Men served as ward attendants providing custodial care.  They kept order in the wards, assisted violent patients in restraints with meals, conducted oversight of those patients who performed housecleaning work, tried to keep patients occupied in some meaningful activity, folded laundry and distributed it to the individual patients’ lockers, prepared patients for visitors, assisted patients in preparing for weekly showers, intervened in fights, among other such duties. 

Because of severe staff shortage, the hospital had suspended services:

• occupational therapy for all but a few patients

• regular exercise activity outside the ward for patients

• hydrotherapy 

Prior to ward assignment within thirty days after admission to the hospital, the hospital provided special services such as electroshock therapy, but once in the wards, the patients received little personal attention.  After the CPS unit arrived, staff resumed some occupational therapy and some exercise routines.

Superintendent Dr. Roy Leak recognized and took advantage of the particular skills COs brought to the unit. As an example, musicians introduced music appreciation as a daily part of the program.

The Assistant Director, Alex Sareyan, who came to the hospital with public relations experience, after some service as a ward attendant, began a public relations department for the hospital.  The department explained mental illness to the public, as well as promoted harmony and open lines of communication among the administration, employees and patients. 

Sareyan regularly visited editors of all the major newspapers in the hospital’s region to pave the way for feature stories on various aspects of the hospital’s life and concerns. The Hartford Courant and The New Haven Register from time to time ran features written in the hospital public relations office. One feature in December 1943 reported that nearly half of the three thousand patients had no visits from family or friends during the year, and asked the community to help remember these “forgotten people” . . .”who might once have been their friends and neighbors”, when making their Christmas list.  (Sareyan p. 112)

The department produced two half-hour radio dramas, one featuring post partum depression.  Jack Neher, one of the COs in the unit had worked in the NBC studios before his induction and helped develop the scripts.  The two worked with a professor at the Yale Drama School nearby.  She recruited student volunteers for the project.  The program director at radio station WELI in New Haven granted use of the studio to produce both dramas.  (Sareyan pp. 115-16)

Approximately twenty wives of the men joined the hospital staff as day and night ward attendants.  Unit leadership not only valued the women’s work on the wards but also noted “women’s positive contribution” to morale. 

Regular attendants in mental hospitals in this period worked a minimum of fifty-four hours to as many as eighty hours per week, and were paid as little as two to three dollars per day, including room and board.  As at other hospitals, some of the regular attendants did not accept the COs, even though the patients did so.