Love to you Fabian, ~~deathrowsister |
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Love to you Fabian, ~~deathrowsister |
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In My
Father's Name It took me some months before writing this letter. I was just asking myself: "Who am I to do so?". But now I know. It's not on my name. It's on my father's memory - for Larry. I am a French woman whose father came from Austria. He became a psychiatrist, in years 50, after spending 10 years helping African people in Africa as a simple doctor, and after World War I. But my father didn't want to make money receiving people at home, even if he knew he could be of some help. My father became the co-director of a laboratory especially conceived for researchers. As he thought he would do nothing if he had to do too much, he chose to devote his life to a single illness: SCHIZOPHRENIA. Thanks to him and to his associates, some medicaments went out, but only for hospital treatment as my father always knew schizophrenic people had to be treated, in the first years, in appropriate hospitals. After, he said, in some years, if we succeed in building homes for them to live on medication, but away from hospital, I will be happy. This, he never saw, dying in 1977. As my father had to visit a lot of mentally ill people in hospitals, he always came back mute and it was difficult to understand this consistent silence. One day, he told me -and I was pretty young-: "You cannot imagine a schizophrenic person being housed in our old hospitals. It does upset me and is the nightmare of my nights. Some of them are even tied to their beds since they have panic crisis and could be of some danger for others and for them. We need to find a solution. They are human beings in real pain." My father was not a believer. He was not praying God to help him. He did work and work again. Until the end. If my father was still alive today and if he knew Larry Robison's story from the very beginning up to the end, He would get so angry that we would have to tie him at his bed for not catching a plane and trying to kill the state of Texas Governor for what he called "lack of humanity". He would even add "lack of intelligence". He could go mad at people who thought mentally ill had to remain on hospitals, just because they were not part of the world anymore. I remember well -I was 12- the day I found him in deep distress, alone in his apartment (my father and mother got divorced). I wanted to go to movie, but I saw it wasn't the day for. I then asked: "What's happening?" And this old man cried. He cried because in the morning, in a psychiatric hospital, he saw four male nurses -stupid bullies, he said- pushing a schizophrenic under delusions of grandeur in a room where walls are covered with special textile for the patient not to hurt himself, but this poor man was tied up into a camisole. Back to middle-ages practices. My father asked a psychiatrist why this man was treated as an insane and the psychiatrist replied: "Just because he is insane". And my father slapped this so-called psychiatrist's face. "I couldn't help it", he said. But he knew he would have to go on trial before the "Conseil de l'Ordre", which is the French court for doctors where judges are doctors themselves. He knew he could lose his job, but losing his job meant he would lose his patients, his research. Nothing happened. And he went on working. No, a mentally ill was not an insane. Just because this word was for him a forgotten word, belonging to the past where the leprous had to walk with a bell. But my father would never have imagined than, in a new Millennium, in the greatest country of the entire world, schizophrenic people would be denied of any medical treatment and, then, after a crisis and the horrible results of a crisis, sentenced to death. Lack of humanity. Lack of intelligence. Fabian Gastellier Copyright
© 1999 by Fabian Gastellier, all rights reserved. |
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