ABSTRACT
Hospitalised some eight months prior to his acceptance at the hospital where I was working, Nick was regarded as a more than potentially violent patient, who had, in fact, drawn a knife against his mother and chased her about the comforts of their home in the fashionable suburbs of a mid-western town. He was eighteen, claimed to have dropped acid four or five times a week for five years, and had experimented with as many drugs as he could find (or manufacture), except heroin. He had discharged himself from hospital against medical advice after pressuring his parents to taking him back home. In the course of this prior hospitalisation he had been restrained on a few occasions, and because he was too disruptive he was isolated to protect the other patients. The Director of Admissions found him cooperative but extremely suspicious and monosyllabic. He appeared polite and formal in an eerily false manner, and the consensus of the hospital staff was that he was likely to ‘blow’.
