An endless cigarette and decades of life on psychiatric backwards | PART 2 of 3
WORKING the WARDS | Part 1 | June 2, 2025
WORKING the WARDS | Part 2 | June 3, 2025
WORKING the WARDS | Part 3 | TO COME: June 4, 2025
By Douglas John Imbrogno | june2, 2025 | On Thursday, June 5, 2025, the Culture Center in Charleston W.Va., will host the premiere of “COMING HOME: Before and After Deinstitutionalization in West Virginia,” a 33-minute documentary I produced with Bobby Lee Messer for the Developmental Disabilities Council of West Virginia. (See Part 1 of this series for more on the film). To make more personal what drove the move to free people from institutional wards, I am reprinting this week in WestVirgniaVille excerpts from a week-long Huntington Herald-Dispatch series I researched and wrote in 1983 on West Virginia’s mental hospital system.
The series examined the wave of lawsuits to improve conditions and to shutter the worst institutions and return patients to their communities and homes wherever possible. Seeking a first-hand glimpse of daily life inside such places, I worked undercover for three months as a volunteer at Huntington State Hospital (now known as the Mildred Mitchell-Bateman Hospital). Below is Part 2 of excerpts from ‘Working the wards: A reporter’s diary,’ from that July 1983 Huntington Herald-Dispatch series. Part 1 features my initial encounters with the hospital’s back wards.
Register at this link to attend the free premiere of the ‘COMING HOME’ documentary on Thursday, June 5, 2025, from 6 to 8 p.m. (doors open 5:30 p.m.) at the Culture Center in the state Capitol Complex in Charleston, W.Va., or show up at the door. VIEW THE TRAILER here.
A NOTE ABOUT THESE EXCERPTS: I have retained the original diaries’ language usage from a previous day, such as the no longer condoned phrase ‘mentally retarded’, among others. I have also made some light formatting and editing changes for ease of reading online.
Excerpts from the July 24 and July 30, 1983 Huntington Herald-Dispatch articles ‘WORKING THE WARDS: A reporter’s diary
INTRODUCTORY NOTE from the original article:
Following are excerpts from a diary compiled by staff writer Douglas Imbrogno, who did volunteer work at Huntington State Hospital from March 15 through June 1. Hospital officials then were made aware of his role as a reporter. Working six to eight hours a week, he assisted in different wards and accompanied patients and staff in a variety of activities … The names of individual patients and staff have been changed. All comments by staff and patients along with the settings are factual. As a result of changes in past months, many wards and patients described have been relocated to bring the hospital in line with court-ordered improvements.
MARCH 30
The hospital is always presented in such an unfavorable light to the public, says Ms. Smith, an aide on the geriatric ward. “They always tell the bad things. That hurts the employees here. It really does, to be portrayed in public falsely.”
Employees are very involved in patients’ lives and take them on shopping trips and outings and have parties for them like the upcoming monthly communal birthday party on her ward where Kool-Aid and cake are served, she says.
“They should tell how much more needs to be done, but also how much has been done,” the aide says.
APRIL 6
Timmy lies curled in a ball a few feet from a table set up in the ward where May, an aide on the ward, sits. She is keeping an eye on patients getting haircuts from the hospital barber who has come today. A cleaning woman in a pale blue uniform mops the bathroom.
Later, I take two patients, Frank and Elton, to the canteen, where everyone seems to be smoking, including Frank who bums a cigarette in addition to the one he smokes. He smokes two-handed, resting one while drawing upon the other. Smoke seems to powder the air of any room at the hospital where two or more patients gather. It seems as if there is one continuously lit cigarette at Huntington State Hospital. When it burns down, another is lit off its butt and then another and another, like a daisy chain.
Elton drags on a cigarette with his collapsed cheeks, then he coughs deeply, drawing up something from deep inside his chest and spitting up a handful. He dabs at his lap.
Back on the ward, a young man in a red sweatshirt stretches on the floor, his head propped against the wall. A pool of urine gathers at his feet. May yells at him to get up off the floor. He does and sits in a chair. Meanwhile, another aide and a nurse come out of a room.
“Look what he did,” May says, as the two approach the wet spot.
With hardly a break in step they walk over it, the second aide shaking her head slightly and going on into the nursing station.
“And he’s not even mentally retarded,” says May as the patient stands up and walks by, his blue pants soaked. “He’s schizophrenic.”
