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During my most recent stay in a psychiatric ward, there was one weekend on which no less than three fights broke out. The administration responded by devoting an entire social workers' meeting to proclaiming that fighting is forbidden behavior.

Later on in my stay, a nurse's group was devoted to reading a pamphlet about handling one's anger.

Such responses probably had a positive effect on the situation, but it didn't stop the fighting completely [which reminds me of an interesting fact: one of the people who got involved in physical fighting spoke no English and we all wondered how he got any therapeutic value from being on the ward, never mind an education in pacifism (the male nurses patted him on the back for beating up one of the more unpopular patients). Psych wards are often unprepared to deal with the world around them].

As soon as the average ward fighter blows his top, he seeks to punish his opponent for "crossing the line," and all the trite rules and pamphlets in the world are not going to stop him from complaining that the person he just punched deserved to be attacked. The fighters may claim to understand that fighting is forbidden, but they believe that there is a time to fight, nevertheless. They do not completely rule out using their fists.

In other words, the psych ward warriors are not pacifists and that's the main problem. Nobody taught them that pacifism is a noble cause, a philosophy that improves society, and that things which improve society are important and glorious (concern for one's fellow man might also stop patients from the alarmingly childish behavior of cutting in front of people on snack and medicine lines).

My belief is that the psych wards should have lectures from important pacifist leaders, say, the people who run the Martin Luther King Center in Atlanta, Georgia, which promotes the use of nonviolence as a tool for social change. In the sixties, Martin Luther King's pacifist policies were a famous and glorious alternative to violence.

On the other hand, pamphlets about handling anger, or ward rulebooks, are not glorious. They appear to be produced by ninnies, not people who care about honor or justice. They don't talk about the danger of you or your opponent getting hurt physically, psychologically, and permanently and what happens to society when people are walking around damaged. And they don't talk about how powerful and effective nonviolence can be.

Many of the people on the ward I stayed on were ex-convicts and at least some of those convicts, if not all, had engaged in fighting not merely before they had been arrested, but had fought in prison, too. They had come to accept fighting as a normal way of handling conflict. When they were not fighting, they were talking about fighting, reminiscing about past fights, play-fighting, etc. They liked to talk about professional fighting, as well. They just wouldn't shut up about fighting. Therefore, house rules did not serve as an adequate deterrent to physical altercations.

Thus, I say, bring Martin Luther King into the psychiatric wards (and American classrooms for that matter) and let him have a go at obliterating the fight culture (and the narcissistic American culture), altogether. Mental patients need new heroes, not just new pamphlets.