At the Kings County Hospital Center Psychiatric Emergency Department, a patient falls to the floor and dies as the hospital’s staff walk on by.

Having volunteered in a psychiatric facility long ago, I remember going down a long corridor where terrible screams could be heard from one of the rooms. The shrieks were ear piercing and as I neared the room, staff were standing outside the door, chatting, as if nothing were wrong. Now closer to the woman’s cries for help, I could hear water running.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Oh, she’s a silly woman,” said the staff. “We are making her shower and she’s scared. She thinks someone’s going to hurt her.”

They rolled their eyes and continued talking to each other. Being only 20-years-old then, I didn’t know what to do. Slowly, I walked away as the woman screamed bloody murder and continued crying. While no one was going to hurt her as far as anyone around the woman could see, to her, she was in grave danger. She was terrified. What was “real” didn’t matter because reality is based on our individual perception of it. Thus, to the woman, someone WAS coming to get her. To her, it was all real and no one even flinched. Compassion anyone? Not a chance.

Welcome to the world of the mentally ill a.k.a. “the crazies.”

Just as we stay clear of the homeless guys on the streets who are talking to themselves, there is staff in all psych units across the country that do the same thing. And at 5:32 a.m. on June 19, when a patient in a New York City hospital falls to her knees and then on her face in a waiting room and no one does anything, I’m honestly not surprised. Not at all.

Hospital security guards reportedly stepped over the woman named Esmin Green (49), as did other passersby. Why not? The mentally ill aren’t really human, they are robots without a heart, mind or soul, right? Ahh, if only that were true. Unfortunately, however, it isn’t and when the woman fell to her knees, she was very well aware that no one came to her rescue and she died on a cold hospital floor all alone.

Witnesses say she wrote something on the ground before her body stopped moving completely. And by 6:36 a.m., she was dead. Caught on the surveillance video camera, viewers of it call the footage “disturbing.”

Involuntarily admitted the previous day for “agitation and psychosis,” said the City Health and Hospital Corp, she was waiting for a bed when the incident occurred. Although the hospital stated that they plan to make immediate changes for the better, it may be too late. It definitely is for Esmin Green. In May, the hospital was targeted in a federal lawsuit by three organizations for “inhumane” conditions. According to the Mental Hygiene Legal Service, New York Civil Liberties Union and Kirland & Ellis LLP, “an investigation of the hospital showed that Kings County psychiatric facilities are overcrowded and often dangerously unsanitary and that patients — including children and the physically disabled — are routinely ignored and abused.”

My final question is this: Was the woman truly mentally ill or was something else going on? For example, drug addiction can be misdiagnosed as a psych issue and untreated withdrawal can sometimes lead to death. This story reminds me of the 2000 brilliant film, Requiem for a Dream. Ellen Burstyn plays a mother addicted to diet pills, which takes her down the darkest road of her life and drops her off at a hospital where getting electric shock therapy while strapped in restraints is what consumes her remaining days. And does the staff consider that maybe she has another problem causing her “madness?” Nope. Just like I did while watching the movie, when I hear stories like Esmin Green’s, I wonder if they even care.

 

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