Staff

I have known mental health advocates who seem to think they are not doing their job if they are not finding something wrong the staff are doing or have done at a state mental hospital. It is a good thing to make the care received by folks who are locked away as first rate as we can. Most of them are not there voluntarily. Since we are forcing them to be there claiming it is our right as a state to do so, we certainly owe them our very best psychiatric care under the safest conditions we can possibly provide.
The key some folks seem to be missing is that the people working in state hospitals are humans with all the same emotions and baggage the rest of us carry around. Which means in very plain and basic terms if I want to be treated like a human when I am a patient in a state mental hospital then I had better hope the staff there are being treated fairly by their superiors, critics, the media, and the public. The better they are treated the more likely I am to be treated well. If you care about the patients, you will care just as much about the staff.
Recently, the staff at Broughton (the state hospital in Morganton, NC) was vindicated by a judge who said a previous investigation had not been accurate or fair. Will the public remember that or all the bad press?
We must at some point learn to respect each other enough to see one another as fully human. Staff, patient, family members, the public, media, and government all have a role to play in this endeavor. As long as we can look pass, each other without seeing the humanity of the other we will remain in the darkness. The light only shines when we open our eyes and see the person next to us as they really are. Fully human no matter how flawed.