Chaplain to the Mental Hospital
When I was a young minister freshly graduated and ordained, my first ministry in the 1960’s, after seven years of the slums of Newmarket, was in a small country church, in the small country town of Ararat, gateway to the Wimmera in Western Victoria. There I learnt the difficult art faced by all city bred ministers, of becoming a country parson.
I had only been in the town a little over a week when I was informed that I was expected to be the Chaplain at the Aradale Mental Hospital. Aradale Mental Hospital was a huge 19th century affair built with high walls, large wards in which 40 or more people slept in one large dormitory, locked sections and very few enlightened approaches to the treating of mental illness.
It was a low priority hospital as far as the government was concerned. There were more than 900 patients in Aradale set in a collection of beautifully white painted old stone buildings surrounded by a high stone wall set upon a hill outside of Ararat. The town depended upon the mental hospital more than anyone realised. It was the biggest employer of men and women from the community and had on the payroll more than a thousand local residents.
The Aradale Mental Hospital was, in the understanding of the Mental Hygiene Department of Victoria, an “end of the road hospital”. It was here people were sent when there was no hope for recovery, when they were long term psychotic patients, and when they were patients who had neither family nor friends and no one to visit them. Rather than occupy a more important bed in a more up to date hospital down in the city, these long term patients without relatives, family or friends, were sent off to Aradale and from that moment on were forgotten as far as the rest of the community or the government were concerned.
The second Sunday I was in Ararat I headed off to the Chapel to take the morning services in the hospital. I understood that attendances, which were compulsory for almost all of the inmates, were very large with two services one immediately following the other each with three or four hundred persons plus a large number of staff. I had not as yet met any of the senior staff but knowing how to conduct services and knowing that the members of staff who were on duty would have everybody in the Chapel waiting for me, I headed off to the Chapel, talked myself past the guards on the external gates and headed off towards the beautiful old stone Chapel into which hundreds of people were being herded by a large number of uniformed warders.
I was carrying a Bible and hymn book and walked over towards a group of men who were in line one behind the other. One of the warders turned round and saw me. I said to him “Good Morning, I am the new Chaplain to take services. I am wondering if you could introduce me to the Superintendent.” The warder looked at me and said, “Of course, you are the new Chaplain. We are so glad to have you with us. Now just get into line like a good laddie with these other fellows here and we will meet the Superintendent in due course.” With that he firmly took my arm and pushed me into line with the others. I repeated “I am the new Chaplain here and I am about to take this service.” With even greater emphasis he held my arm firm and said, “Of course, you are the new Chaplain but get into line with all these others here and we will be in the Chapel service very soon.”
It was then I realized that he meant business. There was no use arguing with him. So I dutifully got in line with the other men and was ushered in to an appropriate place. Fortunately the warder at the end of one of the rows where I was due to sit was more understanding and when I introduced myself as the new Chaplain he indicated that he had seen my photograph in the recent edition of “The Ararat Advertiser” and indicated to me that I should not be lining up with the men but that he would take me to the vestry.
The service moved me almost to tears. While it was true that many of the patients were totally, permanently psychotic, there were other patients who, because of oversight and medication and various forms of therapy were quite rational and for them faith was one of the last hopes they had of ever returning to normality. They sang the hymns with enthusiasm and joined in the prayers. They appreciated the sermon and the communion. Many of the people were disheveled and pathetic looking, many of them dribbling and drooling and many others making constant sounds or rocking from side to side. While I was preaching, standing not in the pulpit but close to the front lectern so that I might have better eye contact with everyone, a lady got up from the audience and wandered up and gave me a kiss on the lips and then silently walked back and sat down in her seat. I accepted her kiss as a sign that I was welcome in their midst.
After the service the wardens marched the people row by row out of the Chapel and back to their locked wards. One man, however, stayed behind to speak to me and permission was granted by the warden. He was a middle aged sufferer of Downs Syndrome and had that delightful smile and round face and kindly expression of Downs Syndrome people. He asked me if I would pray for his mother. I asked him how long he had been in this institution and he told me that since he was born he had always been in a government institution but every Sunday he asked the minister to pray for his mother. Over the next couple of years I prayed every week for that man’s mother and I wondered if, in the grace of God, she ever thought of him as much as he thought and prayed for her.
