What is it like to be in a mental hospital as a patient? Lviv mental hospital for especially violent people Psychiatric hospital for violent people

Tell me, do crazy people make you afraid? Probably, after the epoch-making horror film “The Silence of the Lambs” with the inimitable Anthony Hopkins in the title role, for most of us the word mental hospital began to be associated with an escaped psychopathic pervert, like this very Professor Haniball Lector. Plus all these films from the “Wrong Turn” series, in which stupid students come to an abandoned psychiatric hospital, from where there is no way out, and they are tossed around like the revived souls of psychos. Scary? A little south of Lvov, in the village of Zaklad, a mental hospital and a high-security penal colony coexist side by side. It's funny, isn't it? What should be considered an extreme degree of personal degradation: ending up in a mental hospital, ending up in a colony, or transferring from a colony to a mental hospital? Where would you like to spend the rest of your days, in a madhouse or in a colony? Personally, I don’t even know; I categorically reject both options. And yet, about 12 years ago I almost ended up in a very real psychiatric hospital, and at my own request. Surprised? Yes, just an alternative was prison -

My story is boringly banal: while serving in the army, I stole several clips of ammunition in order to shoot targets with a machine gun in my spare time. God knows what crime, everyone took something away from the base, see the article on this topic "", for this they usually give a month in disbat and rightly so. But I didn’t want to go to an army prison so much that I threw myself into all seriousness - I decided to pretend to be a psychopath. Anyone who served in the army now smiles, saying that there is nothing original, every second soldier pretends to be a psycho in order to get out of service. And it is true. Military psychiatrists are shot sparrows; you can’t fool them with all sorts of ants in a jar. The general idea is that a real crazy person will never go to a psychiatrist to complain that he is sick. A real psycho considers himself a completely healthy member of society, has his own position and is ready to teach a lesson to those who disagree with him.

I remember I had a penchant for the epistolary genre (I still have it, you’re reading these lines), so I took and wrote a couple of pages of some nonsense in a notebook, where I described my vision of the world. I supplemented the writings with clumsy drawings. And that’s the crown of the matter! All that remains is to plant this crap on your colleagues in such a way that it will be “accidentally” found. Moreover, this should have been found not by someone who doesn’t care deeply, but by a person who cares about everything. This person had to convey the necessary information to his superiors. Therefore, I gave my writings to one soldier, who periodically “snitched” on other soldiers to the commander. Who smoked in the wrong place, who was off duty - all this quickly reached the management and we guessed who was ratting. By the way, now this man has risen greatly - he serves as a mid-ranking official in the Israeli Ministry of Internal Affairs; can destroy hundreds of families of immigrants from the former USSR with one stroke of the pen, declaring that they came with fictitious documents. Big boss!

But let's return to army service and the psychiatric hospital. The current official, and at that time an ordinary informer, completed the task assigned to him with a bang; after a couple of days, the alarmed unit commander first called me (namely, he was to judge me for the cartridge clips and send me from the disbat) and anxiously asked if everything was I'm fine. I replied that yes, I was close to achieving my plans. He frowned, what are you up to Sasha? Nothing, I answered, never mind, you’ll soon understand. He sent me to a psychiatrist. Hooray!

And then everything turned out to be simpler than I thought. There is no need to say anything to the psychiatrist; on the contrary, you need to ignore him and repeat that he will not be able to turn you into a psycho. I remember that I stubbornly insisted that I had heard a lot about the practice of sending unwanted people to a mental hospital, but this would not work with me, because I had a plan. What is the plan, asked the military psychiatrist, to which I answered him, “Leave me alone, this is none of your business.” And again I hit the top ten! I was sent for a compulsory psychiatric examination. It was no longer a matter of a military unit, but of the very natural psychiatric department of a large hospital. Three gray-haired doctors asked me amazing questions from the series “There are 5 multi-colored balls in front of you, choose any of them” - to which I said that I did not intend to play their games. Then they asked me what is my mother's name? I answer that my mother’s name is Valery. They were surprised, because it’s a man’s name, and we asked what my mother’s name was. I answered that since my dad left us when I was a small child, my mother was there for my sister, me, and my mom and dad. The doctors nodded happily, “Yes, yes, everything is clear, the family drama left its mark on the soldier’s psyche!”

