Sanitariums
It’s only fiction, but I’m currently touring a book about fake doctors in a sanitarium. The problem is: residents are not mad. Fake doctors with fake certificates on the wall are giving them drugs to make them mad.
It’s only fiction, but does this happen? I suppose it does because people become garbage after a certain age. We don’t want them at work, and definitely not at home, so we throw them out to old age homes and sanitariums. Wait! It’s only families with money that can afford these old age or mental institutions.
Mental institutions whose aim is to make a profit, easily get away with inhuman practices because families do not care. They don’t know medication given to residents to make them ‘calm.’
Families pay for room and board to hold old relatives that are past their due date, liabilities to the good life young families are striving for. They are an embarrassment when we have visitors.
We condemn cruelty to senior citizens, but we forget that it was their choice. They lived alone in their youth, enjoying the good life. They only saw family during the obligatory Thanksgiving or 4th of July. They were independent. They wanted it that way.
Time passed and old age crept in. Their value at work diminished. Aches and pains made them wish for company. It’s something we don’t think about when we are young and wired up.
Let’s say we end up in a sanitarium, who will be in our corner, to make sure that we are not sanitized into madness? It will never happen to me. That is what we say.
By: Nonqaba waka Msimang.
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