Phenergan (Promethazine)

PART 5 - TREATMENT AND TRAUMA

Much has been written about the treatments meted out to some of the more unfortunate who occupied the mental hospitals of the past. Usually such writing seem to come from two directions – first the angry diatribes of ex-patients who have suffered and been abused and second from the contrary point of view of psychiatry trying to justify itself. I have seen little written from the point of view of staff working in the system and even less from those who have seen the system from both sides – as staff and also as patient. Nevertheless the treatments available to people of my generation (and let’s face it, within the span of a single career so we’re not talking of a hundred years ago) were the best available or the worst available but most driven from a genuine desire to make a difference. ECT, or electro convulsive therapy has been around for over 60 years and it had a peculiar ancestry, but for those for whom it worked it was literally a life-saver. Nevertheless like many treatments it was abused and overused or used simply to control and intimidate. But that wasn’t the fault of ECT per se; it was the abuse of what is potentially an effective treatment by people who profess to know better.

Long Grove had its fair share of physical and chemical treatments and I suppose I witnessed or delivered many of them. But although sometimes horrific it is my lasting impression that most of us did the best we could with what we had.

Our materia medica or available list of drugs was very small and could possibly be counted on the fingers of your hands. There was of course the ubiquitous paraldehyde that was used liberally to sedate. Paraldehyde was so caustic that it would melt plastic syringes so most wards carried a small supply of glass syringes that were sterilised in old fashioned stainless steel sterilisers that were little more than a square boiler kept on the bench of the clinic. Other drugs included chlorpromazine and thioridazine as our major...

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