At our psych ward it is possible to keep one’s cellphone and so to make calls and send txt messages to the outside world. What about you?
No cell phones, they were locked in a cabinet. I asked to go check my messages and some phone numbers and they let me.
My last psych ward hospitalization happened before cell phones were commonplace. I don’t think it would have been a good idea for me to have one because of the theft issues. A lot of the homeless mentally ill roam from room to room and steal things, particularly money. I am sure they would target electronics as well.
I had a computer, tablet, and cell phone when I was hospitalized in March, but that was over the cardiac scare. It made the one week that they wouldn’t even let me get out of bed marginally less boring.
In all the hospitals I’ve been in we were allowed to have NOTHING. Some places wouldn’t let you have clothes. You would have to walk around in a hospital gown for 3 days before you got any clothes. Some places let you have money for vending but the vending was never in the area they keep you.
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Every ward is different. At the end of the day they make me feel like i cant function without being monitored 24/7 which is untrue because i know i can.
Some wards force you to go to the groups, that can be really annoying because they are always pointless.
I wonder why they dont standardize it so you have a similar experience regardless of the hospital?
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Yeah, in my last hospitalization last year we were not allowed to have any personal possessions. That was one scary-ass hospitalization by the way. I’ll leave it at that.
Yup no cell phones and no shoe laces
the only lax place about clothes and electronics etc. was the residential place i went to. all other hospitals were very strict
In my foolishness in my long term hospitalization, they would lock up my two record players, my tape recorder, my radio, and my guitar at night. I had use of them during the day.
I wasn’t even allowed to wear my beanie!!! Granted it was summer time but they put a 5 minute per day restriction on my beanie wearing
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My experience in all my hospitalizations is no electronics, no shoe laces, no personal items, and sometimes even no clothes (only allowed to wear the hospital clothing) until you had been there a few days.
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One hospital I was in I was put on “watch” and they had a staff member following me around all day. And they would have somebody sit in a chair right outside my door at night.
I was not allowed anything. I had a small toilet, sink, a mattress on the floor and a book, which took a lot of convincing to actually let me have.
If they let me go to the common area with the other patients, I was allowed to color or do some other things. However, no cell phone. If you wanted to make a call you had to go to the nursing station, ask for the landline phone, take it to the table and plug it in and have a monitored conversation. It was no fun.
I saw a progression on restrictions over the 13 years I was hospitalized on and off (9 times total and an 8 year span between the first 7 and the last 2). Seven of these hospitalizations were in the same unit, including the 2 most recent. It has gotten to the point (early 2012) where no pencils (too sharp), no music (you could strangle yourself!) and no access to art supplies more than crayon type supplies unless in a supervised group (again, very dangerous). Reading materials had to be approved, caffeine was strictly monitored and cigarettes are allowed nowhere on hospital grounds for everyone. I don’t smoke myself but I remember smoking rooms in 1999. No passes, no access of the unit at all. Doors were locked and cameras were placed outside to monitor who entered. All bags brought by visitors are rummaged through and contraband is either locked up or, preferably, sent back with the visitor.
Cell phones…I didn’t have a cell phone until the last few times and I didn’t have a smartphone ever during a hospital stay. Visitors had to surrender their phones immediately upon entering the unit. The reason for this was actually very practical; they didn’t want any patiently confidentiality breached. If pictures were taken and another patient was in the shot or anything identifying about the unit there was a potential privacy threat. I was allowed to check my phone with a nurse if I needed to get a number from my contact list to make a phone call but all long distance calls had to be made by a nurse and then sent to the patient phone. I have spent a lot of time in these units and I benefited from being granted off unit access to go to the snack bar or whatever on hospital grounds. When I think of therapeutic things I think of access to fresh air, not shitty food and music or drawing materials like pencils. Music is much more effective for me than anything during an anxiety attack and I know this. They are extreme with their safety ■■■■ and a lot of things are restrictions imposed on them by insurance mandates. If a patient is well enough to go off the unit it supposedly means they are well enough to be discharged. This is very much not true. I was told to listen to the (broken) radio in the activity room. That’s not what helps. Having headphones and access to specific songs that I listen to under my covers is what I use to help myself. Sadly all the coping skills you can develop are things you are prohibited from employing while inpatient. You already feel like you’re in a prison and being monitored, bed checks every 15 minutes so without anything to do you have to share a tv with a bunch of people and read gossip magazines and draw with crayons while waiting for shitty food to be delivered. TV is often too much for me. If I’m stressed I can’t handle the noise but when I want to watch I am fine and I enjoy it. The point is, you are locked up for a couple weeks while you’re already feeling like ■■■■ and you can’t do anything but zombie around and then they suggest more drugs to make you swallow and you welcome the prospect of being numbed because you are so bored you just want to leave. The environment makes you more anxious and since they watch you 24 hours a day they are convinced they know your patterns and behavior so they justify what they should be giving you to take and you aren’t even able to be yourself and work with a treatment team effectively. Then you are discharged and have to undo the damage they just did.
