I often mention the time I spent 8 months in a locked psychiatric hospital. It was a pretty weird experience.
The atmosphere wasn’t the best. There were about a hundred people there from the ages of 18 all the way up to 60. Every day started with breakfast at 8:00 am. To get served you had to stand in line to get in the cafeteria, people got there twenty minutes early just to get in and get their food first. I always slept in so I was near the end of the line and it could take more than a half hour to get in.
After breakfast it started: the screaming. The yelling. The arguing. It lasted all day and it was literally constant, actual physical fights broke out occasionally. People snapped and went off on another patient or destroyed property. If this happened, the nearest staff member would yell, “STAFF” and every nurse or orderly on duty would run over and dog pile on the violent person. sometimes they threw a net over them.
And then to add to the noise and craziness, there was a janitor crew who worked there four days a week. There were long main hallways and the janitors would strip the wax off using a very loud piece of machinery. They would be there a large part of the day and their noise just added to the bedlam. I saw some pretty weird stuff there in my 8 month stay.
I’ve only ever been the only patient with schizophrenia in my psych ward stays except the first time where one other guy I assume had it with how far out of touch with reality he was. Everyone was particularly calm and got along well other than that in my stays though I remember the other people was kinda hostile and argumentative with the other guy because he liked to do things like change channels on the TV in the intensive unit every 5 minutes and the other people admitted they changed the channel right after immediately to try to spite him. Honestly I don’t even think he was aware they were mad at him or even mad at all. I personally tried to interact with him and such despite I had no idea what he was going on about half the time even with how I’ve learned to figure out loose associations of schizophrenics from evaluating my own that people don’t understand when I have to explain them so they won’t be confused. Schizophrenia can just get to a point where there’s absolutely no logic or connections behind anything we say when it’s in a bad point.
yeah, the state hospital I was put in at first was wild like that too until they put me into a ward where everyone was admitted into the hospital. the wild area I was first in was the holding tank for everyone before they were admitted. fights, yelling, screaming. yes I remember. even in the more peaceful ward there were bouts of violence, this one guy I remember who liked to get in people’s faces got his nose kicked in by some cowboy. broke his nose !!
When I was in the hospital a couple of months ago, there was some arragont jerk who went around causing trouble for the staff and intimidating everyone. Finally, some other guy just snapped and attacked him and beat him down and wailed on him for a minute. It was great, finally some idiot got what he deserved.
last time i was in 5 years ago it was very different, they had built a huge hospital type thing with separate bedrooms which wasn’t great,
i enjoyed the shared bedrooms we had the time before bc they had one room for the really bad and then another room for like the people that didn’t talk to themselves like me, i didn’t have much clothes so the person next to me loaned me some socks and we ended up making supper together for all the patients from the kitchen,
if i hadn’t been put in hospital things would have been very different for me, i met my friend alison in there as well.
…you did.
77nick77 