Milledgeville – Transformative Trauma

It’s September 2020.
We sit across our circular dining table barely catching our breath and sigh once again. With teeth gritting and hard faces, we stare into what has become a thick air of disbelief. There’s a palpable heaviness that lingers only in the swelter of summer. Forty percent of the college students are absent from just one of my husband’s courses, having been quarantined or COVID positive. These students are not free to stay on campus and so are sent home only to potentially infect their fragile family and communities.

We raise our eyes, stop studying the long cuts on the glass dining table and begin to clear the way into the near future where I could be forced to return to Telehealth with my clients in need of mental health treatment. I am immediately resentful of punishing my clients for something entirely not my fault and having to acknowledge the egregious lack of leadership by both the college, as well as, its larger governing body.

I begin to plead with my husband, ‘Please! Please find a way to hold classes virtually – even if it’s for a shortened amount of time.’ My husband’s stubbornness, not to mention his fervent need to follow ALL the rules, makes me look like a gumby pretzling acrobat. Worse yet, his loyalty to a university completely willing to pick off people for their dollar looks worse than pushing a statue of a bronzed mule. And as expectation would dictate, he is not free to simply do what is best for himself and his students.

I try to remind myself that Telehealth for mental health does work, but nothing can replace the compassionate resonance transmitted in the cosmic electricity when two people are together sharing space. The flat faced version of myself saddens my soul when I want to get up and pull a tissue for my client. COVID now leaves us in a hold of loneliness we thought was not possible. Of course, for some Telehealth can stop the hard work altogether. The detraction of the the personal and palpable connection, like missing a soft fabric to run our fingers through, can halt the therapeutic process. It begs the question to the eyes of the universities leadership; do you know how far the red threads of your actions would reach? – And all because the sloppy version of face-to-face courses were far more important than people’s lives.

Here’s the reality of in person courses in 2020……. a masked professor stands at a blackboard in an enclosed room with a shower curtain version of a sneeze guard, sometimes held up with blue tape and only the width of two standard desks. Masked students await the glorious instruction of a pseudo burglar in appearance screaming muffled formulas and theories. Every written word on white and black boards is obstructed, leading professors to speak by playing peek-a-boo. The literal demonstration I received used a pillow, peeking around and above it in the desperate hope of being heard. There are no questions, no engagement from students as their professor has turned into Zorro and they likely spend the entire time hoping they grasped something of value as they peer through plexiglass.

Eight hundreed young women ‘Rush’ for their choice Sorority only to have the college push past 10 percent of its student population with COVID. The administration openly blames students for the spread while congregating at parties, fraternities and sororities – and dorms; all of which could only happen if the campus was open. Rapidly, the university becomes a national news story as the largest COVID spreaders across the U.S. college system.

It is understood in physiological development, we haven’t finished out our brains optimal functioning until we are twenty-five…..TWENTY-FIVE years old! So, sending in my eighteen-nineteen year old to a diseased college is begging them to throw flying hands up with a loud party-yowl and just hope for the best. This is not to say young people are classically stupid, it illuminates the reality that we ALL wear an invincibility cape at this age. It only seems reasonable that the system they are moving young people into would assume some small responsibility.

Opportunities for creativity that could have made this university the gold medal standard on how to make campus, classroom and community life work has been squandered. The local town has become disowned by the university, further dividing the disparity of the highest socioeconomic class student body with a significantly low socioeconomic, minority community. Perhaps local leaders – the Mayor, city council and elected leaders could have united with college administration igniting courageous acts to meet the needs of the community and university alike. Imagine an overflow of danishes, bagels and burnt coffee at scratched folding tables while leaders choose to lean into the fear and leave acknowledging, validating the needs of the university AND the community.

Instead, an interest in privilege and dollars prevail.
This county has approximately 45 thousand residents, with 48 percent minority. Pressing forward with in classroom instruction, on campus activities like rushing for sororities and fraternities and on campus meetings breeds immorality while a deadly virus presses its weight upon our chests. So many will die and the sticky blood of this decision will stain the university’s hands. A lack of a direct death of a student does not release the college from the deaths that are occurring through transmission.

As mental health therapists, we are called to activate ourselves from a place to vulnerability, invoking courage when we are in deep fear. It is our responsibility as leaders to walk in that unchartered path – choose to do hard things. Do not interpret these words as a belief in shutting the world down. My spouse and I have spoken at length the ever teetering potential loss that could ensue, including financial consequences arriving right at our door step.

