This week the unit has been quite, partly because Dawn was discharged. Dawn was the unit’s most hyper active patient. Also, another patient Kevin was discharged; so no more controversial matters or attempts to break rules will be blatant. Richard was moved into a transitional unit to push forward his discharge from the center. Now that he is gone there will be no more complaints of personal items disappearing.

Saturday afternoon all the patients were still sleeping, nothing happening in the unit so I went over to the East side of the center; I heard that a group discussion was scheduled to take place. When I entered the East side of the center I ran into a patient that I met a couple of months ago when I was in the orientation. He remembers me; he greets me; then after that he asked me who am I and where does he know me from.

He is a former Marine and his tattoos reveals that he was a member of a white Supreme gang while he was serving time in prison. His mind races on different periods in his life, which he also verbalizes. For example, before the group got on the elevator, his remark was “Hail Hitler.’ While sitting in the group, he makes off topic remarks that touched on his teen age experience of performing sexual activities with older women, to smoking a pound of marijuana a day.
From the time I met him he was more stable, now he is totally out of it. Surely the Doctors are aware of it, yet he looks and acts worse than what he was two months ago.

When the group was over, and we came back to the unit’s main floor; I ran into Cynthia. She used to be a patient over in the West side of the clinic. She was moved over to the East side. When she saw me, she actually said “hello True_George.” What a turn of events Cynthia has never said anything to me while she was over in the West clinic; I wondered why she decides to at least acknowledge me now?
As it turns out Cynthia is paranoid and when she was admitted she was extremely paranoid to the point that she could not function on the outside or interact with other people. Now her condition has somewhat improved, but she still have a long way to go. So the fact that she did not interact with others or speak with others while she was in the West side was because of her condition of paranoia.

Back to the West clinic on Sunday, I brought in some material on historical black history figures at the request of Mel. For the past three weeks, Mel & I have been having discussions on black history events and people. I have to do the reading because Mel’s medication has compromised his reading ability. I would read a segment of the material, then I would ask Mel what are his thoughts, opinion and if he would like to comment on the segment that was read.

While Mel and I was engaged in the above mentioned activity. Morgan and Kathy, sat near to us listening to the reading, and discussion until it was over. My thoughts on this are why didn’t they just come over and sit at the table with us? Then again, why would they take an interest in discussion on black historical figures? I say this because I noticed that patients default to sticking to others of the same race, some of the same behavior that happens in prison. After all, many of the patients in the units were former prisoners who did time in the state penitentiary and after they completed their sentences, they were shipped directly to the state psychiatry facility either because they were deemed unfit to function in society; or their crimes were so heinous that the keys to freedom was thrown away. They will never see the light of freedom, they will live out their productive years medicated on lock down as residents of the State Psychiatry facilities.