Photo-illustration by Rick Baumgartner for the July 31, 1983, Huntington Herald-Dispatch article ‘Working the wards: a reporter’s diary. ‘
APRIL 9
In the basement activity room at the recreation building a smokey pall gathers. Cigarettes are rolled and lit from other cigarettes, butts unraveled to salvage tobacco and news ones rolled.
At a long table stacked with wooden blocks and covered with paper on which to draw with crayons, a young man in his 30s who lives in the men’s geriatric ward snoozes beside another older man from that ward. He sleeps, also.
On Ward 5, Mickey, a patient, comes into the television room wearing a tie, a pressed yellow short-sleeve shirt, brown pants and polished brown shoes. Where is he headed?
“Nowhere,” he says. “I just wanted to get dressed up.”
APRIL 13
The wards seem to be in a constant state of cleanup but pools of urine are a common sight. In the men’s ward, three patients nap together on the floor, snuggled like spoons in a drawer. An aide suggests I take a handful of patients into the activity room to smoke. She hands me a pack of generic filter cigarettes.
“Praise God, we’re gonna smoke,” Frank says.
“Let me have a cigarette. Let me have two,” Gary says.
Each takes one and when Gary’s is smoked down to a butt, Frank commandeers the nub, smoking it down even further. Looking across the table, I see I’ve given a cigarette to one of those patients an aide had warned me about The intense man calmly takes the last two bites of his cigarette, staring in concentration as he pops the filter into his mouth like a piece of candy.
I search around the room for something else to do. A stack of toys, probably donated. A tot’s drum set on its side. The shelves of a cabinet reveal many puzzles, coloring books and blocks. None of it seems suitable to occupy—much less teach—men whose sole preoccupation is the pack that I stuff in my pocket so they can’t see it. Gary gets up off his seat and makes himself comfortable on the floor.
APRIL 16
Shelia, a short patient with a screeching voice, stands nearby in the recreation room.
“See my new shoes? See my pin?” She holds out her hand. “Look, that’s where Adelle bit me.”
A lanky, forlorn woman seated at a table bursts into occasional screams.
“It’s the sideroom for you when we go back up,” a nearby patient says.
Crabapple trees blossom outside beneath a bright sun. Why aren’t they all outside on such a day, I ask a recreation aide? Once the wards release them to recreation, “we’re in charge of them” and there aren’t enough staff members to supervise them outside, she says.
Later, in Ward 5, a patient says she has been in and out of psychiatric hospitals for a total of two years. Another patient laughs. It has been 30-some years for him, he says, mostly veteran hospitals since he served stateside during World War II and fought in the Korean War. A deputy sheriff picked him up in January after another man took out a warrant charging that he beat him up, the patient says.
He says he didn’t do it, but a judge sent him here for six months. Now, he’s planning to board a bus the following Monday for Princeton, W.Va., where he’ll look for an apartment.
July 31, 1983 story in the Huntington Herald-Dispatch as part of the HOUSES on the HILL series.
APRIL 20
May, the aide, says the other aides are in the small activity room to the side of the mentally retarded men’s ward.
“They’re having Word Recognition,” she says.
There, I find two aides, a nurse and two patients. Frank and Willy scribble in coloring books. “At least he pays attention to you,” one aide tells the nurse reading that day’s newspaper.
Later, in the ward for the elderly mentally ill, patients in chairs ring the walls in their usual slouches, fiddling nervously. Ron, a frail old fellow with sparkling deep blue eyes, sits tied into a rolling chair with a sheet. A sheet also anchors his chair to a nearby table. Sometimes he wails like a baby and teeters from side to side as if trying to keep his balance on a ship’s deck in a storm.
One man shuffles into the room cursing, “You’re all [expletive] crazy!” He lies on the floor, his bare feet caked with black grime. Outside a rooster crows from a house near the hospital grounds.
Peg, an aide, brings a tray of pureed food to Ron, puts it down before him and leaves. Ron wrestles with the spoon as if it were a python, but manages some messy spoonfuls of mashed meat and vegetables. The cup of milk in his hand makes a perilous liftoff from the tray. Some of it dribbles out the corner of his mouth. Peg reenters.
“Here, Little Ron,” she says, sitting in front of him.
She tilts his head, bringing spoonfuls to his mouth. His eyes focus on her.
“Here, you like pineapple?” she says, chuckling. “Just like my granddaughter, Little Ron. Feeding you is like feeding her.”