The commission unanimously decided that I was partially fit for combat service. Do you know what this meant in practice? That I cannot be judged for the above-mentioned cartridge clips! I returned back to the military unit with the air of a conqueror of the universe, look, they fled, they wanted to put me in prison - it won’t work, because my extremely difficult mental state makes me beyond the jurisdiction. It was in these words that I told the unit commander my news. He grinned, “Maybe you managed to outwit the medical board, but you won’t fool me, I know that you are a malingerer.” It seems that I answered him something from the series “I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

Gift from Count Stanislav Skarbek

In 1875, in the village of Zaklad, 40 km from Lviv, a huge orphanage for orphans and the poor was built. This is a real masterpiece of palace and landscape art. The patron of the arts was the posthumous Count of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a Galician landowner, large landowner, founder of the New Polish Theater in Lviv, the so-called “Skarbek Theater” (now the National Academic Ukrainian Drama Theater named after Maria Zankovetska).

In an elegantly built beautiful building, 60 old people were under constant care and homeless orphans were educated. Children of many nationalities lived here, but education was conducted in Polish in a strict Catholic spirit. In addition to general education, children also received professional knowledge: girls studied gardening, cooking and sewing, and boys studied various types of useful crafts. In total, up to 400 orphans lived in Zaklad at the same time: 250 boys and 150 girls. To set up a shelter in the palace, Skarbek sold the theater building in Lviv, a menagerie, three towns and 28 villages. But the count received the palace-institute in Zaklad for eternal possession.

Skarbek died in Lvov on October 28, 1848. He was buried in Lvov at the Lychakiv cemetery. True, in 1888, when the construction of the palace in Zaklad was finally completed, the body of Stanislav Skarbek was reburied in a crypt in a small cemetery in the forest not far from his creation - the palace-institute. After his death, according to Skarbek’s will, his entire fortune was transferred to the maintenance of the “Charitable Institute for Orphans and the Poor” and the “Pension Fund for Actors, Directors, Singers of the Count Skarbek Theater in Lviv” created by him.

Now in the palace there is a mental hospital for violent madmen, and walking along the corridors you hear here and there the screams of Napoleon Bonaparte and the groans of Giordano Bruno burning in the fire -

All the windows have powerful, but very rusty bars -

The laundry of hospital patients is drying outside, and the smell of the hotel is so terrible that it is impossible to be near it. The feeling that the laundry is not washed, but simply being soiled with the feces of patients, is simply hung out to dry, and then returned back. No, I really don’t understand the purpose of clothes actually smeared with sewage hanging on the street to dry -

It seems that the problem with linen in the hospital is global: inmates of the psychiatric hospital hang dirty linen directly on the window bars of their wards -

We decided to go upstairs to look into the chambers -

Ignoring the periodically heard screams and screams, we stubbornly walked up the stairs until we hit the bars. There is nowhere to go further. All rooms are locked, you have to knock. But who will let us in? Most likely, the broad-shouldered orderlies will drive you to hell.

Kitty, aren't you being tormented here? You didn't choose the best place to live -

My other articles about Ukraine.

There are many objects in Moscow that are nationally famous and all that. Symbols of Moscow, and all of Russia: the Kremlin, St. Basil's Cathedral, GUM, VDNKh, Ostankino TV tower, for example. Books are written about them, tourists take pictures, not a day goes by without some shitty photographer stamping a post with the Spasskaya Tower or the monument to Peter by our beloved Tsereteli. They write songs, you sing.

Meanwhile, in Moscow there is a well-known brand, known throughout the country and sung in songs. It has become a household name for all its small provincial counterparts, but nevertheless, for some reason, is not popular in its coverage. No one sees crowds of tourists here, rushing to take pictures in the background and all that.

I, of course, mean our beloved Psychiatric Hospital No. 1 named after Alekseev, known in the world as Kashchenko or Kanatchikova Dacha. I make up for this injustice and sprinkle this post, dedicating it to all the victims of punitive Soviet psychiatry...

In the second half of the 19th century, Moscow came close here. The city border ran here along the Chura River, which flows along the southern border of the Danilovsky cemetery. With the city's approach to previously wild places and the construction of the Warsaw Highway, the area became a fairly popular place for setting up summer cottages for various nouveau riche of the economic boom. Thus, the Zagorodnoye Highway appeared - branching off from Varshavskoye and leading to numerous dachas located around.

