Save Riverview??? Bullshit!!!

When the subject of Riverview comes up, there is a hue and an outcry coming from people who want to keep those buildings up as a testimony to the help that the Government of British Columbia gave to the people who were mentally ill. This makes me turn purple with rage. My viewpoint is that the buildings responsible for the incarceration of dozens of people who were kept medically sedated with pills because the staff there didn't want to actually have to do anything, should be torn down, razed completely to their foundations. And nothing should ever be put there again other than a monument to those who died there at the hands of the BC Health Care System.

I remember 5 years of terror, this was when I believed in my mother and wondered every day why she was going crazy. The infamous Crease Clinic was a staple of my life for five years. Constant visits to my mother. The brief lucid moments that she had in between doses of barbiturates, and her pleading and begging that she wouldn't have any more of these psychotic episodes. My mother was bipolar and had these hysterical self-harming episodes or she would flip out and go batshit crazy and start hitting anything close by her. These were scary times for someone who had to deal with his mother going f*ng insane from the age of 8-12. I wouldn't wish this on any other kid. My fellow friends never knew this. This was our dirty family secret that was never to be aired. At 12 I had to go toe to toe with a doctor 45 years my senior demanding that my mother be taken off barbiturates because they were doing absolutely no good. My mother also went through shock therapy to make her mind "all straight again". That did NO good whatsoever. And electro-shock therapy back in those days was a barbaric procedure. There was torture done in those buildings in the name of "mental health...CARE". Bullshit! Care wasn't even in their lexicon. They came to the building did their work, and the sadists who comprised the staff thought it was a good day when the inmates didn't "ACT UP"!

All Jensen Ackles has heard of was rumors and perceived impression that he had met up with ghosts during his filming there. Yes, there are people who died there. Crease Clinic is not merely entertainment for the masses. How many families have suffered at Crease Clinic and Riverview? How many families wondered if their loved ones would ever see the light of sanity again? How many families lost hope? And Hollywood uses these buildings as a form of entertainment? They make money on the memories of pain and suffering of countless families who shudder every time they see the buildings involved because of the years of suffering that they had to go through? And that's appalling.

I've said before that I want to see the buildings razed to the ground. And I will hold that stance to the day I draw my last breath. Those buildings, after what went through behind those walls, don't deserve to stand as a monument to what atrocities stood for healthcare back in the early days of psychiatric medicine.