Ms. Smith, an aide, enters.
“Phone call, Peg.”
Ms. Smith says she’ll help finish feeding Ron. Without sitting down, she picks up the spoon. She places her hand on Ron’s tilted head and pushes it up straight. Ron’s head slides again to the side. More forcefully she pushes it straight.
“What’s a matter, are you sleepy?”
Ron’s eyes are wide and staring. She takes a huge spoonful of food and pushes it into his mouth. She immediately takes another spoonful and does likewise. Ron’s cheeks begin to puff, his eyes stare straight ahead. Again she stuffs in a spoonful. Ron stiffens.
“Are you sleepy?” the aide says.
She takes his head between her hands and rattles it. Ron’s eyes bulge.
“He’s a seizure patient,” she says to a nearby patient who is watching this. “He may be having a seizure.”
She takes another gob of food and presses it to Ron’s lips—but he refuses to open his mouth. Peg returns and sees this.
“Maybe he’s having a seizure,” the aide tells Peg.
Peg will have none of that. Taking the spoon, she says she will feed him. Ms. Smith say something about her lunch being interrupted and leaves.
“People jabbing spoons at your face, Little Ron,” says Peg, sitting down before him.
His head tilts toward her.
APRIL 23
In the recreation building, a middle-aged woman says that in only two months it will be her birthday. She will be 45. She has been here since she was 21, she says. She has brothers and sisters, though she hasn’t seen them in a long time. She remembers holding her sister on her lap. She starts to cry.
“She must be married and have children of her own by now,” the patient says.
Does she ever get outside for recreation?
“I got some fresh air coming over here,” she says. “I’ll get some more more fresh air going back to the ward.”
She smiles.
Benny, a patient, shows off his new watch.
“A Bulova,” he says.
Where’d he get it?
“I traded for it for two cups of coffee.”
He knows he got a good deal and chuckles at the thought. Benny has moved from one of the mentally ill wards to Ward 5, the short-term treatment unit the hospital is trying to turn into a showcase ward for model treatment. Plants have appeared there in the last few weeks, as have a high-quality magazine rack with a variety of periodicals, prominently displayed, and a bulletin board advising patients to keep good grooming and health habits.
APRIL 27
Richie sits on the floor in the midst of one of the male wards, his head nodding. Other patients are rounded up for an outside walk. Why isn’t Richie going? He has remained glued to the spot. They’re changing the level of his anti-convulsive medicine, a nurse says. He has enough in him now that his legs would be too wobbly to support him, she says.
As the line of patients winds along the sidewalk outside, it is met by a delegation of three smiling middle-aged women coming the other way. Their arms and hands are full of cigarettes, lollipops and magazines, which they rapidly dispense to patients. One woman lights the cigarette she has given another patient.
“Have a lollipop,” says another.
“Do you like magazines?” the third says, thrusting three into the hands of an elderly patient.
The women, smiling still, pass on. The patients move on, sucking, smoking.
“‘Popular Mechanics,’” says May, noting the magazine the old man holds. “Gonna build ourselves a house!”
MAY 11
On the mentally retarded men’s ward, the 10 a.m. activity slot calls for arts and crafts. A male aide sits in the activity room, his white smock open over a t-shirt. He looks very tired. Frank sits beside him, one foot bare. On the tabletop is an upturned metal garbage can lid filled with cigarette butts and ashes.
Patients wander here, careen there, a constant tide. Two aides now sit alone in the dormitory, the male aide seated on a bed with a magazine, the other talking. I take some patients for a walk outside. We pass an older patient from the geriatric ward who has a purple-black eye.
“I got into a fight. I lost,” he says. “He was too fast for me.”
WORKING the WARDS | Part 1 | June 2, 2025
WORKING the WARDS | Part 2 | June 3, 2025
WORKING the WARDS | Part 3 | TO COME: June 4, 2025
Subscribe to WestVirginiaVille for free to receive PART 3 in your email box of ‘Working the Wards: A Reporter’s Diary’ and future posts from an occasional journal devoted to cultural coverage and cranky commentary on that state of mind called West Virginia.
FREE SUBSCRIBE to WestVirginiaVille’s e-mail newsletter:
WestVirginiaVille.substack.com
A selective & opinionated guide to some of the best writing, photography, video and news on life & culture in West Virginia. Yes, we have some.
