Traumatic time at psych ward

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Hi. I was in a psych ward, high flight and suicide risk a few days ago.. I was locked in a room with a watch recording everything I did.
It's left me really anxious and overwhelmed... People there knew I had AS but still questioned me in a way that required higher functioning communication skills than I possess.
Can anyone relate to this experience / offer support?
I'm going back for an assessment in a couple of days. I'm scared :/

I've been in lock-up before except I had a good experience. My psychiatrist put me on a good dose of proper medication according to my needs and everybody was really caring. I was a basketcase before but they managed to make my anxiety go away so that I felt comfortable there.

Psychiatrists are wolves. Make sure everything you say is appropriate now that you know that fact.

Eh, some are, I guess. Don't let them push drugs on you that you don't want, and don't tell them things that might be construed as dangerous to anyone unless you know them pretty well.

after a suicide attempt I was in an 'adult stabilization unit'. I have a stutter and bad anxiety and it was HELL. Didn't know I had AS until a few months later

I've been in psych a few times. Some good, some bad. The calmer and more cooperative you can be will help a lot. Hospitals have policy and procedures and standing orders from most docs with privelages, so they have to follow those. If it's something that bothers you a lot, bring it up calmly with your doctor and explain why it bothers you. If you have trouble verbalizing it, write it down and explain it and give it to him. Ask how long it will be going on, if there is anything you need to do to help get it stopped, etc. Be prepared to have to deal with it for a couple of days at least.

The more understanding you are that the staff doesn't really make that many decisions, and are just following their orders and unit procedure manual, which they have to do or risk getting fired, the better they will treat you. If you do show anger and frustration, which is normal and many times cannot be helped, make sure you say to whoever you show it around "I'm not angry/frustrated/upset at you, I'm upset with the situation. I know you are just doing your job." That shows them that you are able to understand that they aren't just trying to make it bad for you. The more understanding and cooperative you are, the sooner many restrictions will be lifted.

Understand that even though you personally may not plan to cut your wrists with a shaving razor, or drink deoderant, mouthwash, or even lotion that contains alcohol, they are not allowed to leave those in your custody and if you do get to use them, the staff has to take them out of lockup and watch you use them and put them back. They may know' very well that you aren't going to do that, but that may be the rule of the unit.

Don't snap at them and tell them they don't have to treat you like you are insane/stupid/crazy etc. That will make them think they do. Speaking to them in a calm and normal manner, respectful and understanding will get that message across to them much better. It may take a few days or longer for them to get the message because many patients can come across that way to manipulate.

If you get very upset of frustrated with something, ask to speak with your nurse for that shift when she has a minute. Tell her that you are very upset or frustrated and explain what are upset about and why you are upset. Ask her if there is anything she can do about it. There may not be. If she says no, then there really isn't, and tell her "thank you anyway".

Do not sneer at or look down your nose at their rules. The rules aren't made for you, they are made to cover all possible problems from many different kinds of mental illness. If you came in through the ER with no regular doctor who can give them your history, they don't know for sure what you have or how bad it is. You can tell them, but many patients lie or don't tell the whole truth. Telling them you aren't lying doesn't help. Even if they believe you, until they get a doctors order, they cannot relax certain restrictions. Saying something like "Oh my God! A plastic spoon to eat with? REALLY? What the hell do you think I'm going to do with a fork? Come on now!" or ridiculing their policies won't help you. The fact that only plastic spoons are given may only inconvenience you and some others but it may save someone else's life.

Remember that the rules on the psych units are made for the lowest common denominator. The sickest person who might be on that unit. Every new admission unless the doctor orders otherwise, is subject to those rules until they find out what's wrong with you and what risks you have.

Even if you have a horrible stay, do not complain while you are a patient. No one listens to psych patients complaints while they are in the hospital They may pretend to, to placate you, but they don't take it seriously. ' Stay cooperative and calm, and polite. If you do not have any episodes while you are in there, your chart will show that you were well behaved and cooperative. After you are discharged, write a letter to the medical director of the psych unit, send a copy to the patient representative, your doctor, and the director of nursing of the hospital. Those are the four people who can and will review your complaint and chart and if need be change policy, apologize to you, and put a flag on your chart so if you come back they will know not to be so restrictive. Make that letter polite, concise, state the problems briefly, and end it with something like "I trust you will look into this matter, and I would appreciate a response once it has been resolved". Do not go on about how it made you feel. Don't say vague things like "They treated me like a child" but don't go into too much detail. Something like "The night staff wouldn't tell me what meds I was given, I was told to just take them and ask my doctor". Be calm, respectful, businesslike, and nonthreatening. Your point of writing the letter is to bring the situation to their attention, thats all.

Good luck.

My psychiatrist does everything she can - even when my suicide risk is high - to keep me out of the psychiatric hospital because she knows that it would be a really bad environment for me. I know this to be true and am thankful that she sees this too. I'm sorry you had a bad experience.

Thanks for everyone's comments, especially OliveOilMom's, it was very informative and comforting.

