So it occured to me that I'm in a unique position and that might let me help some people. I've spent a few months in a "mental hospital" (the doctors prefer "residential treatment center"), and I'm currently active on a forum that has a lot of mentally ill people who might benefit from something similar. But hospitals are scary! So why don't I take the time to explain my experience and try to de-mystify hospital stays? Spoiler: My Experience First, a couple of notes. I was admitted voluntarily, meaning I could check out any time I liked, and then in defiance of the Eagles song, I could actually leave. But I had literally nowhere else to go. So that wasn't as comforting as you might think. Every hospital is different, and I can only speak to my experience. If you want more details about the hospital I was in, PM me and I'll share privately. Just bear in mind that my experience may not match yours or other people's. At least for us barbarians in the land of no single payer, hospitals are *expensive*. Even a short stay can rack up hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical debt. If your insurance doesn't cover it, or you don't have insurance, then think of hospitalization as an absolute last resort. If you have to go though, go. Debt sucks, but killing yourself due to being clinically depressed sucks more. So, the first thing I noticed about the place is how it was layed out. It had its own fenced in campus, all surrounded by trees. At the front was the road in, and the admininstration building, where you checked in, and where the caffeteria, gym, and other facilities were locates, as well as the offices for the staff. It was... nice, actually. I didn't know exactly what to expect but I harbored a borderline subconscious fear that I'd end up in a place out of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest". Not so. The back of the admin building led to a big, grassy open garden style are, ringed by a circular concrete walkway. At regualr intervals, there would be a path branching off the walkway that led to one of the patient dormitories. The dormitories were segregated by age, and went 65+, 30-65, 18-30, 12-18, and 12 and under. Let me tell you, there is nothing more heartbreaking than watching thirty kids under twelve walk quietly to lunch in a psychiatric hospital. It was bad enough being a full grown adult and dealing with it. Being a kid... I don't want to think about how tough and scary that must have been for them. I was 24 at the time, so I was dead center in the "young adult" group, although in practice I was one of the older people there. The oldest was "B" at 27, the youngest was "A" at 19. Most of them were 19-22. There was no segragation based on diagnosis or symptoms. I was in groups with people with BPD, Schizotypal disorder, crippling depression or anxiety, heroin addictions, you name it and, memoraby, one guy with ASPD. (He was... interesting. Fasctinating to talk to.) The first thing I had to get used to was the lack of freedom. The doors all locked from the outside, except our room doors, which didn't lock, even the bathrooms. Everything was on a schedule: meals, exercise, free time, individual and group therapy, medical checkups, group activities, meditation, everything. Privleges were given out based on a point system. You started at zero and by going to groups, participating in discussions, and doing other things related to recovery, you gained up to five points. At various scores, you were allowed things like ipods, or escorted time outside, or day passes accompanied by family. I shot up to level five in about two weeks, because I'm easy to get along with and I was very focused on recovery. Some people never got above a one, mostly those who didn't want to be there in the first place. It was very... structured. Every week had the same schedule. (I've probably still got a copy in my recovery binder somewhere.) Meals were suprisingly tasty. The groups and meetings ranged from interesting to boring as hell. The staff were, at their worst, incompetent but well meaning, and at their best, exactly the kind of caring, insightful, intelligent, well trained people you want in charge of your recovery. Let's see... computer acces was limited. I wrote mostly in notebooks for transcribing later. There were no TVs, and no video games. Only boardgames and loads of books (fiction and non-fiction). And of course the other patients. The majority of my "free time" was spent talking to other people, learning about why they were there, what their symptoms were, how they were doing, and the basic "getting to know you" type stuff. This was tough for me, because at the time I habitually retreated from human contact into games and books, and the staff refused to let me have that defense mechanism any more. The worst things were family visits. I'd get comfortable with my routine, and then my folks would show up and I'd spend an hour not getting anything done because they pretended to be perfect parents at all times. I still haven't resolved all the lingering issues I have with them. Probably never will. I was there for just under 12 weeks, which was about average a time to stay. I left in an incredibly better place than I entered in, and I've been getting better, on and off, ever since. Questions are welcome, of course! I'll answer anything I can without breaking anyone's trust or revealing too much about the hospital in question and my current and past whereabouts. Also, feel free to post your own experiences with hospitals or therapy or recovery! I'd love to see other people's perspectives.
