From a heartbreaking story reported by CBS News:
When older brother Jeff was 6, Molly disappeared. For a while Jeff asked constantly: "Where's Molly?" He stopped asking after being told repeatedly by his mother he had to forget his baby sister...
Jeff Daly reunited with the sister he last saw when she was just shy of her third birthday... Molly couldn't tell Jeff and Cindy about those missing 47 years, they set about filling in the details, which brought them to the institution where Molly was sent back in 1957: the Oregon Fairview Home.
Fairview, founded in 1907, was originally named the "Oregon State Institution for the Feeble-Minded." And it was hardly alone. By 1962, there were 123 state institutions around the country... "The doctors told my parents, 'It's okay. Let Molly go to Salem. She'll be in an institution. She'll be better off there.'"
...at first, Molly's father visited often, until Fairview's staff advised him to stop, because Molly would become inconsolable after he left.
But Jack Daly found an ingenious way to continue seeing his daughter... "He did go back," said Jeff. "It was only a way that I suppose my dad could have figured out. He went back as a clown."
My aunt was in a major auto accident a few months after she graduated from nursing school. It broke both sides of her jaw and left her loopy. (Obviously brain damage of some variety, but I don't know enough to even begin to speculate on its type.) She said later that she thought she was dreaming, running around doing all these crazy things, and she couldn't wait to laugh about it with her best friend when she woke up.
ReplyDeleteWell, she really was doing crazy things, like running down the hallway in only a hospital gown cheerfully yelling for her doctor. It was the early 70s, and my grandmother was advised to 'put her in an institution and forget you ever had a daughter'. She was more stubborn than that, and brought my aunt home. She also took her off the medication she'd been given to control her. Two weeks later my aunt was back to her normal self.
Being a nurse, my aunt later looked up the sedative she'd been given. Turns out that under some circumstances, it could prolong the kind of loopyness that she'd had. It's frightening to think how that story might have ended had my grandmother not been stubborn. I know it makes a neat bon mote about motherly love overcoming all obstacles, but the point is I'm very, very glad that medicine and general approaches to treatment of the handicapped have advanced since then.
That's an interesting story anon. Unfortunately, despite the advances in medicine since the 70s, the kind of paradoxical reactions to sedatives and psychoactive drugs that you describe still do happen, and unfortunately are still overlooked or misdiagnosed, though perhaps not as often.
ReplyDeleteIn the same era, (the early 50s), my mother was committed to the State mental hospital for Parkinson's syndrome.
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