For some people, the psychiatrist’s couch is a metal examining table.
On such a table, in a hospital 20 years ago, a young woman waited for me. She weighed 65 pounds and was covered with fine hair. Her face was little more than a frame of bones. I was a new psychiatry resident, and I had been told by a nurse that the patient had refused to drink her nutritional supplement. “You’ll need to put in a tube to feed her,” the nurse said.
Just a few weeks before, I had gone to see a screening of Frederick Wiseman’s documentary “Titicut Follies” (1967), which was shot at a Massachusetts state mental institution. The brutal treatment of patients at that hospital was so shocking that after its release, Massachusetts successfully banned the film for many years — ostensibly to protect patient privacy but more likely to hide the state’s deplorable care of the “criminally insane.” In one of the most grueling scenes, a patient who has refused food is held down by guards, and a fat nasogastric tube is shoved into his nose. A white slurry of nutrients is poured into a plastic funnel at the other end of the tube. A doctor flicks his cigarette ashes into the funnel as the food goes down.
[For more of this story, written by Ane Skomorowsky, go to http://opinionator.blogs.nytim...tntemail0=y&_r=1]
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