salaries. It's important to note that we weren't well-paid. Many of our workers with children qualified for food stamps because their income fell below the poverty threshold for a family of a certain size.

I sent a copy of that letter with my angry comments to Tito. Note that the non-profit that I worked for has been out of commission for decades now and that is why I am allowing the real name on the document.