When I go for the assessment, I want to have it clearly understood that I am struggling to function, but I do not want to be admitted...
In the past, it has either been like "You are fine. Goodbye." or "Omg you are f****d. We will search you and lock you here."
I would like an in between, if that makes sense? And should I that it's what I want?

And make sure not to use sarcasm (which I have), apparently we do it badly and it never worked with me.

I've spent a week in a locked withdrawal ward, voluntarily at first. I was treated like an idiot by the rude and bossy staff, couldn't stand the noise and the confinement, and had bad anxiety attacks. When I packed my bags and asked to be let out after a day, I was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia and pumped full of drugs against my will. Other than that, I received no treatment whatsoever. I was only drugged up until I was a twitching, dyskinetic mess and barely aware of my surroundings. So yeah, I can relate.

If you think that you need psychiatric help (i.e. drugs, which is the only help they can offer), don't ever check into a hospital. They have a different financial incentive than psychiatrists with a private practice and are only looking to keep their beds filled. Once you're in there, it's very hard to get out until they're done milking your health insurance for all it's worth (at which point you might have sustained lasting side effects from the medication). And since nobody has ever been cured by a psychiatrist, it's a pointless exercise anyway.

^^ It depends on where you are. I've been in places where they just give you meds, you see your doctor for less than five minutes a day and he only manages meds, the only therapy is group therapy led by a social worker (in my case his final suggestion to everyone was to get right with God and go to church and the rest of time the group discussed the persons problems who was speaking) and they bring some new age lady in to play "soothing" music to you while you color a picture of how it makes you feel. The rest of the day is spent watching tv.

I've been in places where I had an excellent doctor who actually did therapy with me. He would come to my room and we would talk for about 40 minutes, and he treated me like a person worthy of respect and who had intelligence. There was occupational therapy (basically arts and crafts but we were bored), several group therapies to go to, a gym where a trainer would come every day and help you work out, a nice enclosed tropical garden to sit in (thats the only place you could smoke), plenty of things to do for distractions, they were not understaffed and they had time to sit and talk with you.

Another place had private therapy with the doc as before, but the rest of the day was taken up with mandatory activities which I could see no point to. Not only were we made to draw and color, we had to play indoor vollyball and all sorts of "games" which taught us to work as a team, trust each other, give and take, etc. That was pretty fun. We had group therapy with a couple of different people a day, some of which I felt was beneficial and some of which I felt the girl leading it didnt know her ass from a hole in the ground. The worst was this mandatory class to learn to relax. We had to lay down on blanket rolls on the floor in this room while the girl played a tape with music in the background and someone leading us through progressive relaxation. Now, I enjoy that kind of thing and have done it at home many times. However, this was completely ruined because the man who was speaking on the tape had the exact same voice and tone as the man who narrated every educational film strip I saw in school in the 1970's. You know that voice. It does not help relaxation. If we didn't go to every class, we were not allowed to smoke.

This one was on the 7th floor of a for profit hospital that I used to work at and so did my mother. The unit that I was in had originally been CVICU and they had a laminar flow room. This is a room for patients in reverse isolation where the air going into the room was brought in from outside and not through the ventilation system. Being up that high there is little bacteria and germs in the air. It's a common thing to have. It also sent the air from the room back out into the outside air. " Thats where we smoked. It stunk to high heaven and they had cameras all in there and we were not supposed to share cigarettes, as in give someone one. That rule was mostly ignored, and it was in place to prevent meeker people ffrom being put on the spot by someone pushy constantly asking for cigarettes. The crowd I was in there with was nice and normal. One evening nurse was a stickler for the rules and anytime she was able to enforce them she would get a smile on her face, which was the only time we saw her smile. You could also tell that the entire staff didn't much care for her, but they couldn't do anything about it because she was charge nurse for the shift.

I know that I said you don't complain while you are in there, but I had worked at that hospital for years and my mother had worked there since it opened until she retired, which was about 30 years. I was brought to work with her a lot and basically grew up in that hospital, knew everybody and every nook and cranny of it, and I was very much at home there. I also knew Miss Margaret was still the house supervisor in the evenings, and she was a very good friend of my mothers and used to come to the house and came to all my baby showers and my wedding showers. I mentioned to the mean nurse that I felt she was taking the rules to the extreme as no one was inconvenienced by sharing and for the most part the sharing was offered, and she told me I didn't know what I was talking about and took my smoking privelages away for 24 hours. I had a phone in my room. I knew the ext for the house supervisors office. I called Miss Margaret. We talked and caught up for a minute and she came up to see me. Told me she was so sorry I was depressed and was real sweet then told the overboard nurse to cool it unless there was a problem. She gavve me my smoking privelages back and asked if I had cigs, I had half a pack left, and went and bought me several packs. (She's known me since I was a little girl)

If you have that kind of pull at a place, THEN you can complain while you are inside.

But, I wrote all that to point out how different places are. Some are great! Some suck and do nothing more than make you worse, or treat you like cattle.