My husband and I look back towards one another, perhaps done with the ranting and sneering into the nearby kitchen windows. We discuss the possibility of him quarantining himself for the rest of the semester, both myself and our teenage daughter.

Another deep, long sigh.

Faculty do not appear to be getting sick in class, but how do we know with certainty? Our table, this home, suddenly starts to stretch out longer, warbling my ability to see clearly. He already seems so very far away and I crumple up my face in disbelief.

No more kisses and long, deep hugs after a day of bewilderment in the wild world. No more snuggling my head into his chest while we wait for “all of this mess” to just go away. More time covering your face, forced to hide from those we are most open to. And no more witnessing of the tenderness between him and my daughter as he kisses her on the forehead, standing in the bathroom before bed. It’s more than my mind can hold. The grief has already begun and a decision hasn’t been made.

With the current trajectory that my scientist spouse continues to calculate, by Thanksgiving, 25 percent of the total faculty and students will have this ravenous disease; approximately 1,600 students. There are no words for the potential devastation for the fragile community surrounding this college campus.

Fast Forward one year, late August 2021.

It would seem the science fairies have gifted the universe a medical marvel, one that has not been readily seen since the polio vaccine (This not to say many other vaccines should go unnoticed: HPV, Meningitis, and Shingles, just to name a few). We have a way out of COVID death for anyone 12 years and older. We even have a small window of bliss where something like ‘normal’ reappears. That is, until Delta arrives…..and I am not discussing our next flight to vacation island.

As the world is ravaged, many countries lag on purchasing their vaccines out of their own cockiness to stop the spread while others have no resources to vaccinate. Of course, the United States has a massive stockpile – only to have misinformation, extreme mistrust of our government and conspiracies create a wild frenzy of lies. It feels like only the nerds will sift through the data to know the truth, but then again, if science were taken seriously, perhaps the pandemic of misinformation would not be the secondary pandemic. 18-29 year olds have the lowest vaccination rate and are currently filling up hospitals, potentially creating a more deadly return to college as previous mandates for masks and physical distancing has ended. And despite necessary vaccines to enter college for exponentially less dangerous diseases, no vaccinations for COVID are required.

Students are already testing positive while participating in Sorority Rush. Professors are already going to miss the first weeks of class while in quarantine. As many as 20 percent are already missing from the first week of classes and university COVID positive cases are double that of 2020. My own clients are facing down one sick or dying person after another, surpassing hundreds of lives lost to this terrible disease. My clients in health care have said they are forced to make life and death choices while breathing machines are gone and are now watching the march of COVID death at a much greater intensity than their first 3 surges. It’s overwhelming and hard to imagine most of these deaths would just not be if the pandemic of misinformation was eradicated. So now, My husband and I are once again staring at each other in grief and disbelief……and wondering when science died.

We rolled into Milledgeville, Georgia in 2002; straight off the little highway connected to many other little webbings of other tiny highways with their distincly black and white signs declaring you have just entered into nowhere land. I will never forget passing onto the street that was one long strip mall of cheap clothes and fast food wrappers. I sank and swore under my breath as I died just a little. I was trapped on this ant farm of tiny highways that led to nothing of substance. This big city girl was being squeezed and stuffed into small town life. I couldn’t breathe and only did some of the strangest things breathe life into my caged up heart.

Milledgeville, it turns out, is an icon in lunacy. Growing up in Georgia meant that you may be threatened with being sent to Milledgeville to live at the Asylum. Taking up some two thousand acres, The Georgia Lunatic Asylum established in 1883 was once the largest mental health facility in the United States. Then called many other less kind things, it housed between 13-15 thousand patients. Practices, much less medicine was scarcely humane and people were sometimes chained to walls, children placed in crib cages and overall treated with less decency than my own pets. Legend has it that some of the less ill could be taken home to clean and cook for you and the residents had their own garden. It was said to have one of the largest laundry services on site making the hospital more like its own city. Some physicians and staff lived in tiny houses settled right next to the massive buildings that housed room after room of mentally ill patients. Without much regulation, most anyone deemed ‘sick’ could be left there and because of the lack of staffing, sometimes the patients became the workforce treating the other patients. Now some twenty five thousand patients are buried on the grounds of the hospital creating fuel for the often haunted gothic stories that have become apart of Georgia’s history.

By the 1960’s a governed decentralization of mental health facilities began and the onset of stabilizing medications for the severely mentally ill along with recognition that mental health issues did not constitute removal from society, created the slow disinegration of the once massive city. By the time I arrived for my volunteer orientation at the Powell Building in December 2002, less than half of the community was being used and many buildings were already condemed and haunted by its past.

