Personal Narrative: Overbrook Asylum

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It was a gray day. The sun did not shine; it could not sever the layers of powdery black skies and the fog. The thick mist that was not really rain and not really fog covered the southeastern corner of New Jersey. It was depressing, just like most days in the area surrounding the Overbrook Asylum. On the outside, Overbrook was a welcoming place where patients were treated with care and respect; the inside was very different. I entered the asylum as a nurse in May of 1910 and was excited to be able to lend a helping hand to the people in need. I always had an interest in what made people tick and what made people think the way they did. The hospital had provided me a living area for the time I was there. The hospital wanted nurses who were on-call twenty-four hours a day, because the only time patients were allowed to leave the facility was to visit with family on holidays or …show more content…
I left December sixteenth, to visit family before the holidays and didn’t return until the night of the seventeenth. There was a window in her room, despite the fact it was boarded up, she still stood in front of it as she were to be looking outside into the life outside of her room. She’d contemplated whether she wanted out or not. The morning of December seventeenth she finally decided she wanted to see what was outside of her window and with her hands, she ripped the boards off. Louise saw real light for the first time in over eight months; she stopped dead in her tracks looking at the window, seeing her reflection, she began to scream uncontrollably she ran around her room yelling “curse the evil!” She fell on her bed scratching the flesh around her eyes and ripping into her eye sockets, pulling her own eyes out. Tearing her fingernails off, she began laughing then mumbling in between saying, “See no more. Think no more.” Louise was taken from my care to personal confinement and I was transferred from being a personal nurse to helping wherever I was

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