Mental Hospitals Committee Provides Activity, Friendship at State Hospitals

Feeling a "responsibility to our patients" to continue through the summer ward work begun during the regular school year, the PBH Mental Hospitals Committee this summer is once again staffing an extensive program of assistance to mental patients.

According to Edward S. La Monte '65, committee chairman, approximately 120 Summer School students, comprising ten ward groups, are participating in the summer work at Metropolitan State and Boston State Hospitals. A different group visits a different chronic ward every afternoon and evening.

Usually the only regularly scheduled activities for the patients are those provided by volunteers, LaMonte reported. "We try to work with patients who are not obviously on their way out, since the limited hospital staff concentrates on those who leave quickly," he noted.

Although only a fraction participate, potentially about 450 mental patients could benefit through the summer program, LaMonte said. The Committee encourages volunteers to utilize whatever special skills they have in dealing with individual patients. "We do not try to fit volunteers into a definite structure," he said.

By instituting an intensive individual interview program with ten volunteers this summer, the Committee hopes to lay the ground work for a case-aid program in the fall. Because of the inadequate records and under staffing of the state mental hospitals, the interviewers are indispensable in obtaining additional information about the attitudes and problems of patients, LaMonte explained.

The ward workers have been instrumental in pointing out patients who may possibly benefit from a case-aid study, LaMonte said. "We hope to have 30 volunteers working with 30 patients next year," he added. The present interviewers now meet weekly with Boston State social workers, but next year the Committee will have to hire its own psychiatric social workers to closely supervise the case-aid volunteers, LaMonte said.