Woman Convulses and Dies, Ignored, in Waiting Room of New York City Hospital

Posted by Jill Filipovic, Feministe at 1:39 PM on July 3, 2008.

If this story doesn’t disgust you, I don’t know what will:

It was a nightmare captured on surveillance video. A woman who had waited nearly 24 hours to be seen in a Brooklyn public hospital collapsed, fell face-down on the floor, convulsed and for nearly an hour — while several hospital staff members looked at her and one staff member even prodded her with her foot — received no aid. At some point during that time, she died.

The New York Civil Liberties Union has been sounding the alarm about New York City hospitals for some time now, calling the emergency room and inpatient units at Kings County Hospital “a chamber of filth, decay, indifference and danger.” It’s disgusting that someone had to die before the city bothered doing anything about it.

And this is just the one that we know about because the video was released on YouTube. The callous disregard that the hospital employees showed to Esmin Green is not possibly a one-time occurrence. Ms. Green was a poor, mentally ill woman of color. She apparently didn’t matter one bit to the employees at the hospital who were supposed to be giving her care. I would bet everything I own that she is not the first “unimportant” patient to receive that kind of treatment — she is just the first to have her death broadcast on YouTube, and so she is the first that the city cannot turn a blind eye towards.

And via Panopticon in the comments:

A state agency, the New York State Mental Hygiene Legal Service, filed a lawsuit a year ago, calling the psychiatric center “a chamber of filth, decay, indifference and danger.”

Patients, the suit said, “are subjected to overcrowded and squalid conditions often accompanied by physical abuse and unnecessary and punitive injections of mind-altering drugs.”

“From the moment a person steps through the doors,” it added, “she is stripped of her freedom and dignity and literally forced to fight for the essentials of life.”

The suit was especially critical of the hospital’s emergency ward, saying it is so poorly staffed that patients are often marooned there for days while they wait to be evaluated.

Sometimes, the unit runs out of chairs, according to the lawsuit, forcing people to wait on foam mats or on the waiting room floor. The suit also claims that bathrooms are filthy and filled with flies, and that patients who complain too loudly are sometimes handcuffed, beaten or injected with psychotropic drugs.

In case this doesn’t make it clear, mental health (and health care in general) is a feminist issue. This should appall and enrage all of us.

And no, it’s not just a New York City thing. A similar incident happened in LA about a year ago; and it’s only the most shocking horror stories that get reported. Usually, the people who are neglected are so low on the social totem pole that their deaths are just swept under the rug — another crazy colored lady? Nothing to see here.

We’ve had a lot of conversations at Feministe lately about mental illness, disability, the words we use, and how all of that intersects with feminism. Esmin Green and Edith Rodriguez died in part because they were poor women of color without very much influence, access or power. They died because they sought help in a system that is over-burdened to the breaking point — a system that enables the people within it to make cruel choices and to perpetuate racist, sexist and ableist hierarchies in their jobs. Esmin Green wasn’t just a woman; she was a woman of color who was mentally ill. She was “crazy,” she was poor, and she didn’t appear to be particularly powerful, so she was left to die on the floor. We are a truly sick society when we allow these abuses to continue.