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visit. None of that will have anything to do with you. Your training will not be impacted, and you shouldn’t give any of it a second thought.”
    The lawsuit, instigated by New York State’s Mental Hygiene Legal Service, had been in the local tabloids for a couple months. I’d first heard about it from my classmate Adrienne. She had done an externship at Kings County during our second year of school, and the most telling thing she had to sayabout it was that she’d noted, as her time there wore on, that she began to take markedly less and less care with her appearance. In May she’d e-mailed me a link to a
New York Post
article titled “B’klyn Psych Ward a Horror Show”:
    The psychiatric ward at Kings County Hospital is a Dickensian nightmare where patients sleep on urine-covered floors, are beaten, and are forcibly injected with mind-altering drugs, according to a shocking lawsuit
.
    The suit, filed in Brooklyn federal court this week, describes horrifying conditions in the emergency and inpatient psych center, known as Building G, where patients are beaten with metal batons, bugs crawl over sleeping bodies, and the bathrooms are rarely cleaned.…
    Patients in Building G often wait for days in a cramped, dirty room for initial evaluations, the suit alleges. At night, they fight for beds, the losers often sleeping on a floor that may “be stained with blood or urine.”
    Patients tread a “treacherously thin line” between demanding basic care and being viewed as “difficult,” which could earn “severe and harrowing” consequences, the suit claims
.
    “Raising one’s voice or complaining about the unbearable conditions can result in an injection or being strapped to a gurney,” the suit claims
.
    Consistent with the
Post
’s style, the article’s hyperbole made it hard to take seriously. But Scott’s outright dismissal of the whole thing felt just as off. I hadn’t finished my degree yet, but I was already much too far along not to think about the suit’s allegations like a psychologist. My training had taught me there was a grain of metaphorical truth in even the most psychotic of fantasies. I also knew that no one in anygiven system—be that a family, a corporation, or a hospital—remains untouched by the problems of the larger group. With his emphatic need to preempt any concerns we might have had, it seemed to me that Scott was communicating something else altogether: if our experiences there were to go awry, well, certainly he didn’t want to know about it.
    Later, over lunch at a pizza place, we interns reassured one another—after all, we’d toured the wards when we interviewed—that things couldn’t be as bad as the tabloids alleged. A couple of the interns introduced the concern that the investigation might cost the hospital’s training program its accreditation, but soon enough we moved on to matters of greater importance to us, such as which electives we were going to choose, and also a general getting to know one another. For the next week, our group dragged ourselves around Kings County’s campus to hear about the rotations we could choose from. The week after that, we sat wordlessly together through a thirty-five-hour hospital orientation that covered topics like hazardous waste disposal and how to avoid sexually harassing anyone. (“I’m a heavy-chested woman,” our orientation leader informed the hundred new employees in the room through her microphone. “If someone mentions that, it’s sexual harassment!”)
    During those first two weeks my intern group would share the frustrations of people eagerly waiting to get started with something. My irritation grew each night when I came home to George’s stories about his days, quickly filling up with gratifying learning experiences—outpatient therapy with grad students, supervision with big-name psychologists not otherwise employed by the hospital who volunteered their time for the auspicious privilege of affiliation with