So a certain large merchant Kanatchikov bought some land from landowners who went bankrupt in Paris and built a dacha.

The dacha was built on the high right bank of the Chura River, towering above its floodplain and from here there were views of the Zamoskvorechye region lying below. As can be seen from the map of 1888, it was located between two streams flowing from the southeast and northwest in ravines, and from the northeast - the Chura floodplain. The place is secluded and pleasant for the private transportation of actresses and all sorts of bohemian characters for subsequent pastime in all sorts of entertainment conducive to a country holiday.

Yes, it must be said that this place was previously occupied by a noble estate, which belonged to a certain landowner Beketov at least until 1835. One of the streams was dammed under him, forming a picturesque pond with the unusual name of the modern Becket.

At the beginning of the 19th century. it was an estate surrounded by groves, which belonged until 1835 to the brother of the prominent educator and publisher P.P. Beketov to Ivan Petrovich Beketov, a famous art collector and numismatist, member of the Society of Russian History and Antiquities. Here he had a country house, semicircular in shape, with a pond and a greenhouse, a beautiful winter garden of three sections, connected to the house through a poultry house located on a hill and surrounded by meadows and a park.

True, this place did not have long to remain secluded. Moscow grew rapidly; at the end of the 19th century, construction of the Moscow Railway began here. Our merchants were all patrons of the arts, and as soon as it became clear that dancing with actresses would no longer be so private, the owner sold the dacha to the city authorities for good money in 1869... The authorities did not really know what to do with the fallen gift, at first thinking of organizing either a slaughterhouse or something else

Finally, in 1894, in a building built by architect L.O. Vasilyev with funds raised by the mayor Nikolai Aleksandrovich Alekseev, a bedlam city psychiatric hospital was opened here.

This is what it looked like in 1915:

Here we see the central U-shaped building built in 1894 by Arch Vasilyev. Now this is the Administrative building. In the central part there is the Church of the Virgin Mary "Joy of All Who Sorrow".

The same in 1913

Central hall:

Since 1979, there has been a hospital museum right there. Free to visit. You can join for free:

In 1904-06, the head physician of the hospital was P.P. Kashchenko, whose name the hospital bore from 1922 to 1994, who gave the hospital its second popular nickname.

The tipus was interesting:

In 1876-1881 he studied at Moscow University, from where he was expelled for participating in the student revolutionary movement and deported from Moscow to Stavropol. In 1885 he graduated from the Faculty of Medicine of Kazan University and received a medical degree. In 1889–1904, director of the psychiatric hospital of the Nizhny Novgorod zemstvo (Lyakhovo colony). He was in charge of the Moscow and St. Petersburg psychiatric hospitals. In 1904-1906 - chief physician of the psychiatric hospital named after. Alekseev in Moscow.

In 1905 he took part in revolutionary events in Moscow, providing assistance to the wounded during the uprising on Presnya. In 1905-1906 headed the illegal inter-party Red Cross. Organizer and chairman of Russia's first Central Statistical Bureau for recording mental patients. From May 1917 he headed the neuropsychiatric section of the Council of Medical Colleges, and in 1918-1920 he headed the department of neuropsychiatric care of the People's Commissariat of Health of the RSFSR. He was buried at the Novodevichy cemetery.

In Soviet times, due to the need to expand punitive psychiatry, the hospital was added and expanded.

Let's take a walk.

In the main building there is this arch:

Having passed through it, we will go out to the technical building. Kitchen, boiler room, laundry - all this is concentrated here:

Yes, by the way, in addition to the central church, there was another one on the territory - in the farthest corner, consecrated in honor of John of Rylsky. At the morgue. The morgue is located here today:

In addition, on the site in front of the facade of the Main building, a chapel was also erected in 1994, dedicated to the founder of the hospital, Alekseev:

Yes, in addition to religious spirituality, secular spirituality is also provided. There is a club. By the way, crazy people have a pretty fun life. It was here in 1999 that I saw a 1.5-meter diagonal TV for the first time in my life. I was standing in the cinema hall. The psychos who were not violent were taken to watch a calming movie based on it. And here’s more from cultural education already in the departments:

Yes, besides, relatives can take the crazy person and take him to the dining room:

Numerous buildings and departments are scattered around:


If I'm not mistaken, this is one of the paid branches. Here all sorts of show business stars were cured of delirium tremens, overdoses and all sorts of alcoholism. In my memory, Milyavskaya was lying somewhere, coming out of a drinking binge...

