Have you ever been committed to a mental ward?

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I've never been.


Once when I was about 5 though, my mother told me that if I didn't stop stimming I might end up in a place called an institution, where kids just "did things". I asked if it was fun and she didn't really reply; she wanted to dissuade me from stimming so I guess she couldn't answer that. I asked what it looked like. Did it look like something fun? (I forget what I said exactly.) She said, gettig annoyed or impatient or desperate or something, that it looked like a hospital. I didn't stop stimming, anyway.


Just today an acquaintance of mine (who has been in a mental ward himself) looked surprised and said "Oh, really?" when I said I had never been in a mental ward. I guess I still have a lot of living to do.


So how many people here have lived/stayed in a mental ward? What was it like? Did you make friends? Were you force-fed meds? Did you try to rebel? Did you make enemies? Is there such a thing as solitary confinement for punishment in mental wards? What was your daily routine like? What activities were you allowed to do? What did people say about you? How were people's reactions to you being in the mental ward? How long were you there? Was it fun? Or do you have PTSD because of it? Did it save your life? Or nearly kill you? Did you witness a suicide? A murder? Did you almost kill someone, or save anyone's life? What kind of eccentric people were there? Was it like One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, or more democratic? Did you meet any famous criminals in for evaluation?


Cummooooon! I KNOW you wanna spill your guts!

Actually the closest I got to that was a partial hospitalisation program because I was way too depressed and irrational at the time. I was in there with this lady who slit her own throat and you could see her wounds, neat to look at too
But anyway, both my sisters have been to them/are in them, and I used to have a friend that went to them frequently.

Partial hospitalization... how does that work? Does that mean you live there but are allowed to come and go as you please (however you have to get back in time for appointments and such)? Or was it like an evaluation, with one week on and one week off, that sort of thing, and they compare the results the first time to the results the second time? Or were you just in there the whole time and it means something else? I'm so curious about this stuff!

Well I actually went there in the morning, spent all day there and came back home at night. Sounds sh***y but it gave me something to do and I got to spend time with people who I could relate to.. In a depressive aspect anyway. So it turned out to be a lot better than I thought it would be at first. Once my time there ended I went right back to feeling depressed again lol

Oh, and thanks for pointing out my spelling error

LOL; I didn't even mean to point out your spelling error.


I know how you feel. When the social skills group I attended ended I got more depressed/bored/lonely because now I couldn't talk to people I could relate to anymore, though we only related very shallowly, and I didn't learn a thing from the social skills group; it was insultingly basic. But it was fun to see people's assumptions about me, so all is cool.


Oh, now I'm getting off topic.


I used to want to be in a mental ward so that I could relate to other depressives... just like you! I also wanted to do the McMurphy thing-- treat the other inmates like humans, identify with them, sort of become their leader, rebel, pull pranks on the staff and crack jokes, maybe start a real revolution and we'd all escape and go into the woods or somewhere where we'd start a "crazy community" and be crazy together in peace... and this was before I'd heard of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest!

I've been in short-term hospitalization (for me usually a week or two, once or twice for closer to a month) but never long-term. Some hospitals are nicer than others. The adolescent units were in some ways nicer than the adult units. On adolescent units there are all sorts of people and nobody seems to be terribly nuts. But on adult units there are usually some delusional folks and some people walking around like zombies all day. There are exceptions. Just as some hospitals are more about medicating the patients and getting them out the door, others have a lot of helpful and friendly staff who go above and beyond to make the patients comfortable.

Topeka State Mental Institution, Boysen South, Ward B. Third Wing .

was there for 8 months. Learned to smoke cigarettes with out filters, drink black coffee and play cut throat 500 Rummy at the tender age of 17. Saw a woman after she ate Drano. Craved tomatoes and raw meat. Found out people with psychosis have a different chemical smell. The walls were permeated with the smell of the mental chemistry of schizophrenics. I was always nauseated because to me, the place reeked of it so.

Last year, in 2006 I for the first time read Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar" and watched "Girl, Interrupted" and was quite touched with them . I had no idea others had walked my path!


Merle

I found the book Girl, Interrupted quite amusing, gripping, just cool.


What did the woman who are Drano look like?


And I noticed that autistic kids (I've been around a few of them) have a certain chemical smell too... almost like sour milk mixed with arsenic or something. It's in the hair, I think. But the skin has it too.


Did they let you have your tomatoes and raw meat?

I was - I reported my mom for some of the physical abuse she was doing, and the cops decide to take her word for that I had caused my own scratches and bruises, and so I was locked up, while that evil beotch got to go free.

The therapists in the ward weren't much better than my mom. There wasn't physical abuse but emotional abuse ran rampant. And I was punished for making friends amongst the other kids. The lady said that since I didn't talk during group therapy I wasn't allowed to talk to anyone outside of group therapy. Of course I didn't pour my heart and soul out in group therapy - for one thing there were 20 + people looking right at me when it was my time to talk, and for another that was everyone who was in the ward. One mistake in group therapy meant no friends at all there. And besides they were all relative strangers. what evidence did I have to know it was safe to talk in front of them? The girl I was punished for playing with knew my inner fears but I decided not to tell anyone else once I was punished for talking to her. When the therapist said I was allowed to talk to anyone she exchanged a "What in the world?" look with me, but then went off to play happily while i was made to sit on the couch. We would have both been about 13 at the time.

AAAAAGH! Horror story! SUE THEM! I'm serious!

