Echoes From A Psych Ward
My neighbor is the last person you'd expect to have stories that keep you awake at night… She's kind, funny, always has a cup of tea ready, and never seems in a hurry. But one afternoon she casually mentioned that, as a young nurse in the 1970s, she worked in a psychiatric hospital in northern Scotland. I asked her what it was like. She smiled and said, "Well... you had to be good at running." I laughed. "Running from the patients," she said without missing a beat. I wasn't sure if she was joking. Then the stories started. She described long stone buildings perched on a lonely hillside, where the wind seemed to whistle through every corridor. The wards were filled with people who had been there for years—some with nowhere else to go, others so ill they rarely spoke. Some wandered the grounds quietly. Others could become unpredictable in an instant. The nurses learned to read the room. They knew who needed a kind word, who wanted to be left alone,...