This is a catering unit in the technical building. Here the walkers and soldiers gather for lunch to sort out the cans and deliver them to their departments. Experienced orderlies keep a watchful eye on them. And then there were cases...

Walking area behind fences for the violent:

Non-violent relatives can take a walk in the park. There are benches and even fountains. No swans. To avoid.

On the territory there are a rehabilitation department, workshops, a “senior” department, and all sorts of tops, right up to the educational departments of medical universities and mud baths.

Well, after a little walking around the territory, let’s go inside.

Dining room. You can watch TV, play checkers and just stare blankly at one point. Not forbidden.

Here's the TV. The nurse has the remote control. If you want to switch, you need to ask permission.

Those who don't want TV can take a nap until lunch...

Creativity of the sick:

Library in the department.

Patients who were unlucky enough to visit psychiatric hospitals tend to remember them with a shudder. However, today's mental hospitals are simply a paradise compared to what happened in similar institutions several decades ago. The few surviving photographs testify: in that era, mental hospitals were a real branch of hell on earth!

Restrictions on freedom were much stronger than now
At a time when effective and harmless sedatives did not yet exist, doctors used simple and effective, but extremely painful and often dangerous, drugs to calm patients and prevent them from harming themselves and others. Ropes and handcuffs, being locked for days and weeks in cramped closets or even in boxes - everything was used. Such drugs often further intensified the patient’s psychosis instead of truly calming him down, although the medicine of that time most often had no idea about this.

A completely healthy person could end up in a psychiatric hospital
At the end of the 19th century, the list of indications for hospitalization in psychiatric clinics in the United States included the habit of masturbation, immoral behavior, incontinence, excessive religious zeal, association with bad company, as well as reading novels and using tobacco. Those who were hit in the head by a horse's hoof, who had been in war, or whose parents were cousins ​​were also subject to forced hospitalization. A compact list of several dozen testimonies leaves no doubt: each of us, somewhere in 1890, being in the United States, could easily have ended up in a mental hospital.

Patients were treated using whipping machines
These machines were used a hundred years ago in psychiatric clinics to alleviate the symptoms of the disease in the mentally ill. The heavy-weight sticks beat the patient all over his body from the back of his head to his heels: the doctors hoped that this would make him feel better. In reality, everything happened just the opposite - but, again, the doctors had no idea about this yet.

Doctors actually believed masturbation to be a cause of mental illness
Just a few decades ago, doctors were firmly convinced that masturbation could cause insanity. They quite sincerely confused cause with effect: after all, many patients in psychiatric clinics, unable to control themselves, engaged in masturbation from morning to night. Observing them, doctors came to the conclusion that masturbation caused the disease, although in fact it was only one of the symptoms. However, in the old days, patients in psychiatric clinics were required to wear such bulky and uncomfortable units so that they could not masturbate. Walking in them was uncomfortable and sometimes painful, but despite this, clinic patients lived in them for weeks and sometimes years.

Women in psychiatric clinics were forcibly subjected to "vaginal massage"
Surprisingly, while masturbation was considered dangerous for men, it was prescribed to women as a remedy to treat hysteria. This diagnosis could be given to a woman for anything - from irritability to sexual desires. The treatment was prescribed so-called “vaginal massage”, that is, massage of the vagina using a special device to bring the patient to orgasm. Of course, no one asked the patients’ permission, and yet, given the situation in mental hospitals, there was by no means a worse, albeit useless, method of treatment.

Steam cabins were also considered a sedative
These boxes are not cages, but special soothing steam cabins from the late 19th - 20th centuries. Despite their terrifying appearance, there was nothing particularly scary about them. In fact, these were similar to the modern single-seat barrel saunas that can be found in many spas today. Doctors believed that such a steam room calmed violent patients. This method of treatment could even be called pleasant, if not for one “but”: as you can see in the picture, patients were put in boxes fully clothed, which turned the pleasure of the sauna into slow torture.

