I find this kind of interesting even if you may not. In 1981 when I was twenty years old, my parents arranged for me to be put in a locked psychiatric hospital. I ended up staying there for 8 months. I suffered the whole time I was there, non-stop. My symptoms were unbelievably intense and mentally excruciating. The doctors put me on a high dose of medication as was common then. It didn’t make me better but it stopped me from getting worse.
My symptoms seemed as strong in the end of my stay as in the beginning, I never felt like they improved. But never-the-less, they let me out after 8 months and my parents then arranged for me to move into a beautiful Residential Treatment Home in a nice neighborhood on a beautiful tree lined street in an affluent city.
Well, thinking back, when I moved into this home it was like someone flipped a switch and my symptoms weren’t as bad. So that’s what is weird. 9 months later I got a job, A few months later I moved into semi-independent living. Two years later I got a car, and started college. It’s just so weird how I improved so rapidly. One day I’m in the hospital shuffling along suffering and a year later I’m doing all this stuff.
It raises the questions, How much does our environment help us? And how much do hospitals contribute to our mental health? Do long-term hospitals prolong our illness and create an environment where we don’t get better?
If we stay medicated and relapse anyway, shots of haldol will do the trick I guess. While in the hospital I met medicated people that prefered to stay as long as they could in the hospital because they felt they were taken care of. Unmedicated that were on involutary basis, like me and most of the others, and the suicidal.
There was this guy with sz that made a bet with his “best friend” that he would die on his suicide attempt. He said he was not proud of not winning the bet. He seemed happy to be there, to be honest, I think for many it feels like someone will look after them there and not feel so abandoned out in the world. A sense of belonging.
For me, because I was highly delusional, it was like something I had to endure. I liked the food and being amongst the crazy. Only the part of getting there was traumatizing, I still have flashes of the five cops holding me down for that shot that knocked me out, and putting me on the vest. I was screaming for my mother, she was crying, it was just heartbreaking.
Yes, that is very heartbreaking. It’s kind of hard to imagine how brutal the mental health system can get, so-called “normal” people will never go through anything like it. But hey, you survived, you’re going to school, you’re working on yourself, so that’s all good. And hey, like someone said, you look like a movie star (Ally Sheedy). You can’t beat that.
I spent a year in a private psychiatric hospital when I was twenty-seven. It seemed like everyone in the place was just going through the motions, and there was no real involvement in therapy. At the time I felt like it was useless to try. I don’t know what private hospitals are like now, but back then I didn’t see that many people getting well. They claimed a much higher success rate, but I doubted that. It seems to me that psychiatrists in the public sector do more good than those in the private, but that could be because I expected private pdoc’s to work miracles, considering what they charge. I doubt if I am the type that benefits much from therapy anyway.