I was sent to work with a professor and part time psychologist where the acutely physcially ill were housed and made an apparent impression that quickly led to a paying job, office and a behavioral health partner to work with. Stationed with the severly mentally ill geriatric patients, I was schooled in how many mental health disorders looked in their clearest diagnosis and through this lens, I learned more than I could ever offer them, affording me the ability to learn and understand their world view from living with them eight hours a day, five days a week.

And it was the little things that even school could not teach me that informed me of their world view. It is true that with the onset of major mental health disorders like schizophrenia and Bipolar I disorder, the brain is more suspectable to dementia due to the malformations occurring physiologically. Some clients liked to hoard wads and wads of paper while others wore their lipstick wild, drawing farther outside of the lines when less stable. Others signed their name as famous presidents and during the difficult times, many would yell, call me names and wildly run naked through the hospital. I loved them all dearly.

Over time I would find ways to be supportive without being overbearing. I learned to slowly slip out some of the garbage hanging about my patients clothing. Of course it always gave way to more later, but at least there was room made for the hunt to continue later. I would politely ask to help adjust my patients makeup as she went for a big outing like a dance at the auditorium or to shop. And I considered it a compliment to receive a good tongue hammering from one of the once stotic church ladies who kept loads of waded up tobacco in her mouth while spewing her ugly fuck language at me. Perhaps I learned a thing or two about flinging around my foul language from her.

I realize now what a debt of gratitude I owe them. Being a part of their lives gave me the foundation for what I continue to use today as I am in relationship with so many who will never exhibit the extremes I have known, but perhaps, like all of us, have a touch of madness that can be connected to those that showed me what it was like to live with in its most pure form. We would like to believe we are really somehow eons away from the Central State Hospital resident. I believe this is a disservice to my people then, as it is to us collectively now.

I would be entirely remiss to not mention my fellow behavioral specialist and friend Charles. He was known as the quienessential ‘jack of all the hospital trades’. It would not be odd to see him on his way to a treatment team meeting for a resident with three different tools in his hand and some part-a-sum-em that he was steadily fixing that broke. He had his way of making life in the hospital run smoothly, whether it was to create a calming effect on an irrate resident to fixing the dishwashers so the cooks could carry on with their work day. He would often make sure the once entirely too godly church woman had her tobacco, a vile behavior to her visiting friends. We were amused at her way with cuss words, especially when the tobacco ran out. I learned so much about how to be a good human in his presence and offer love where it often faded away in our quiet and isolated world of Central State Hospital.

All these distant memories occurred long before my own kiddo was born and in just these past few weeks did the two collide……And I promise, this next thing, I couldn’t make this shit up if I tried.

Fast forward to 2016. It’s a cold and dreary evening and my daughter and I are so excited to get ready for her first middle school dance. We prep with a new dress from Grammie, ballet slipper style shoes and a sparkly purse to make all the pretty things shine. Just a week before we execute our marvelous plan, I realize where we are going…….I am taking my kid and dropping her off to the newly acquired auditorium AT THE CENTRAL STATE HOSPITAL. RIGHT NEXT TO THE MAIN BUILDING ENTRANCE. I have died and died laughing. I wanted to call up Jenny Lawson, The Bloggess and beg her to listen to this story. I always understood that southerners joked about happily parading around their crazy, but I had no idea that they would send my kid right up in it!

As we ride into the back side of the campus, I squeal in delight showing her the building I worked in, where my office was and the people I adored there. I can see her rolling her eyes from the back seat as she says, “Mom is taking herself a trip down memory lane.” She is not amused and said, “This is why everyone said I was going to a dance at the asylum.” Lawd. What could I say but ‘Yes honey, yes you are.’ We passed the main hospital where residents stayed when they were physically ill and told her stories of life on the inside.

We cruised right by the Powell Building, the main entrance and I pointed and said, “This was where the residents went if they became actively psychotic.” Lyra gasped and said, “That sounds scarey! Did you have to handcuff them?” I unknowingly but nonchalantly said back, “Nah, we would sometimes just wrap them in a sheet, especially when they got naked.” Silence. And the next building over is the drop off point………… I swear, I swear, I CANNOT make this shit up. I still remain amused and astonished all in one.

Still….none the less…How can you not be in love? ❤ ❤

LIVE.OUT.LOUD.

Category: Milledgeville

COVID NATION

Southern Gothic Dancin’