Exactly. I don’t understand how giving you nothing to do but sit in small room on the floor and stare at the wall. If I talk to my voices they get all upset with me. Well I have nothing else to do for entertainment…
I faked my recovery to get out, because that place was making me worse.
They keep saying stuff like “you’re only here for a short time and we need you to focus on your recovery” like eating shitty food that makes you feel sluggish and being watched 24 hours a day with nothing to do is doing anything for your recovery. It’s really hard to do anything besides be a zombie without arousing suspicion. You aren’t really working on any sort of recovery while you’re there and the real damage happens when you are essentially forced to take things that you don’t want or need in order to get out and then you have this huge ass post discharge plan with all these things lined out that are based off of nonsense and will affect you for months. Of course they know better when it comes to everything though. I told them around 5pm one night (this wasn’t the first time either) that I did NOT want to take my Prozac. The nurse said that the doctor had already left and gave me this guilt trip about how I needed to take it and trust them basically. I had said for three days it was making my brain race and I was batshit hallucinating from it but they insisted it wasn’t the Prozac, it was my condition they were treating me for. I eventually got the doc to scrap it but it was making me manic and I knew it was best to take something different and we eventually went back to something I knew I tolerated. The power play in those places is insane.
No cell phones allowed. My doc in a psych ward even refused to let my mother give me my precalculus textbook because he said he didn’t want me stressing out about school!
I thought it was ridiculous that I couldn’t have my math textbook, but he had no issue letting other patients periodically smoke cigarettes their visitors brought for them.
During the ER triage, they took away everything: clothes, socks, bra, pens, pencils, books, wallet, even the antipsychotics I brought that hadn’t kicked in yet, but I was willing to take due to horrible symptoms (I had to argue for them to give them to me, since I was in “observation” and was not allowed any medications that interfered with their observation period. I threw a verbal fit and started detailing what I was experiencing in terms of voices and hallucinations. The mental health tech finally gave it to me, probably out of fear). I had to write with a crayon–and even then I had to beg for the crayon and give reasons for why I needed to write something down! I had to ask for the phone book, too, and they eventually took it away from me because when I got to the facility, I called the administration of the mental health facility to complain about a sexual assault that had happened in the facility the day before! I complained so much and to so many names in the phone book they sent an admin down in person, but all that happened was they refused to give me the phone book anymore. Their way of shutting me up and keeping me off the phone (they were not legally allowed to refuse me the hospital’s phone).
At the hospital, they searched my mother like she was visiting a prison to look for “contraband” when she came and even when she left. They said the guard even looked through the stack of papers I sent her out with (little scribblings about my bad experiences in there, along with random doodles and drawings I did to pass the time that I wanted her to have as an art gift).
Urgh. I think one thing we need to ask for is the right to cell phones, phone books, internet access, and textbooks! puts that on my to-do list for constitutional advisory committee board leader
Agreed. The food is always so bad… I feel like in hospitals they should be teaching people how to eat healthy, but they just feed you crap.
And I really don’t agree with being forced to take medication, especilly if it’s making you feel awful.
Bleh, I just never want to go back.
Wow, it’s not right to treat it like prison.
And I don’t understsand why they would go through the papers you gave your mom. That seems to me like a violation of privacy.
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