After the second service most of the wardens marched the congregation back but one tall distinguished man of military bearing with clipped moustache came up and introduced himself to me as the Deputy Superintendent, Colonel James Rasmussen. I thanked Mr Rasmussen for making himself known. He indicated that he would take me on a tour of the hospital. He took me round all the various wards, indicated to me the various kinds of people in the various wards and what was happening in the various forms of treatment. He seemed to know everybody and the various wardens opened and closed the doors behind us as we walked through. Occasionally I noted that some of the wardens were sniggering as I passed but I paid no attention to them. He introduced me round as the new Chaplain and told them all to give me the courtesy that the task required. I greeted everybody as warmly as I could but noticed that many of the staff had little time for the Chaplain as they seemed to smirk in a most derogatory fashion.
During the following week I came up to the hospital to present myself to the Superintendent Dr. Johannes Van Den Hooten. In discussions with him about my role and work as Chaplain to the hospital I discovered that he had no Deputy Superintendent. I said to him “But what about Colonel Rasmussen who showed around on Sunday and introduced me to the staff and everyone else?” “Oh,” said Dr. Van Den Hooten with a great smile. “So he was Colonel Rasmussen on Sunday was he? It was lucky he did not introduce himself to you as Ludwig Beethoven or Napoleon Bonaparte. He is quite a harmless fellow really and he does know what happens in the hospital.” I knew then why the staff, none of whom informed me, were sniggering and smirking as I fell into line talking seriously with the self appointed Deputy Superintendent as he took me from ward to ward. I certainly was not the first visitor who had been fooled by one of the patients who declared himself to be the Deputy Superintendent.
One of the amazing things that came to my attention in that first meeting with Dr. Johannes Van Den Hooten was his statement “You realize, of course, that many of our inmates here are perfectly sane, or at least as sane as you and me.” I must have looked rather quizzical because he continued, “You see they have a problem, but we are able to maintain them here with good security and medication, and they know that if they were to leave this hospital they have no homes or families and they then have all the stress of starting up life again. They never make it. They go off medication and before long are back in one of our closed wards. So even though they are quite mentally healthy, they prefer the security and the oversight that this hospital gives them rather than going back into the community. We need a programme to help these people. I am wondering if you would care to run a series of public education programmes, give a series of lectures and then have a quiz to see if the people have learnt what you have had to say, or something like that?”
He continued with a flash of inspiration remembering the then popular Bob Dyer quiz programme starring Barry Jones which was all the rage on the television, “Something like a Bob Dyer programme where you quiz the patients on the subject upon which you have lectured, then have a ‘pick a box’ programme. Anything like that that keeps the men and women who are mentally alert and bright functioning as normally as possible would be of great help. And I suggest you do something on a Biblical theme because there is an immense interest in the healing power of religion here.”
I gave his suggestion some thought over the next day or two and at my following week’s classes which I conducted for quite large numbers of mature aged adults, I announced I would do a series of teaching segments on a topic that they would choose. Someone suggested the Gospel of Matthew. That surprised me but everybody agreed except for some who wanted us to do the whole New Testament. So I agreed to start with Matthew’s Gospel and if they enjoyed it we would continue with the rest of the New Testament.
In brief what happened was this: For more than six months I lectured once a week to a large class of about 200 adults on a verse by verse exposition of the Gospel of Matthew. I then set them a number of questions for group discussion or for personal reflection. I also set them memory verses and the following week they repeated the verses in unison. Many of the people in the groups were very literate and of high intellectual calibre.
One of the men I had chosen as a group study leader and discussion leader told me, after a few months, his personal story. He had been the Principal of the Ararat High School but alcoholism had brought him to being terminated from his teaching career having lost his family, home and community respect. As a hopeless alcoholic he had gone into the hospital, had become dry and sober. He now worked as the hospital librarian in a voluntary capacity and was most interested in intellectual pursuits. “But if I were to leave this hospital I would have nowhere to go, no family, no home, no job. I would back on the bottle within a day. As far as I am concerned, this hospital is my home and my future hope.”
With men like this I realized I had an important job to complete.