Women were more likely to be patients in mental hospitals than men
It was much easier to send a woman to a mental hospital several decades ago than it was to send a man. For this purpose, the already mentioned diagnosis of “hysteria” was most often used, under which anything could be fitted, even resistance to a rapist husband. Reading was considered another risk factor: it was believed that it definitely leads a woman to madness. Quite a few representatives of the fair sex spent years in psychiatric clinics only because, as hospital documents stated, they were found reading at 5.30 in the morning.

Psychiatric hospitals of previous eras suffered from overcrowding
With such a huge number of indications for hospitalization, it is not surprising that all psychiatric hospitals of earlier times suffered from an excess of patients. They dealt with overcrowding without ceremony: people were crammed into the wards like herring in a barrel, and in order to fit more, beds and other “excesses” were removed from the wards, giving patients the freedom to sit on the bare floor, and for greater convenience, also chaining them to walls. Modern straitjackets against such a background seem to be an example of humanism!

Children lived in mental hospitals for years
In earlier times, there were no special clinics for children, so young patients - suffering, for example, from mental retardation or persistent behavioral disorders - ended up in the same clinics as adult patients and lived there for years. But, what’s even worse, there were a lot of healthy children in mental hospitals of those times. The children of patients, medical staff, single mothers who had nowhere to go with their babies, as well as children left without parents lived here. This whole horde of children was raised mainly by patients: the medical staff, due to their heavy workload, simply did not have time for this. It’s not hard to guess who these kids grew up to be.

Doctors regularly used electric shock as a treatment
Electroshock therapy, when a high current is applied to the patient’s head, is still sometimes used in psychiatric clinics, but only in cases of global disorders, when the patient, as they say, has nothing to lose. But half a century ago it was used all the time, including as a sedative. In fact, electric shock did not calm anyone down, but only caused unbearable pain to patients. The famous mathematician John Nash, who suffered from schizophrenia, was subjected to electric shock in American psychiatric clinics back in the 1960s, and subsequently recalled this experience as the worst of his life.

Trying to treat with lobotomies, doctors turned patients into vegetables
Back in the mid-twentieth century, many psychiatrists considered lobotomy a real means of ridding a patient of schizophrenia or obsessive-compulsive disorder. This operation looked creepy: the doctor inserted something like an ice pick through the corner of the patient’s eye and, piercing the thin bone of the eye socket with it, with a sharp movement blindly cut through the nervous tissue of the brain. After the operation, the person lost his intelligence, his coordination of movements suffered, and often blood poisoning began due to unsterile equipment. And yet, lobotomy has been considered a panacea for schizophrenics for decades: for example, in the United States in the early 1950s, about 5,000 lobotomies were performed per year.

You could end up in a psychiatric clinic because of your non-traditional sexual orientation
The fact that incorrect sexual orientation was considered a mental illness a hundred years ago probably does not surprise anyone. It is amazing how doctors inferred sexual preferences when deciding whether to take a patient to the hospital! So, in one case, she spent several years in a mental hospital just because she liked to wear trousers and tinker with equipment. There are known cases of several women when they were recognized as mentally ill due to too low a sexual appetite: asexual women in those days were considered closet lesbians, believing that a normal woman in her right mind does not have the right to simply reject her husband!

Both a lack and an excess of religiosity led to a mental hospital a hundred years ago
A hundred years ago in the United States, a person who refused the help of a therapist or surgeon for religious reasons (as, for example, fans of Scientology do today) had every chance of going to a psychiatric clinic instead of surgery. But the lack of religious feeling was also fraught with ending up in a mental hospital: there are several cases where people spent more than one year in houses of grief just because they openly declared themselves to be atheists.

Doctors who treated the psyche knew almost nothing about it
A hundred years ago, doctors knew almost nothing about the functioning of the human brain, so their treatment was more like cruel experiments on people. Patients were doused with ice water, their skulls were drilled, and parts of their brains were removed, not because the doctors were confident in the effectiveness of these measures, but only in order to understand whether they worked or not. It is not surprising that the mortality rate in psychiatric clinics a century ago was perhaps slightly lower than in plague hospitals.

Abandoned mental hospitals today - objects for dark excursions
Only in the 1970s and 80s did the Western world begin to abandon the practice of indiscriminate hospitalization of patients in “houses of grief” and cruel and ineffective treatment methods. In the 1970s, psychiatric hospitals in the United States and Europe began to close en masse. At the same time, there were many real patients on the street who were not able to take responsibility for themselves. Well, the buildings of former psychiatric clinics today are the most popular objects for young extreme sports enthusiasts, who scour every corner here, looking for traces of the era of the bloody dawn of psychiatry, which lasted several decades.

