OSAWATOMIE — Osawatomie State Hospital is a collection of brick buildings set among a quiet, leafy campus on a hill overlooking the Marais des Cygnes valley.
Many of the looming, century-old structures still cast a shadow across the wide lawns, but for the most part they’re boarded up, no longer in use.
These days, the hospital coordinates the bulk of its care from behind the solid walls of a handful of low-slung, midcentury units that resemble army barracks.
During the day the hospital grounds are still. No one is out and about. It looks — with its empty red-brick buildings, stands of giant elms and sunlit quad — like an Ivy League campus that time forgot.
A narrow, curving road leads back to the admissions building. Inside, the lobby is unmanned. A sign instructs visitors to use the nearby phone to summon an attendant.
The phone is mounted to the wall of a small glass kiosk outside the building. The stiff, armored cord that links the receiver to the console is impracticably short, no more than 10 inches in length; a visitor has to bend awkwardly at the waist throughout the duration of a call.
In a place where patients are denied shoelaces, belts, even rosaries, the shortened cord is another dark precaution employed by Kansas’s oldest mental health hospital in the protection of its most desperate residents.
A sign posted directly above the phone lists one number for admissions, another for security.
“Is this security? I’m not sure I’ve got the right place. I have an appointment with the hospital chaplain, Rev. Yelton?”
THE ADAIR complex, which houses the admissions office, the chaplain’s office, and many of the patient beds, was named after the Rev. Samuel Adair, one of the hospital’s founders, and its first chaplain.
“I want to show you this,” says the hospital’s current chaplain, Jeff Yelton, pointing to a framed picture of Adair, whose doleful face stares out across the lobby from beside a pair of vending machines.
Yelton’s office is a small book-lined, one-window affair at the end of the building’s dimly lit hall. His desk is a riot of papers and folders, his floor heaped with boxes and more books, and a wall calendar pinned above his desk says it’s December 2014.
The 59-year-old chaplain speaks thoughtfully, has a deep, echoing voice and a gentle manner. Sitting across from him feels like office hours with a favorite professor.
After graduating from seminary and spending years preaching in small, rural churches across the Midwest, Yelton devoted much of his life to prison ministry, before arriving in Osawatomie nearly four years ago.
With Osawatomie so much in the news of late — a recent moratorium on admissions has created a strain on the state’s mental health system, which has riled community mental health leaders and local law enforcement (see Monday’s Register) — Yelton offers a rare perspective from inside one of only two remaining psychiatric hospitals in the state.
“We have a variety of patients here, from various economic and social backgrounds. Some suffer from schizoaffective disorder, borderline personality disorder, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, general anxiety disorder. … Just about every kind of imaginable and a few unimaginable psychological disorders. And so there is that difficulty, a kind of barrier that exists when you’re talking to them.
“But one of the changes that the Lord has made in my life was to give me a great deal of patience, a great deal of sympathy. So I am able, I think — and I don’t give any credit to myself with respect to this — but I think I am able to sit there and just listen while a patient talks to me about whatever is on his or her mind. That’s difficult for a lot of people. I think most people are uncomfortable in that sort of setting. I think most clergy are uncomfortable in that sort of a setting.
“You encounter things here that ordinary experience won’t prepare you for. … I’ve got patients that tell me ‘I’m the King of Germany, and I’ve got to go back there because my people need me.’ They mean it. ‘Please, I need to leave the hospital, today.’
“I don’t have to agree with what he’s saying. But I’m his connection with reality. Whatever’s going on in his mind is not real. But what he needs is a lifeline to the real world, and I try to be that.
“It’s amazing how many patients have lost all contact with their friends or family or what co-workers they had. They just don’t have anybody anymore. Nobody seems to care.
“I think sometimes that’s helpful, you know, when you are that sick, when you are so delusional, or are having hallucinations, that you don’t know what’s real or not real — it’s helpful to have somebody come along and say, ‘I care about you. I love you. I want you to tell me your problems. I hope you succeed. I want you to prosper.’
“We have chapel service every Wednesday afternoon at 3:30. … And I have therapy groups — eight every week — where I’ll sit down with four or five or sometimes as many as a dozen patients, and we’ll talk about spiritual issues together. I’ll go from building to building. All the groups are completely voluntary. And then, of course, I’ll see them one-on-one.
“Eighty percent of the patients here are fine 80 percent of the time. You might have a patient here, for example, that attempted suicide, and the police brought them to the hospital. But by that point, maybe they’ve completely given up on the idea of suicide. … So that might be somebody who is just like you or me — an awful lot of people contemplate suicide at one time in their life, but just don’t do anything about it.
“A lot of these type of patients are also professing Christians, and so here we both have the Bible in common. … The Bible has a lot to say about anxiety, for example, a lot to say about worry. And of course the most important thing the Bible tells us about worry is: We’re supposed to be trusting God for everything that we need, including our sense of safety and security. … Matthew, Chapter 6, Philippians, Chapter 4 — those are the verses I like to direct these patients toward.
“But then at the other extreme, you have patients that have been delusional or psychotic for years, and as far as anybody can tell, nothing seems to help. This is probably their last stop.
“I think we run into these people all the time, out on the street. … You see somebody out on the street, sort of muttering to themselves and asking for money. You don’t think of that person as somebody who needs help; you think of that person as somebody who needs to be avoided. And that’s sad, but we all tend to be self-centered and selfish. It’s something the Lord has helped me with. Until we really want to serve other people, we’re not going to look for opportunities to serve them, and if we’re not looking for opportunities to serve other people, we’re not recognizing their needs.”
WHILE THE Rev. Yelton’s role attending to the spiritual life of the residents doesn’t obligate him to the tidy psychiatric jargon of his medical colleagues — he is free to speak with the patients who seek him out about sin or God’s love or Christian duty — he has great respect for his co-workers (especially the front-line nurses), and is careful not to trespass on their expertise.
“I try not to talk above my paygrade. I don’t make a lot of pronouncements about psychiatry or psychology,” says the chaplain, who understands his main contribution to Osawatomie to be the lifeline he offers a population too often adrift.
In writing to the church at Philippi, Paul thanked them for their generosity during a period of illness: “Ye have well done, that ye did communicate with my affliction.”
