The food that was served to the staff in the cafeteria at Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk was just as bad as the food served to the patients.   That’s why many staff members walked across the street to the cafeteria at the modern headquarters of Bechtel, where we could sit and dine among the white shirts and ties of the engineers who were designing nuclear reactors and cities in Saudi Arabia.

I was sitting at a table with my supervisor, Leo Sandron, when a loud, corpulent psychiatrist walked over to us.   After Leo introduced me as his psychology intern, the psychiatrist remarked, “Oh, so you’re on ward 407.   You know what they say?  If you can’t get to heaven, go to 407!”

Attempting to enter the modern era, a few years earlier the hospital started calling the wards “units,” in order to sound less like what they were, psychiatric wards for the patients no one else wanted or could handle.   The hospital in Norwalk, still functioning to this day, was the dumping ground for patients who were involuntarily committed throughout Southern California.

I was lucky to have been assigned to unit 407, because it was the only enlightened unit in the hospital.  That was due primarily to one remarkable individual, my supervisor, “Dr, Leo.”   Leo was one of  a dying breed; a humanistic psychologist in a hospital that was one of the most inhumane places I had ever seen.   His unit had the reputation of being the only one on the hospital from which patients were ever discharged.  That’s because it was arguably the only unit in the hospital where the patients weren’t trapped in a medical nightmare.

Leo had a “secret sauce,” a therapeutic ingredient that no one else in the hospital had.   That sauce was work.   On his off hours he would go to businesses in the area and convince the owners to hire his patients.   He would then give his patients “passes” to go to work in the community for part of their day.   At work, patients who had been hospitalized in some cases for decades would shed their engrained identities as patients and gain dignity for a few hours a day at a job “on the outside.”  On the inside Leo had a motto that he would recite to patients whenever he saw evidence to the contrary: “There are three things you aren’t allowed to do here: you can’t be sick, crazy or lazy.”

Leo had the glass windows removed that separated the nursing station from the day room, so the nurses and psychiatric technicians couldn’t hide and separate themselves from the patients.   No other unit did that, mostly out of fear for the staff’s safety.  He would smile broadly when he saw you and rub your shoulders; he believed in touching both staff and patients, and we loved it!   He held psychodrama groups daily, with the staff members participating alongside the patients, and although he was a rather funny looking, overweight fellow himself, he led daily exercise groups as well.  He not only gave me permission to run poetry writing groups with the patients, but he connected me with the foremost poetry therapy proponent in LA, who at the time was teaching at LA City College.   And he scolded me for submitting a patient to psychological testing, because he believed that testing should only be done therapeutically and the projective tests I was giving only led to patient regression.

When I worked with Leo it was close to the end of his career, and he appeared to be fighting off his own depression.   When I talked to him about it, it was clear that he was struggling with the medicalization of the hospital (and his beloved wife Frances’ declining health).   The new medical director put psychiatrists in charge of each unit, when previously the staff member who earned the most respect, regardless of their position, had led each unit.   And a renewed push was placed on medication as the only legitimate treatment method; the humanistic changes that Leo made on his unit were being pushed to the side.

Leo has long left us, and while I am not a big believer in heaven or hell being anywhere other than on earth, if there is a heaven outside of 407, Leo is there rubbing everyone’s shoulders.