Good day.

I recently visited this establishment as a patient with a depressive disorder. I prepared for two weeks, it was scary. The result of such wonderful films as One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Girl, Interrupted and the TV series AHS. Everything turned out to be not so scary, but still, the overall feeling from this place is disgusting...

A modern "fool" is a high-security institution, with established rules and prohibitions, where, out of many prohibitions, there is at least one indulgence. This is smoking, which is allowed 3 times a day, if the shift is good, then it happens 4 times and even 2 cigarettes. I called it “herding fools.”

Since now is the age of scientific and technical progress, and everyone has various gadgets, it’s crazy. The hospital only allows mobile phones. And then, twice a week, the time of use is no more than 15 minutes.

The worst thing for me was that the bath day was once a week. And so, like observing hygiene procedures, this means sitting on the toilet and drawing warm water from enamel buckets with half-cut plastic bottles, at 6.30 and 19.30, every day.

I was impressed by the food of this government institution... I won’t describe it in detail, I’ll just say that there is very little and all the food is absolutely bland. Therefore, the majority of patients “live” on messages from loved ones. And it is during the issuance of parcels and their subsequent hamstering that the “circus of freaks” begins! The medical staff seem to be used to this and are absolutely indifferent, sometimes they just shout at me. So, those who are not visited, or who are rarely visited, create a “heap and a lot” of begging, snatching and even brazenly taking food from weak patients. As I wrote above, this circus is not stopped, it is regulated, i.e. This action occurs from 10 to 20 minutes, three times a day.

In the department described (in view of the island region, the mental hospital has at most 5 departments), where I had to spend 16 terrible days, “everyone” lies. I mean diseases. They are separated only into wards. The first 3 are observational, the remaining 4 are for more or less adequate patients. But the attitude of the medical staff towards all patients is almost the same. There is no division into “normal” and “abnormal”. All of us lying there are abnormal for the staff... I feel universal sadness because of this...

I wrote "refusal of treatment." I couldn’t come to terms with all of the above and one more factor. I don’t know how it is on the mainland or in other countries, but if you go to the Sakhalin mental hospital, they only “treat” your head. If there are various diseases of the body, such as joints, gastrointestinal tract, kidneys, allergies, etc., no one cares about these diseases. Be strong, soldier!

After 14 days of my torment, I caught a serious cold. Apart from paracetamol, they didn’t offer me anything... Knowing my body, without appropriate treatment, the cold could turn into a more serious form, I had to forget about my depression and urgently get out of the department.

In conclusion, I will write about our doctor. Not only is he the only one in the department, but he is also elusive. You really have to run after him and catch him by the hand. Because, besides, when you enter, you talk with him, and then the audience with the “elusive avenger” is only on Wednesdays and that’s it. There are specialists who come, but in order to be called, you must either state what is necessary as much as possible upon admission, or really “tease” the medical staff so that they record the problem/request.

With that, I’ll finish the story. Try not to get sick at all, and especially take care of your psyche.

ONE of the first pictures that appears before your eyes when you hear the word “mental hospital” is gloomy walls and bars, strong orderlies strapping a violent patient to the bed, and an evil doctor with a large syringe... But inspired by Ken Kesey in the book “Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” I didn’t see any horrors in Gaityunishki, Voronovsky district. This is an ordinary hospital with its own medical staff and patients. But the patients here are special people. Murderers, rapists, thieves, swindlers, recognized by the court as insane at the time of committing the crime... Under the conditions of the most difficult type of supervision, strict, they are trying to return to a normal way of life in the usual sense - to recover and go home. True, the duration of the “term” here is measured not by the severity of the offense, but by the severity of the mental state.

The administrative building of a psychiatric hospital, an architectural monument of the 17th century.

A REPUBLICAN psychiatric hospital, from which the border with Lithuania is only a few kilometers away, is not difficult to find. At the entrance to the village, an information sign points in the right direction - “Castle. Gaityunishki. An architectural monument of the 17th century."