The hard part is finding a good place that your insurance will cover. The for profit hospitals were the best in my opinion. Those are the ones that aren't teaching hospitals and aren't the charity hospitals. You have to have insurance to get in or the money to pay. I had insurance one time and the other time my mother made some calls and it was all written off as professional courtesy. Most aren't that lucky.

I spent more than 6 months total in psychiatric hospitals between 2008 and 2010.

I had trouble communicating with the first psychiatrist (probably because of ASD) but when I wrote down what I wanted to say and presented it to her in written form, some miscommunication set her off and she got mad and said things like "I bent myself over backwards for you and it still wasn't enough".... not the kind of treatment you want from the person prescribing you meds. As soon as that happened, I started refusing to take meds and asked to be assigned to a different psychiatrist.

All that I got for my trouble was a reassignment, and then a mis-diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder. I wasn't even a particularly difficult patient, it was just my method of communicating doesn't fit well with mainstream psychiatry.

With the Borderline label it was even worse, psychiatrists stopped listening to me completely and I was turned away at the emergency room when I really needed help. That diagnosis got removed by a Borderline specialist. I'm glad.

Now that my (genuine) diagnosis of bipolar disorder is under control, through a combination of low doses of meds, proper food and sleep and exercise, I hope I don't have to return to the hospital. There's always a chance I'll have another bad episode, but I've learned how to cope with that stuff. The last psychotic episode I had in 2010 I wasn't even hospitalized for. My (current and good) psychiatrist treated me on an outpatient basis and eventually stabilized me without any need for hospital.

The one thing I've found in every psych hospital I've been in (3 psych wards and 1 "step down" unit) is that the nurses and even the volunteers who come in to do activities with you treat you like you're incompetent.

I don't know if that's just something that happens? I've gotten the same reactions from other professionals since the ASD diagnosis. The last hospitalization, in 2009, a volunteer came in to bake cookies with the patients. Maybe 4 of us helped her bake cookies, and then everyone left except for me. I offered to help her clean up and help with the dishes, but she said, "It's all right, there's some paper and some markers over there, how about you colour?"

I'm in my late 20's. I'm not a child. It seemed incredibly patronizing. Just go colour because obviously you're too unbalanced to manage doing dishes?

I insisted on helping her do the dishes, so it was just the two of us in the kitchen doing dishes. Now that I think about it, maybe she was afraid that she was being left alone with a psych patient? In any case, we had a conversation and I told her I was a university student, which also seemed to surprise her.

But I agree with OliveOilMom, some hospitals are good. Is there a patient/consumer advisor board at your hospital? I know the first one I ended up in had one of those, specifically for mental health patients. You could talk to them about how the professionals didn't understand/accommodate your needs because of your AS and then maybe if you ever end up in the hospital again, they can match you up with the right doctor.

I was in the adolescent unit for 108 days and had my 13th birthday there. When I arrived I was the youngest person there. People were there for reasons from waiting for placement in foster care, rich parents that wanted somewhere to dump their kids off to court ordered alternative to juvenile hall. By the time I stopped trying to get kicked out of there they had a couple of 11 year olds then a 10 year old. I had an incident while what I now know is stimming where someone was behind me and the story was that I hit them and left a mark, that they never let me see. I got sent to the locked unit, where there wasn't any segregation from the adults, for that. Another time for 'making threats' against a staff member when I tried to correct him about his accusations against another patient. They had me on antipsychotic meds that made it pretty much impossible to do anything beyond eat and sleep but there you go, I guess it's really just a misunderstanding when I wanted the bullies to go away and they thought I meant by suicide

When I was 14 I was on an adolescent unit for a 30 day evaluation and then went to their day treatment program for several months and then they admitted me again because they didn't like my weight (I was not anorexic and wasn't diagnosed with that but the whole time I was there they acted like I was anorexic and bulimic) and after that I think I pretty much quit going to the day treatment because I felt like I had no way of knowing whether I'd actually be allowed to leave at the end of the day.

As far as I know the only reason I was sent there was for skipping too much school. I was never diagnosed with anything or medicated.

Unfortunately, I've found medical offices have an alarmingly high rate of incompetence, especially in the reception area.

Hear hear!

I've been going to the same cattle clinic (my nickname for the only psych docs that see Medi-cal patients anymore) for close to 7 years, my previous meds allowed me to go 3 months between visits. Since I've been put on Adderall the last 2 years, I 've had to come in every month, so I see the chaos more frequently. It doesn't matter what day I book the next visit or how early, I've never sat in front of the doctor in less than 45 minutes. Twice this year alone they booked me on holidays, when they knew they would be closed. The last time, all the computers crashed and they wanted everyone to remind them when our appointments were supposed to be. There IS one good RN there but she is so overworked and the other 2 girls are clueless. I have to keep dialing in hopes of reaching the good RN live otherwise my messages never get returned.

The doctor was kind of a good ol' boy when he started there, he's just on this side of retirement, but the more I go and tell him how depressed I get, it seems he never really hears me. The sad thing is, this doctor is one of very few that I've seen that don't just pawn off antipsychotics onto me. I haven't even mentioned the meltdowns to him, wonder what his response will be when I ask him what he knows about AS