an article out today by a man in a mental health facility.. ( full article at the website listed, i am posting a portion of his interview.)
http://www.statesmanjournal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060417/NEWS/604170311/1001
30-year patient discusses life at the Oregon State Hospital
He shot two men in '76 and has 10 years left at Salem facility
ALAN GUSTAFSON
Statesman Journal
April 17, 2006
Robert Martyr has spent more than half his life as a defiant patient in Oregon State Hospital's program for the criminally insane.
Martyr, 58, was admitted to the Salem institution June 18, 1976 -- less than three weeks after he shot two men at a downtown Portland rooming house, killing one.
Thirty years later, he still claims he was wrongfully punished for defending himself.
Martyr, the name he adopted to protest his confinement, was locked up on maximum-security wards for 25 years. He was moved to less restrictive medium-security units about five years ago.
Martyr now has a private room in Ward 50I, which houses 36 patients, 33 of whom are women. He calls it "the girls' ward."
Facing 10 more years at the psychiatric facility, his routines include watching programs on the History and Discovery channels, going to group therapy, exercising, reading and writing, and talking with fellow patients.
Question: When did you change your name from Robert Robertson to Robert Martyr?
Answer: I changed my name on Nov. 27, 1984. I changed it while laying in restraints, from that moment on. I changed it in my brain and then I changed it formally as soon as I came out of restraints by writing letters to the Social Security office and everybody else.
Q: Do you have visitors?
A: No, I've never had a visit. Actually, in recent years, a couple old prisoners have come back to visit me. That's it. Oh, and in my first few years here, there was this Jehovah's Witness that came by to talk with me. That was nice. He used to come by and study the Watchtower with me. But I chose not to become a Jehovah's Witness, so that was the end of that.
Q: By some accounts, you have been hospitalized longer than any other current patient. True or false?
A: I've been here longer than any prisoner, and I've been here longer than any staff member, any guard, any superintendent, any nurse. You will find some prisoners that have an older number than me in that they were locked up before me, but they got out for five or 10 or 20 years before they came back again. Or they got out five or six times and kept coming back. I've been here steady, constant, flat time. No one except me has done a flat time 30 years, not even the employees.
........
Q: What meaning do you find in your existence?
A: Salvation. I really believe that my life has a purpose and that I'm going to be testifying about all this before God at the judgment day. The purpose in my life wasn't to enjoy my life; it was to take a stand for the truth, and that's what I've been doing.
Q: Can you imagine getting out of the hospital and having a different life?
A: I don't bother with it. I'm not much of a fantasizer. I deal with my life the way it is now. That's the way I think. I won't be leaving this place for 10 more years, so I can't compute that it my mind. I'm going to be very old, if not dead, by then.