Rule Prohibiting Intentional Harm or Humiliation of Other Patients

The Rule Prohibiting Intentional Harm or Humiliation of Other Patients is stated by Teodoro Ruipérez as a limit on how patients may treat one another: deliberate injury, humiliation, or harassment will not be tolerated. The principle is protective, but its force is conveyed through severe punishment. A patient’s vulnerability is treated as something others must not exploit, while the hospital’s answer to exploitation is itself disciplinary and coercive.

Scope and rationale

Ruipérez describes the prohibited conduct as voluntary, distinguishing intentional mistreatment from the symptoms or distress that may accompany illness. His example is a patient who hallucinates and believes he sees the devil. Ruipérez says the hospital would not tolerate other patients frightening him for amusement with dolls or drawings associated with the devil. The scenario is presented as an illustration of the rule, not as a separate incident that has occurred. Its point is that ridicule can become a deliberate assault when it takes aim at a fear the person cannot simply dismiss.

The rule therefore concerns more than physical injury. Humiliation and harassment are named alongside wounding, and the imagined prank shows how torment can be accomplished by intensifying another patient’s delusion or terror. Ruipérez frames enforcement as protection for the person exposed to such conduct, rather than as permission for patients to police or punish one another. At the same time, his insistence that penalties are very harsh makes clear that the institution enforces this protection through its own authority.

The water example

Ruipérez then describes a different case, this time as something that happened. One patient was terrified of water: seeing it could bring on panic and vomiting, and the patient might defecate. Another patient learned of this fear and threw a bucket of water at the patient’s feet. The act was not described as an accidental spill or an unavoidable encounter with water; it was a deliberate use of a known vulnerability, matching the distinction between illness and intentional mistreatment that underlies the rule.

The consequence was severe. The person who threw the water was confined to a punishment cell, fed salted food, and deprived of water for a month, except for the amount considered absolutely necessary to prevent dehydration. Ruipérez says the patient did not repeat the act. The account supplies a concrete measure of what he means by very harsh punishment: the hospital responds to one patient’s exploitation of another’s phobia by imposing confinement and sustained deprivation on the offender.

Protection and coercive enforcement

The episode gives the rule a double character. It recognizes that a fear can make an ordinary object or situation a source of extreme suffering, and it condemns the choice to turn that suffering into entertainment or torment. The water was frightening not because the vulnerable patient had chosen to provoke anyone, but because seeing it produced a powerful physical reaction. The rule’s protective logic is clearest where the person targeted cannot be expected to defend against the fear through reason or willpower.

Yet the response also shows that protection is administered through punishment, not merely through a warning or separation of the patients. The month-long restriction is described as having a narrow exception to prevent dehydration, but the account offers no further discussion of the punishment’s proportionality or of alternatives. It reports the measure and its stated result: the offender did not do it again. That outcome supports Ruipérez’s claim that the hospital will enforce the prohibition, but does not establish how the patient understood the punishment or whether the response changed anything beyond the behavior reported.

Alice Gould’s response and narrative significance

Alice Gould approves of Ruipérez’s method and accepts his view that patients cannot be persuaded by reasons in the same way as people presumed to be rational. Her response aligns her, in this exchange, with a firm disciplinary approach: she regards severe consequences as appropriate to deliberate cruelty. Ruipérez’s final request for her approval makes the rule part of their conversation about the hospital’s conduct, not simply a detached statement of policy.

The exchange brings care and control into the same frame. The prohibition insists that a patient’s distress must not be made a target for another person’s amusement; the punishment demonstrates the institution’s power to impose a further deprivation in the name of preventing that harm. The rule’s significance lies in this tension. It establishes a boundary against intentional cruelty among patients, while its most vivid illustration leaves readers to see both the necessity claimed for protection and the severity with which the hospital enforces it.