my hospitalization only lasted 8 days, but it was very similar to your experience. i described it later as "like band camp for sad adults", because the regimented schedule reminded me of nothing so much as band camp. we were woken up every day between 6 and 7 am to have our blood pressure taken, then got some free time (which i used to sleep more) until breakfast at 8. after breakfast was group therapy, then another group therapy, then lunch, then a group therapy, then some activity (gym, yoga, art therapy-- it varied), dinner, then free time until bed. no one really enforced a bedtime. no internet access, or even access to your devices, the whole time. there were two common rooms with a tv, some books, and a bunch of coloring pages and supplies. oh yeah-- that's mostly what i did the whole week there: color. sleep, go to group therapy, and color. usually at least one of the tvs in the common rooms was on a music station, and so i'd hang out and color in the adult coloring pages with a bunch of the other inpatients. the group therapy was fine. it reminded me of college classes, where there were handouts and notes and stuff but you could generally participate as much or as little as you wanted. everyone had specific treatment goals-- mine included "go to group therapy at least once per day"-- but it was on you to make that happen. i usually went to therapy at least twice a day, just to fill the time. the only rule i really disliked was no food in the dorm rooms. there was a bowl of fruit in the lobby, and there was a snack every evening at like 8 or so, but i am a grazer who eats many small meals rather than a couple big ones. so by day 3 i was shoving bags of chips down my underwear to sneak back after meals, lol.
oof, sympathy liked for the depression and parent feels, south. i don't have an experience quite like either of you, because i was one of the people in the underage group, at 15. there were people from 8th grade there, although i was only a freshman myself-- it had a saint's name in the title, so you can imagine the sort of subtle ~ jesus ~ lingering about, haha. the thing that sticks out to me in my memory is that we had group therapy during one of the planned activity slots, and the person asked us why we were all here. obviously since... we were in the suicidal ward... i wasn't taking it seriously at all and mostly wanted to go back home, so when it was my turn, i just said "i tried to be like jesus and walk on water." a few of the people in-group started laughing, but the person in charge was Not Amused. worth it, tbh. my group was mostly waking up early in the morning, breakfast, planned activity, lunch, movie, p.e, dinner. sometimes the planned activity was just sitting around and doodling, free timeish, other times we went into the p.e room and worked out. if you didn't want to watch the movie, you could also go back into your room, and we had the decision of what movie to watch. you'd get pulled out of the planned activity as well to talk to your counselor, and if i hadn't napped during one, i would have been out in 4 days. bedtime was enforced, and apparently-- though this didn't happen to me-- switching rooms was pretty commonplace. i started off being alone, then getting someone to room with. the people in the group were fine as well, and there's nothing that i remember besides that two of the patients began dating in their stay and someone younger than me recognized me from middle school. at the time i was very //// at being so mentally ill, but now im just damn, that poor kid. the hospital didn't really help me, especially because i was lying for the reason of my attempt. it was a short-term solution, and i wouldn't go back, especially to that specific hospital. i'm sure others are more recovery-based, but.
oh yeah! i completely neglected to mention this aspect of it, but: i went into the hospital in the worst depression of my life, and i came out feeling rested and better than i had in over a year. getting the chance to check out of my daily life and just take care of my mental health for a week was so, so, so helpful. i also had been on a medication that made me way worse, and while i was in the hospital they transitioned me to a medication combo that has kept me more or less stable for almost a year now. but doing that in a controlled environment was really good.
I was in a locked ward inside a larger hospital for a little over a week. It was overall a pretty positive experience in that it got me out of immediate crisis mode. I'm not sure how helpful the group therapy was, honestly, because it was extremely basic CBT and more like a class than anything, but just being somewhere where I could control my access to the outside world and talk about what had been hurting me was good. (Also, they let me keep my phone and headphones, which saved my damn life because I cannot go without listening to music for very long, but this is not a super common thing)
Was all your group therapy verbal therapy? That's so weird to me because I have experience with a psych ward from the other side (studying to be a doctor so one of my rotations was on a psych ward), and most of the day consists of non-verbal therapies. Like making art, or doing something with music, or sort of 'p.e.'-classes. The psychiatrists find that the non-verbal therapies are at least as important if not more important than the verbal therapies. I mean, you can talk your problems to death, or you can practise boundary setting by going: 'no, I think I have walked for long enough today' in 'p.e.'-therapy (psychomotor therapy it's called)
Oh yeah, we had some occupational therapy too, some of which was art, and that helped more than anything else I think.
yeah, every day had some kind of occupational therapy as well-- art, or gym, or yoga, or meditation, or something like that. but most of the therapy was sit-and-talk. i went to art every single time it was available, though. i'm not sure if it helped more than the DBT but i did paint two jars, and that was great.
Yeah, it depends a *lot* on the hospital you go to. I was very lucky in that regard. Sorry to hear it didn't help you, but I'm glad you shared your experience! Yessssss, the opportunity to just... *exist* for a while was very helpful. I was having daily anxiety attacks because I was trying to do school and a job and avoid my parents and force myself to be social, etc. Having the opportunity to sit back and take stock and just decompress and get some help was immensly useful to me. Also medication. I went from 10mg zoloft (did pretty much nothing) to six different meds, including 40mg prozac (all of which actually worked to alleviate the worst of my symptoms). Yeah, we had talk and non-verbal therapies. I'm a very verbal person so the talk therapy helped me the most. I didn't get much out of art therapy other than a cool statue I made.
