For this task you?ll be looking at an interview in 1996 with Colin Sproul who was a nurse at the hospital for all of his career.
First watch the interview with Colin Sproul. What does he say that fits into the boxes below? After all, as Goffman points out, staff could be as institutionalised as residents.
Use the text boxes below to note down anything you think is relevant.
Interactive content appears here. Please visit the website to use it.Transcript
Characteristics
Batch living: People are treated as if they are all the same, without any individuality and controlled by strict rules so that there is little freedom.
Interactive content appears here. Please visit the website to use it.Colin Sproul?s working life as a nurse at Lennox Castle seems to have been regimented in similar ways to that of the residents. Nurses ate together with a daily menu he could still remember years later.
Binary management: Staff and ‘inmates? are controlled and kept separate by two different sets of rules and treat each other with suspicion, with staff feeling superior and inmates inferior.
Interactive content appears here. Please visit the website to use it.They were supervised on their way to the dances held at the hospital and, in the early days, they were discouraged from mixing with the doctors and were expected to salute the medical superintendent who was, as Colin puts it, ‘god almighty?. Their wages were low and their work seems to have consisted mainly of controlling residents.
The inmate role: People are stripped of their past lives and lose the identity and previous roles they had before entering the institution. This happens on admission when someone may have what is personal taken from them and instead are given the identity that the institution has decided on.
Interactive content appears here. Please visit the website to use it.Colin talks about the early years when residents? wages were cigarettes or pipe tobacco and when they were kept under control with force and punishments like the ‘five o?clock treatment?. Later, when drugs came in, controlling behaviour became easier. He preferred this. It was better for residents if they were ‘quiet and docile?, he says. Other changes came when the hospital was ‘nationalised?; that is, it came under the National Health Service in 1948. Residents were paid wages for their work; not enough in Colin?s opinion. Later still, in the 1960s, work ended for residents and this, he feels, caused problems as they had nothing to do all day.
The institutional perspective: The institution?s way of life takes over and determines the way in which inmates and staff experience and understand their lives ? often through events and activities designed to create a sense of community.
Interactive content appears here. Please visit the website to use it.He worked with ‘juvenile delinquents? who, he says, should never have been at the hospital. But in other parts of the hospital Colin saw how, on the wards, ‘high grades? played a useful role, looking after ‘low grades?, doing work that staff didn?t have time for. He remembers Jimmy Lappin as being ‘no bother at all?. Looking back, he says he enjoyed his life there though would have given residents ‘more freedom?.
Not a ‘total institution??
Interactive content appears here. Please visit the website to use it.Colin Sproul is describing what life for staff was like in the early days of Lennox Castle. From what he remembers it seems that the staff were subjected to many rules and also were punished for what were considered misdemeanours. However, he also mentions how staff were involved in using force against patients, and later drugs, to control behaviour. This was a 'total institution', which depended on staff to maintain order. Looking back Colin sounds as if he is recognising that those times were too oppressive for residents. In the next excerpt you'll hear two staff members talking about a later period in the life of Lennox Castle, when things were beginning to change.
From Colin Sproul?s account you learn about a community where control was a distinguishing feature of life for everyone, either by giving or receiving it. You also get a strong sense of hierarchy. Residents are firmly at the bottom, with nurses somewhere above them and the medical staff at the top. The ways in which the institution ensured that lives were regulated, rule-breaking punished and staff and residents kept isolated from the standards of rationality and ethics in the world outside make this feel like a very different kind of community.
You might like to compare your grids to see to what extent the interviews with James, Margaret and Colin tell us more than any document or pictures of the buildings.
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