Late Bloomer , I learned how to do all of this except for drinking black coffee when I was sent to North Dakota State Hospital in Jamestown, ND (Wards AD 400 and AD 300) twice. Once when I was 11, and the second time from ages 12 to14, though the the tobacco use only really caught on during the second time.

The first time that I was there, I got to understand what 'Schizophrenia' was when one of the older kids told me to say something to a relatively quite kid who seemed ok. --It took a bunch of the adult staff to pry him off of me and hold him down on one of the picnic tables at the camp the state hospital owned at Spiritwood lake.

THe first time that I was there, I also learned that Thorazine not only makes it absolutely impossible for you to get angry, but also in sufficient makes it quite hard for you to breathe, and makes you gulp air. --My parents objected to medication, therefore I was subsequently taken off of it.

Walking the corridors of the place, (All of the buildings at NDSH were/are connected by a series of tunnels) I also got to see what happens when suicide by shotgun is unsucessful, as well as a girl who was given valium attempt suicide by slashing the viens in her elbow. --The blood went everywhere, and I hid in the staff bathroom until she was dragged out.

So.... the question is, what is a mental hospital like? I have no Idea of what it's like these days, but the one that I was in was essentially like a storage unit for people the State of North Dakota had no idea of what to do with. --Therapy was essentially nonexistant.

I have not bothered to keep track of people from there, and really have no interest. --I really can't say that I had any freinds there, because I didn't.

A month and a bit, completely voluntary; everyone there spoke too much.

she looked dead and not happy about how she got there.



and certain cancers have a smell, too. ..




the tomatoes, yes, the raw meat, no. I was pregnant throughout my last few months there, so I was hyper sensitive to smell ( well, everything, actually).

Merle

ive never been commited, but in this state i think there something called title 36 where a judge can order you to a phyciatric center against your will. i did spend a week voluntary in one before and that basically made up my mind that if i ever go that crazy again i'll just blow my head off. mental wards are freaking terrible.

Oh, they had therapy at Topeka State, alright. Hydro theraphy - barely luke warm water whirling around you in big claw footed tubs that had vinyl sides that zipped up around you with your head popping out. Matron would sit reading a Saturday Evening Post Magazine for hours, while you became shriveled and lulled by the swirling water. And of course, shock treatment was still used for the particularly stubborn cases. They went to Admininstration House for that, though around the back with the bulbous porcelin sinks and gurneys and equiptment made in the 1930's that must have been state of the art, back in the day.

They did take me into a room with a small light on the end of a stick on a tripod. You could tell it was stationary. they put a huge piece of drawing paper and a pencil before me and turned out the light and left the room. I was to draw to follow the beam of light. My drawings went completely off the page! I talked to others and they did the old 'roll your eyes' look because they just logically said the light didn't move and their hand didn't move, either!

I always wondered about that test, and what my reaction meant.

Merle

Hahaha mental wards... yeah...

Three times, Springfield Hospital, Southwest London.

Joy of joys. It wasn't too bad the first and second times. The first time I was generally "out of it" for the first few days, but then I opened up a bit. There were a couple of schoolteachers, a classroom with some computers, and the rooms weren't too bad (except for the oldest one, which the window had been painted badly so that it had a permanent gap... bad thing in the winter when the -5 Celsius air kept coming in). Although the bath was a bit disgusting sometimes. The first time I spent a lot of time playing Tetris, doing maths, reading, listening to music and, towards the end of my stay, walking around Tooting with my Mum.

The third time... *screams* I came in after literally trying to kill myself in front of quite a few people, and not really meaning to kill myself; I was in the middle of some psychotic episode of some sort. I was taken in my my psychiatrist, voluntarily initially (well, yeah, I JUST DIDN'T PUT UP ANY RESISTANCE lol). But on the third day, after being restrained about 7 times in 2 days, I was sectioned (section 2 - 28 days) I was sent to a secure wards. The worst restraint (and this does not include straps and all that s**t, it just includes varying numbers of nurses grabbing all your limbs and pinning you to the ground) was for 6 1/2 hours, but that's probably because I just wouldn't stop trying to get out of that stupid room. I can't even remember what happened during that anyway... Too traumatic. The secure ward was a s**thole; I didn't have a bath for two weeks because I was worried about the colonies of microorganisms on the sides of the bath. There was nothing to do there (unlike the general adolescent ward) and I was only sent there after I ALLEGEDLY tried to strange a doctor in the adolescent ward. I stayed at the ADULT secure ward for two weeks, having to deal with the guy across the corridor who seemed to have the mindset of a paedophile, and also having my arm twisted back behind my back in all my restraints. I was then moved to an adolescent secure ward, which was privately-funded (the NHS had been looking for funds for me to go there, and yes, it took two weeks for them to find funds lol). That ward was rather nice, and by then, I was much better. Although the only problem about that ward is that I did not get a single breath of fresh air for two weeks there. Which is not as bad as some, but at least most psych wards these days have courtyards! I got to use the gym once, YAY. lol.

Psych wards are sometimes really beneficial, and I have had minor institutionalisation problems before, but sometimes they do quite the opposite (i.e. secure ward in Surrey). But I definitely can say that I have never, in real life, seen a straightjacket, straps, or any other such restraint devices. And I have also never, in real life (this excludes TV!), seen a room with padded walls.

Although one thing that I did get quite acquitanted with is the lorazepam 2mg injection. The lorazepam 1mg pill and the oral diazepam stuff was always so easy to spit out, I found. But then, the nurses realised that too!

w0w that was long... sorry.

Last edited by SteelMaiden on 12 Aug 2007, 2:47 am, edited 1 time in total.