At the end of six months we ran a pick a box competition where I prepared a hundred questions for twenty competitors on the Gospel of Matthew. The first thing that surprised me was this, that almost every one of those twenty people knew the entire Gospel of Matthew by heart. Then my second surprise. After 100 very detailed questions, eighteen of them had answered every one correct.
I declared that we would have the second competition the following week when we would decide from the eighteen candidates, the winner. In the meantime I got our Women’s Fellowship group in the local Ararat Church of Christ to donate a silver cup for the winner of the Bible Study competition and gifts of sweets for those who were runners up. I prepared 250 questions. At the end of a marathon competition asking the most detailed questions on the content of Matthew’s Gospel that anyone could find, I had five equal first place winners.
In many ways some of the people in that mental hospital were far more intelligent, astute and with greater intellectual abilities than anybody I had ever met in any church in which I had preached, or in any of the university study groups I had previously led.
At Christmas time the 200 people met together for a break up Christmas party. I had a dickens of a job persuading the Women’s Fellowship from the church to come inside the walls of the dreaded mental hospital to provide some female companionship for the large number of men that I had in my group. But they accepted the job with some timidity, especially when I indicated that we would have some ballroom dancing in the midst of our Christmas party because the men had told me that what they wanted more than anything else, was to have the opportunity dancing with a lady.
Ballroom dancing was anathema to most of these church ladies and to have them dancing with patients in a mental hospital was about the last straw. But such was the devotion of some of those ladies to what I was trying to do in the hospital that they came with a personally wrapped gift for each man and each woman and spent most of the afternoon in the Christmas celebration and in ballroom dancing with the men. However, after the Christmas cake and the Christmas gifts were distributed to everyone I noticed that one of the men in the corner had unwrapped his personal gift and taken out a face washer, a cake of soap and a bottle of green “Californian Poppy’ hair oil. He promptly undid the lid and drank the lot!
Probably the most amazing scene that I ever witnessed in the mental hospital occurred shortly before I left.
I was rung during the week to explain that at 2 p.m. Sunday afternoon there was to be a full scale emergency evacuation of the hospital. It was decided that a full scale fire evacuation was necessary and that there would be a fully co ordinated practice by all the emergency services in Ararat: the State Emergency Service, the fire brigade, ambulance service, bush nursing, police and all the other authorities that would be involved if there was a full scale emergency or a disastrous fire. Everybody connected with the hospital was to report as quickly possible at 2 p.m. on hearing the sirens wail.
I noted the time and cleared my schedule. At 2 p.m. Sunday, the sirens went off and staff and others associated with all of the emergency services ran to their cars and drove out of town along the road that led to the Aradale Mental Hospital. Everybody was present. The ambulances arrived, the bush fire brigade was there, the town fire brigade, the police and emergency vehicles and everybody ran to their posts. The fire brigades unrolled hoses and the ambulance men ran with stretchers. My job as Chaplain, was to oversee one ward and to check the evacuation of all patients.
There were only two aspects which were not to be followed through as in a real emergency. The first one was that the patients were not to be actually physically taken from the wards. As many of them were in locked psychotic wards, it was too dangerous to release these patients out into the community so we were to pretend that the patients were all taken out to safety. The second aspect was the patients themselves were not told of this emergency procedure on the basis that everything had to operate as usual.
I let myself in with my pass key to ward 43B. There were about 50 men in that dormitory. As I mentioned to you a number of them were quite intellectually above average and possessed of all of their faculties.
As the patients stood wondering what all the noise and confusion was about, they looked out the windows and through the bars at the strangest sight you can imagine: Ambulance men were running backwards and forwards with stretchers carrying invisible patients; firemen were unrolling fire hoses then standing spraying invisible water onto an invisible fire. Police were directing invisible lines of traffic and holding back invisible crowds. State emergency people were rushing with blankets to place round wet and shivering survivors who, like everything else, were invisible.
Several of the patients stood there shaking their heads and one turned to me and said “And they lock us up in here because they think we are mad.”
In all of my experiences over the years perhaps the most helpful experience in my personal growth, after years of university study in human psychology, was the experience of being the Chaplain of the Aradale Mental Hospital. Nothing helped me so much to deal with people on the outside than my experiences with those people on the inside.
So I headed back to the country manse at 90 High Street, opposite the Railway Station, having learnt another lesson in the difficult art of becoming a country parson.
GORDON MOYES