Using the term here in as broad a sense as possible. Someone who has been in prison for decades, and proved unable to adjust to life outside, would be just the ur-example: others could include being in an abusive relationship for years, where the person in question has completely subsumed their will to their abuser, or where someone you knew when young went into a career which utterly changed them (and that not necessarily for the better).
I know a lot of people who should be. 
In all seriousness, I know a man who was a patient at the state hospital for around 10 years. He’s out now but he may as well still be in the hospital. He’s not especially high-functioning and even without the mental illness, requires a lot of assistance just to make it through the day. He keeps to a VERY rigid schedule and gets agitated if it changes by more than a few minutes. I’ve been told the lack of functioning is more from being in the hospital for so long where he didn’t have to make his own decisions or do much of anything but be mentally ill than from the actual mental illness. He just doesn’t know how.
I went to high school with a guy who, if the stories are to be believed, was institutionalized.
He had an issue with alcohol and illegal substances, and bounced in and out of jail. Somewhere in the interim, he had two kids, and it seemed that he was getting his act cleaned up. A few years later, he suffered a major relapse and (this is where details are sketchy), he overdosed, putting him in the hospital for a few days.
Allegedly (and like I said, this is all second-hand information), he did something like bath salts or another substance that can kill you over the course of a few days. The doctors didn’t know what was wrong with him, but apparently (either via note or bedside confession), he confessed that he couldn’t adjust to staying on the outside and being clean, and rather than have his kid have to see his father bounce around from prison to rehab to the outside world and back again, he wanted to take his own life and he requested his younger brother to raise the kids.
There are a lot of gaps in logic in this story, such as “if he confessed that he overdosed on a particular substance, why wouldn’t the witness report it to the doctor immediately?” But, for all intents and purposes, I’d heard numerous accounts of the friend telling people that he felt it was too late for him to have a “normal life,” or to be a good parent to his child. He’d felt he’d become so accustomed to prison and drugs that he couldn’t adjust to the outside world.
I’m not so sure about the authenticity of all the exact details (this happened right when bath salts were all over the news), but given the friend’s family history, I’m inclined to believe the spirit of the story, if not all of the particulars.
Yes. A colleague was formerly a fine mathematician, but became alcoholic and apparently stopped eating, resulting in severe B1 deficiency that led to Korsakoff’s syndrome, see Korsakoff syndrome - Wikipedia. He cannot form new memories and is permanently institutionalized since he cannot live alone. There is no cure; his brain is permanently damaged. He cannot even tune a TV, although he has, with difficulty, learned to use a CD machine. He owned several thousand CDs.
I definitely saw lots of people who were institutionalized back before I retired. There really are people who become dependent on the system and lose the ability to manage their own life.
One of my wife’s former students is serving life in prison for murder. One level down I have two aunts who are in 24-hour care for Alzheimer’s.
I’ve told this story before, but it’s been awhile:
Back in West Texas some good friends lived in an apartment, and we all became friendly with the people next door to them, three members of an extended family. One day, their cousin came to live with them. He was middle-aged and had been in prison in California for almost all of his adult life. He was paroled to Texas because of his relatives there. We’d often share a beer at night, and he was a genuinely nice guy to talk to. Completely open and honest about himself. He’d been given a decent job driving an airport limo, was making good money from that and seemed really to be trying to make a go of it. One quirk that he had, though, was always reminiscing about how good life was in prison. You could see he truly missed the place. He’d tell how you could have anything you wanted there, even pornography and sex.
About that time, a series of armed robberies began in the area. Yep, you guessed it. During one robbery, the perp ended up shot through the neck but lived. Yes, it was my friends’ paroled neighbor. It seems going back to prison was a main motive for the robberies. They obliged him and sent him back.
Not personally, but back when Spain removed life sentences from the books (the maximum now is 25 years and if you have several sentences they’re served simultaneously), there were stories of an old man who went to the prison where he’d spent most of his life and asked them to take him back.
He’d murdered someone when he was barely an adult, gotten life, spent almost 50 years inside, had no family or friends outside and the new technology, language, administrative systems, anything you can think of, was completely alien. IIRC, they hired him as a gardener (which was the work he’d been doing), although that required some paperwork wrangling due to his officially being over forceful-retirement age. I think they called him a “voluntary with in-housing benefits” or something like that.
I’ve never understood how someone could LIKE living somewhere where one always had to be worried about being assaulted or killed. Granted not every prison is San Quentin.
I’m reasonably sure most of them aren’t. The people who like it there aren’t expecting to be assaulted or killed; some of them, like the old gardener, carry out lives which aren’t so different from, oh, life in a Navy ship while at sea (you’re told where to sleep, when to do it, fed, wear very similar clothes to most of the people around you, and while you have some time which is your own there’s a limited choice about what to do with it) - not disparaging Navy life, but trying to point out that life inside can indeed be better than outside.
Beats me too. But I’m tellin’ ya, the guy in my example above could wax poetic about the Good Life in prison.
I have a friend I was in the Marine Corps in Vietnam with who is finishing up a 30 spot for murder. He’s worried about getting out. Mid sixties. No money. No real way to earn any money. Very little family left to help him out. Pretty sad all round.
Another acquaintance from Green River, Wyoming is doing life with no hope for murder. Green River was a small town and I also knew the guy he killed. Both were actually pretty good people.
A lot of these guys don’t worry about being assaulted or killed because they figure they’re the one who knocks.
Institutionalized?
Yeah, a few.
More than a few, actually.
Amazing how some guys just can’t make it on the outside. Or won’t. Or don’t want to.
I knew this one guy. He just wanted a Pepsi. And his mom wouldn’t give him one. His parents thought he was on drugs. They were worried he would hurt himself or someone else.
But some people just can’t be caged. Their feathers are just too bright.
When you go through life hoping for murder, you’ve hit that point where you really need an intervention.
Yup. Played soccer with and knew on a first name basis a guy who killed his wife and was executed by the state.
Played soccer with another guy who actually played in the NASL, and knew him on a first name basis. Only found out recently that he’s serving 20 years for rape.
Edit: By the way, the first guy went to Oral Roberts University. I’ve known four people who went to ORU. One was executed and two others became atheists.
A childhood friend of mine spends most of his time in prison - not jail, prison. It isn’t so much that he likes it there, or even is used to it. It’s just that the idea of not stealing everything that isn’t nailed down or red hot doesn’t seem to occur to him.
He doesn’t seem to get along with anyone in prison, either. So I don’t know if he is “institutionalized”, just sociopathic or nearly so.
Regards,
Shodan
My wife’s grandmother is in a nursing home.