It is in such a unique place from a historical point of view - the only surviving fortified house in the country, built by the Dutch Protestant Peter Nonhart - that the administrative building of the medical institution is located. There is also dentistry, a laboratory and other treatment rooms. Next to the castle is a modern building with a walking courtyard, which clearly stands out against the background of an attractive architectural composition. It has three departments where patients are kept (there are currently 280 such people in Gaityunishki). The entrance to the territory is through a metal gate, near which there is a guard constantly on duty. There is barbed wire around the perimeter. A secure facility is a refuge for mentally ill people who have broken the law. If they did not have a mental disorder, many would receive maximum sentences.

Hospital department.

The building has an inaccessible view only from the outside. Inside there are typical hospital corridors with nursing stations and wards. True, each of them is locked. There is one orderly for two wards, who keeps order and gives the patient food that is brought by relatives. The daily routine corresponds to sick leave, only with some reservations. Patients have less free time: getting up at 6 am, procedures, breakfast. Then examinations, consultations, medications. An hour is allotted to take care of personal matters. Hairdresser twice a week on schedule. Specially allocated time for bath procedures. According to a special schedule - calls and visits.

Chief physician of the hospital
Margarita Kudyan

Previously, the hospital coexisted with patients with different conditions of detention - enhanced and strict. But after 50 high-security beds were transferred to the Republican Mental Health Center in Novinki in 2012, only the “strogach” remained in Gaityunishki. The head doctor of the hospital, Margarita Kudyan, does not try to draw an analogy with the prison system, because it is not criminals who are kept here, but patients.

It is difficult for a non-medic to determine this line. And really, how to qualify, for example, the murder of a mother by a son just because she did not give five rubles for a drink? Or the actions of a rapist, who is responsible for dozens of mutilated lives? It is difficult to attribute the illness and action of another patient who is currently undergoing treatment in Gaityunishki. A man threw his little niece out of a seventh-floor window. Like a kitten. The sister (the girl’s mother) went to the store, the grandmother was somewhere nearby. The child cried constantly, and this drove his uncle crazy. He decided to calm the little one down in this way... Later he explained the action simply - she was in the way. No remorse.

Often indignant relatives of victims call the hospital - how is it that the killers live in warmth, satiety and comfort? Doctors do not assume judicial functions. For them, patients are people in need of help. And not only psychological. Sometimes people come in who need to be taught how to serve themselves. Margarita Georgievna recalls a case when they received a guy whose mother kept him chained in a barn until he was 18 years old. He didn’t know how to read and write, brush his teeth or wash his face. After some time, the patient got comfortable and learned the rules of hygiene. Moreover, he discovered his talent as a singer: he began to actively participate in amateur performances and perform. I realized that it’s not only vodka that brings joy in life...

Ward orderly Ivan ADAMOVICH.

Alcohol is one of the reasons that leads to crime. In a drunken stupor, he misunderstood his glass mate, a fight broke out, and the result was murder. Moreover, statistics show that there are no more mentally ill people who have crossed the line of the law than healthy ones. Both one and the other rob and kill. The only difference in this case is the punishment - a prison term or compulsory treatment.

BEFORE 1989, mentally ill people were treated directly in colonies, where the prisoners themselves worked as orderlies. After this, they began to be transferred to psychiatric clinics. Then the first batch of 60 people arrived from Mogilev to Gaityunishki. Colleagues from the regional center taught us the intricacies of working with such a contingent, because starting in 1956 (that’s when the hospital opened), the institution specialized only in the treatment of mentally ill patients. No criminals for you. When doctors began to sort out the cases and read the medical histories, terrible pictures emerged. Murders, rapes, robberies... Ugly and ugly things were shocking. But, oddly enough, they didn’t scare me. Margarita Georgievna explains this simply:

The trainer entering the tiger's cage is also a little afraid of them, but knows the weak points of the animals. Thank God, we don’t have tigers, but patients we treat. If, suppose, the doctor did not look at the history of the disease, did not really talk with the patient, he simply will not be aware of his characteristics, and therefore will not know what to expect from the patient. But when you talk with him, and more than once, a trusting relationship is built. You see that progressive remission is underway and medications are helping, why should there be fear? Yes, there are forms of the disease when a person can jump up and perform an unexpected act, but these are only 6-8 percent of the total number.

