Lest We Forget: A summary of the pain and suffering caused by The Arizona State Hospital's clinical and administrative ineptitude. Wherein, the substandard mental health conditions at The Arizona State Hospital directly serve to worsen the health of the patients there, rather than helping them. 

      Despite the enactment of numerous federal mandates designed to address ongoing 
endemic discrimination against disabled Americans, seriously mentally ill adults in contemporary American society are still very, very marginalized as a group, arguably the most marginalized population of disabled adults in the country. It is a catch-22 situation, for not only does the vast majority of the the general public have little to no grasp whatsoever in terms of understanding the experiences of these disabled individuals, seriously mentally ill adults themselves are for the most part so hidden from the sight of mainstream Americans that they are unable to express themselves in an any meaningful fashion. Out of sight, ergo out of mind, they don't vote or otherwise interact with mainstream society, and because of their status as seriously mentally ill adults, they also lack the legal capability to speak and/or reasonably advocate for themselves, while the nature of their actual disability(s), in combination with potentially mind numbing psychotropic medications, very often exacerbates the situation by severely restricting their cognitive skills and general aptitude to such an extent that they cannot comprehensively respond or react to stimuli of any kind, including abuse of their fundamental human rights in any context. The central reason for this situation lies in the fact that so many mentally ill adults exist well outside of commonly shared perspectives about American life today, this as a consequence of deeply endemic stigmatization and discrimination against seriously mentally adults, dynamics of human interaction (or lack thereof) that have been prominent in western culture for centuries. This undeniable reality underlies the irrefutable presence of patient abuse in state facilities such as The Arizona State Hospital, and also fosters the willingness of state agencies such as the Arizona Department of Health Services to utterly ignore well established standards of procedure the purpose of which is to protect mentally disabled adults from systemic abuse and related discrimination.  The conditions at ASH can be characterized as covertly sanctioned chaos, in the sense that despite a moderately vast body of law and policy specific to monitoring and regulating the operations of a facility like ASH, there is virtually no sincere compliance to these codes in the actual application of patient care and treatment at ASH. And in my learned opinion as a survivor of ASH, the staff at every level in that damn place clearly recognize the helplessness of their patients in the specific context that I outline above, and they- the staff- take full advantage of it. At times, that atmosphere at ASH is literally alien to modern human existence, as though the fence lines and highly fortified entrances represent a departure from the realities of the modern human experience, and the only reason for this is the fact that staff at ASH know beyond any shadow of a doubt that the patients themselves can't do anything about it.