Murphy's Boy by Torey Hayden

Author:Torey Hayden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-01-08T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

Kevin certainly seemed to have settled that matter in his own mind. Whatever had happened to him over the summer during his brief flirt with the outer world, he had returned, deciding normalcy was not for him. He was crazy; he was completely resigned to staying that way. And perhaps it was that resolve that caused his incredible depression. I imagine concluding that the life he was currently living was the best available to him would be pretty shattering news.

I found this attitude no small thing to deal with, particularly in light of the hospital situation he was in, where drugs to dope him into incoherence were distributed every four hours. Just as bad was the token system all the patients were on. They earned points for appropriate behaviors and these points determined all aspects of their day, including going to therapy sessions, attending the on-unit school programs and gaining passes to go off the hospital grounds. It was a perfect setup for someone convinced he wanted to stay crazy.

Kevin refused to cooperate at every turn. If he did not feel like getting up in the morning, he did not get up. And he lost points. If he did not want to wash, he didn’t wash. More points gone. If he did not want to go to the schoolroom, he did not go. Each thing lost him more and more points or at least did not give him the opportunity to earn more, but Kevin was so unmotivated that none of the privileges he was losing was worth enough to make him try. The bottom line was seclusion, either in the patient’s room or ultimately in the seclusion cell. Kevin, after a few weeks, became almost permanently confined to his tiny room. He loved it. What they ought to have done was boarded up his window.

Understandably, the hospital staff was in a frenzy over him. He was so passively uncooperative that they were ill equipped to deal with it. He did not rage or scream or do anything aggressive, which merited time out in the locked seclusion cell, although when they came to the end of their ropes with him, they occasionally put him in for a spell anyway, to see if it might motivate him out of his lethargy. It didn’t. The psychiatrist upped his dose of antidepressants. No change. The staff decided to try the opposite of their normal routine. Kevin was not allowed to enter his room unless he earned the privilege, but the only place to keep him was in the TV room or the games room and they were hardly nonreinforcing. Or in the hallway where he would sit on the floor outside his room, his cloak of silence wrapped around him, and stare at the staff and visitors as they went by, his long legs sticking out across the corridor to trip unsuspecting passersby.

My greatest difficulty grew to be simply seeing him. I couldn’t half the time. He got put on a system where he had to earn points to have Jeff or me come, and often as not, he wouldn’t earn them.

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