True, there are violent people in Gaityunishki. Not long ago, a patient was admitted to the hospital with minor offenses. But nevertheless, he is dangerous to society - he makes troubles everywhere, shouts, and tries to fight. The result is a whole folder with acts of analysis of each of his conflicts. You need to be careful with such a person, have a clear conversation and not allow any allegories. In the case of this patient, in addition to compulsory treatment, another function of the hospital comes into force - temporary isolation from society. Even doctors cannot predict how long it will last:

We do not have strict restrictions on length of stay. On average, patients stay with us for at least five years. We can only write a submission to the court, in which we indicate that the patient has been in remission for a long time, takes a small dose of medication and does not pose a particular social danger. Then the court decides what to do. They don’t go home from us right away: compulsory treatment continues, but with general supervision at the place of residence. It is carried out on the basis of regional hospitals, which have a compulsory treatment department, where medication intake is monitored.

WHAT are mentally ill people treated with? Many of the drugs that scare people have not been used in psychiatry for a long time. Haloperidol, for example, portrayed in movies as a “terrible drug,” is prescribed in adequate doses to relieve a person of hallucinations. Current medications can relieve auditory and visual hallucinations, delusions of persecution, and make epileptic seizures less common. In this area of ​​medicine, medications are approved by protocols; a diary is kept for each patient, where the use of any drug is justified.

But there are cases when drugs are powerless. A special story is sexual perversion. “Such people,” notes Margarita Kudyan, “most often have long-livers, because such things cannot be cured. The same pedophilia. It is proposed to treat her with hormone therapy and surgical castration. Doctors are still arguing about the effectiveness of such methods. Now a citizen of Belarus, who has more than one rape record, has been transferred from a Russian clinic to Gaityunishki. He committed all his acts in a neighboring country, and both before hospitalization and after discharge he raped and robbed. How can this be released into society?

Doctors say that not all patients realize their guilt. This is how their psyche works. And some, on the contrary, are very worried after emerging from psychosis. Doctors are trying their best to help such patients. If there are relatives who have not turned away, this is a big plus.

AT THE MOMENT of my arrival, it was an appointment day at the hospital. Mothers and sisters of patients are leaving the meeting. Those who, despite everything, continue to love them. Even innocent murderers are forgiven.

Is it possible to understand that something is wrong with a loved one, there are mental deviations? - I ask the head physician.

This is very difficult to do. Relatives become myopic: they try to explain all the oddities by some circumstances. The fact is that we are all afraid of getting mental illness. Therefore, there is often denial: a loved one was upset here, this is the situation there. Of course, for the most part, parents see that something is wrong in the family. They even take children to specialists, but the patient does not open up. Over the course of several visits, it is difficult for a physician to understand and see the extent of the disease and the level of anxiety. We need to watch. And now the mother cries and says: I took the child to a specialist...

There is an opinion that if someone ends up in an institution of this type, then they are certainly lost as a person. However, a psychiatric hospital does not aim to throw the patient out of society, but, on the contrary, to help him return to this society. But are people ready to accept those who have taken the path of correction?

Margarita Georgievna recalls a case when a mentally ill person came to them. The court found him guilty of a terrible crime - he killed a little girl. With particular cruelty - a bloody body was found in the forest. The criminal's family, who lived in a small town where everyone knows each other, became outcasts. A mentally ill son is a good reason for gossip, especially after he has committed a terrible murder. The relatives of such a monster were simply forced to leave for the Russian Federation - they were not given life. But the mother’s heart felt that the son was not to blame. As a result, she achieved a re-investigation. The accusation actually turned out to be wrong, and the man was acquitted. Yes, he remained mentally ill, but he did not commit a crime. However, he was never able to return home - the villagers would not accept him. Brand.

DOCTORS are not interested in putting a person on four meals a day and making him a dependent. Therefore, every effort is made to prevent this from happening. However, even the former patient of a psychiatric hospital himself needs to have a strong character and will in order to start a new life from scratch. Such examples do occur.

The chief doctor recalls a patient with a severe form of mental illness who killed his stepfather in a drunken brawl. All his relatives turned their backs on him and did not maintain contact with his mother. There was a young daughter left at home. After five years of treatment, he returned home and started a new life. He became an individual entrepreneur, renewed his relationship with his daughter: he bought her an apartment and supervised her education. He still calls Gaityunishki. Doesn't forget doctors...