Daily Excerpt: From Deep Within (Lewis): Selection from Kew Gardens - From Mental Health to Laboratory to Mental Health
Excerpt from From Deep Within ; selection from Kew Gardens: The grounds of the mental health center were lovely, but the patients who wandered them seemed lost. The dangers of smoking were not yet known, and everyone in the hospital smoked, including me. The patients’ fingers were tainted yellow from the tar, their fingernails were long and unattended, and their clothing was mismatched and tattered. My heart broke watching them shuffle around. I chose to go onto the locked, dingy units and keep patients company as they ate their lunch. It was all about relationships to me. The room was filled with groaning people and the constant leg movements of tardive dyskinesia. Most patients knew me by my first name. “Susan, are you eating with us today?” they would ask. Then, in 1973, one of the psychiatrists at the center was shot and killed by a patient while I was in the next building. I heard the gunshot, but no one knew what had happened. As the information trickled down that someone had