Riverview Hospital for Children and Youth. Richard J. Wiseman

      [ CHAPTER 1 ]

      ON THE WAY UP THE HILL

      …

      I did not set out to write a whole book about Riverview. Originally, my intention was to write a history of the children’s mental health system in Connecticut based on my sixty years as part of that system. Having witnessed a very slow evolution that still is a long way from meeting the mental health needs of children and their families, I had titled it “On the Way Up the Hill.” The story of Riverview was contained in one chapter.

      As I thought about the chapter on Riverview and my twenty years as co-director and then superintendent there, I became acutely aware of how my previous experiences in the mental health system had forged a philosophy regarding the treatment of seriously emotionally disturbed children and the function of a state hospital in the continuum of care that guided me in my vision of what Riverview should be. As I explored these paths, the chapter on Riverview turned into a book. Here you will find the story of how Riverview came to be and what it represented for children’s mental health treatment.

      Let me start with a brief account of the experiences that led me to Riverview, as well as a chronology of the hospital. When I graduated from high school in 1946, I attended Drew University, Madison, New Jersey. After my freshman year, I transferred to Springfield College, Springfield, Massachusetts, majoring in group work and community organization, and was invited to join the football team. By my senior year, I realized I was eligible for another year of football, so I returned and received a graduate assistantship in guidance and personnel. There I was involved in teaching an introductory psychology course called “A Student Structured Class,” which merged the work of three contemporary psychologists: Carl Rogers’s client-centered therapy approach, Abraham Maslow’s theory of motivation and self-actualization, and Milton Rokeach’s organization of belief systems. This formed the basis of my master’s research in 1952.

      In addition, I was asked to teach an orientation class for incoming freshmen. This happened to be the first year that women were admitted to the college. In my class there was a student named Eunice Ganung, and I stumbled over her name when calling the role. She came up to me to correct the pronunciation, and we became interested in each other. She became the first coed to graduate, finishing in three years, while I completed my air force commitment. When I returned we married, and within two weeks I took a job at Children’s Village, in Hartford Connecticut. I accepted a group work supervisor position, and my duties included supervising and directing a wide range of activities utilizing volunteers from the community. After a few years, my wife and I were asked to fill in as house parents in the cottage for older boys (twelve to fourteen years old). We became “parents” for a year, with twelve kids along with our own two-year-old—our boys.

      One of these boys, Jimmy, was always in trouble—except in our house. He adored my wife, Eunice, and would announce to the other boys at bedtime, “I don’t want anyone to be noisy and wake up Kenny,” our son. Ours was the quietest bedtime in the village. Nevertheless, because Jimmy was always getting into (playful) trouble and annoying other staff members, a meeting was called for the purpose of discharging him. I spoke up for Jimmy, saying that he always admitted to what he had done and never blamed anyone else. I liked him. We all agreed to give him another chance. He stayed as long as possible. When he aged out, he went to a facility in Litchfield. There, he contracted appendicitis. Since he had nowhere to go to recuperate, Eunice’s parents, who had a cottage at a nearby lake, took him in. He officially became a member of our family.

      Later, Jim became a successful businessman, owning his own contracting company. He married and has four children. On special occasions, Eunice and I are invited to sit at his family table. When we decided to move to a retirement facility, it was Jim, with his company van, who helped us move.

      My Children’s Village experience left me with a true sense of the importance of the other twenty-two or twenty-three hours in these kids’ lives and the feeling that the fostering of children around the clock is at least as important as their one- or two-hour therapy sessions. I made the decision to invest in further training, and we left for Michigan State University, where I would pursue a doctorate in child psychology. There I had the fantastic experience of working for three years in play therapy with an autistic child and also learned the importance of individual work. But I still wanted to work with children in groups, and I was the first student in our campus psychology clinic to run a play therapy group, with four children. Also during this period our daughter, Lauren, was born, and we became foster parents to a fifteen-year-old girl who had run away from a treatment center in Texas. Sue lived with us for two years, and we thought of her as a “borrowed sister” for our son and daughter. Sue’s two children and their children continue to be part of our extended family.

      When I returned to Connecticut, Ph.D. in hand, my first job was with the Connecticut Valley Hospital (CVH) Department of Psychology. That was in 1962, the very year children from other hospitals were relocated at CVH. Three years later I was asked to be director of the Connecticut Service Corps, a takeoff of the newly formed Peace Corps. During each of the next five years we hired 150 students to fill ten-week sessions. Students came from all over the world to spend time “socializing” with patients from the back wards of our four state hospitals (including the new Children’s Unit). One group went with my family and me to the woods in Danielson, Connecticut, and with the help of patients from CVH, Norwich Hospital, and Fairfield Hospital we built Camp Quinebaug.¹

      Every two weeks a new group of sixty patients from the hospital (adults in early summer, children in late summer) would become campers before returning to their respective hospitals to become patients again. Witnessing this transformation from patient to camper to patient was an amazing and frightening experience, one that left an indelible imprint on my thinking about the nature of hospitalization, or what I coined “patientitis.” And I wasn’t the only one who felt this way. Around a campfire one night, students were bemoaning how the campers resumed their roles as sick people upon boarding the bus for their hospitals. The students concurred that something should be done. Matt Lamstein, a student at Wesleyan University,