No it is not illegal to keep you in the hospital against your will.
No staff does not enjoy keeping you against your will because “we make money off you”. We would make money whether you were here or not. I promise we do not enjoy keeping patients who berate us, scream at us, are disrespectful to us and blame us for decisions they made that winded them up being court ordered to be in the hospital.
You are not going to be hospitalized eternally. The average length of stay is 7 days. It is not the end of the world to be hospitalized for 7 days.
Being a psych nurse is so tough guys please if you are hospitalized be nice to your nurses.
I’m usually chomping at the bit to leave because I’m locked up with people who scare me.
Maybe they aren’t actually so scary because staff doesn’t seem to be afraid of them. I guess I just feel more vulnerable when I’m in psychosis. Haven’t been to a mental hospital in over two years. The forum helps.
Yeah we try to separate people by level of acuity so that the super ill people are with each other and the more lucid people are with each other because the super out of it folks tend not be aware of or care about others behavior but the more lucid folks get scared by the ones who are out of it. Unfortunately sometimes our more acute units fill up and we then have to mix more acute with less acute. I just try to assure my patients that we will keep them safe.
Though to be honest it really depends on the hospital you are in. My hospital is pretty good about stopping things before anyone gets hurt but others aren’t so great. And even though my hospital is pretty good, every once in a while a patient does succeed in hurting another patient. Just the other day some guy got sucker punched by his roommate because he pooped all over the toilet and wouldn’t clean it up.
I talked to my therapist about how stressful it was trying to keep people safe and he told me sometimes people just needed natural consequences. For example if we have a super manic person calling people racist slurs, and he gets punched, of course thats not ideal but then maybe he will learn that he probably shouldn’t do that.
Myself I feel it is my utmost duty to keep my patients safe. I have not ever once had a patient hurt another patient while I was working. But again it really just depends on the staff. So I can understand completely having anxiety about it.
It really is a tough job @Anna and wish you the best. One of my good friends was a psych nurse for a hell of a long time. 20 years or so and now he’s out of the game over some stuff that happened to him. He did ok as he got a payout but the stories he had were pretty full on. It really is a tough profession.
Hi @Anna , greatful for your work in the mental health service.
my gf is doing mental health for her clinical term next month for nursing. so in the psych ward.
If she wants to be a psych nurse, the clinical in no way prepares you for what being a psych nurse is actually like. At least my clinical didn’t. In my clinical they just tossed us in the day room with patients for 12 hours and had us chat.
Being a psych nurse is 100x more intense than the clinicals are.
It was intense. Especially when I was on the children’s unit, I was not prepared for how depressing that would be. I actually sobbed giving report that day.
If you are an empathic person just try to remind yourself that you are doing your best to bring some kindness and positivity to that person’s day.
Thanks for the advice, Yeah she is an empathic type of person so I was trying to explain to her to not absorb the patients situation as your own but to keep it separated.
Not an easy thing I imagine.
Yes it took me months to be able to sort of put up a protective wall there. In the beginning of my job I spent many nights crying to my boyfriend about patients and how I was worried for them and their futures. Now I have come to accept that I am not responsible for their choices and lives, I am just doing the best I can to show them kindness and help them in any way I can while they are with me and at that lowest point in their lives. If I can achieve that then I am doing good and have nothing to feel sad about.
I wish the nurses at the psych ward I’ve been to were nice like you. It may have something to do with the psych ward I was in a lot between 16-17 was just changed. Before that, it was part of the regular hospital children’s ward. Maybe the nurses weren’t properly trained. They laughed at me a lot and I would hear them talking about how weird I was in the hallway at night. Thankfully, if I get admitted again, I wouldn’t be in the same place because I’m now an adult. Thank you for being a nice nurse.
Good job, You got the right approach.
Well you are a superhero in my eyes. All nurses are superheros no matter what sector you choose. It takes a lot of grit and compassion to do it. Thankful for it.
I hate when staff laughs about a patient in front of them. I will even have staff joke about a patient in front of the patient to me. I never respond in those situations because I find that so rude. These patients are going through very serious things. It is no laughing matter. Yes maybe I may find it silly when my patient is screaming “GIVE ME CRACK RIGHT NOW” but regardless I would never show that in front of that patient because that is disrespectful. And like I said before no matter how out of it a patient is, they can tell if you are being disrespectful and mean. If the patient takes something seriously, then I take it seriously, as a rule.
Yes I have encountered nurses like that as well. Even more bizarrely these nurses can be so nice and helpful to me, a fellow nurse, but treat their patients like wild animals or children…
I discussed it with my therapist and he told me nurses who respond this way, with threats and treating those who are struggling in a dehumanizing way, are just uneducated as to how to treat those with mental illness and don’t have proper understanding of it.
I don’t think it is so hard to understand that you treat fellow humans with respect and decency. But I dunno apparently it is for some people.
Also since I have mental illness I guess I can see things from both sides so that biases me a bit.
During my one hospitalization to date I barely interacted with the nurses at all because I didn’t feel I could trust them, being extremely psychotic. I wasn’t mean to them but when they would try to engage with me I’d say maybe a few words to them at most and then retreat to my room or some other secluded part of the ward. How do you guys feel about patients like that?
As long as they take their meds and aren’t aggressive we have no issue with more isolative patients. Tbh they are very easy patients, never in your face.
please if you are hospitalized be nice to your nurses.