Part of the reason art therapy helped me was that when I'm in a really bad depressive state I just don't draw, and it eats at me. Having a designated time to just sit down and create something was really helpful!
I spent maybe around 10 days in a public hospital following my suicide attempt* a few months ago. The floor I was supposed to be in was full so I got put with older adults. I was actually able to keep my phone and there was wifi, I later got my tablet back as well. Since I was underage, I wasn't allowed to get out. At all. I just spent over a week locked inside that hospital floor. It was incredibly boring. I did an art therapy thing once, made a clay ring I was told I could get back once it dried but I never heard of it back. I tried to study for exams that were coming up but it was pretty much impossible with all the noise (some asshole was always blasting music at full volume and helicopters were regularly landing and taking off right next to the hospital). The food was awful, and I was completely unable to eat it, and even threw up a few times. Some of the staff apparently thought I was here for an eating disorder and absolutely refused to let me go away until I finished eating everything on my plate. In the last few days, it got a bit better and I was able to take stuff like bread and fruit into my room. My family asked if they could bring food but they were told they couldn't because it wasn't dietetic, so I just got biscuits. I was there for observation after they had put me on meds (Risperdal, for all your suppressing-autistic-people-acting-autistic needs!), which I had an adverse reaction to so they kept me even longer than expected. I saw a doctor exactly twice during my whole stay, once at the beginning and once near the end. I pretty much came out of it even worse than I started off (though I didn't realize it at the time, having convinced myself the meds were totally helping and I was better than I ever was), but my parents were pretty fine with that because I was practically begging them to take me back. This whole mess, along with other details, is in my vent thread starting here. *They didn't know it was a suicide attempt and thought it was a particularly violent outburst.
Wow, that sounds incredibly fucked. I'm sorry you had to go through it. I am glad you talked about it though; I don't want people to get the impression from my post that hospital stays are all sweetness and light.
ive been in the hospital a lot for non-mental health issues but some of those times it was kinda a weird setup in that 1/2 of the ward was for regular hospital stuff and the other 1/2 was an eating disorder inpatient program (specifically for people who were extremely malnourished to the point of needing to be medically stabilized before they could think about going to another program more for the mental health side of it) the hospital food was absolutley terrible and i always felt so bad for that group
...I may take the time to write up my many, many hospital experiences at some point here but not right now
I had really negative/kind of traumatic hospital experiences. Context: I live in Australia but am also poor as shit, so this was all under public hospital infrastructure, which is notoriously worse than private care. Gonna put this under a cut because I don't want to freak anyone out, but I kind of want to talk about it. Because there is the possibility that hospital can fuck you up. Spoiler: OH BOY LET'S DO THIS My first admission to hospital was in 2006, to an adult ward, despite being only 16 at the time. Doctors falsely believed I was schizophrenic due to misinterpreting what I was telling them, and kept upping my dosage of seroquel until I was a living zombie. (They wouldn't listen to me when I said they had it wrong, and just assumed they needed to do more of what they were doing.) I couldn't stay upright and I just wanted to sleep. I was not allowed in my room to sleep, because the doctors felt that was 'isolating myself'. So I ended up napping on the couch. Most of the time, they didn't open the activities room until the middle of the afternoon (if then) because no one got around to it. (The activities room was a room full of art supplies and some games.) There weren't any group activities, and only one television in the public area. There were a lot of magazines with great fad diets, though, which was amazing for someone with an eating disorder. </sarcasm> Smoking was the main way people occupied their time, because this was before hospitals had a blanket ban on smokes even in designated areas. There were a lot of cases of people getting thrown into the padded room (actually a completely smooth-walled room with no handle on the inside of the door and only a plastic mattress inside) for being disruptive. I went in voluntarily, but when they started mistreating me and I said I wanted out, they scheduled me (ie. held me against my will). I had to get an attorney (I think? my memory is fucked, but it was some kind of law person) to defend my right to leave because the doctors wanted to keep me there. I was almost legally obligated to take injections of antipsychotics but managed to get out of it by pretending like I was terrified of injections. I went into that ward because I was suicidal, and I left more suicidal than I was preciously, and with a host of other issues on top of it. It wasn't fun. My second admission (also in 2006) was to an adolescent acute unit. This place actually had day activities - they were pretty useless, art projects and physical fitness stuff, but there was at least stuff to do. There were also more staff members who actually tried to talk to you -- like, I had an occupational therapist giving me advice there. It had less of a ward feel to it, and more of a homely feel - a lot of individual rooms. There were also two entertainment rooms in case someone was using one, and there were gaming systems there, thank fuck. No one supervised my obsessive use of the exercise bike when they probably should have, though. This place had less egregious abuse. They fucked with my meds but didn't just keep pumping me full of more and more seroquel. (It helped that I'd learned how to lie at that point.) That partnered with the fact that there was something to do other than stare at a TV turned to a channel you didn't care about or reading Cosmopolitan meant that it wasn't as bad as the first one. Both of those wards had walled-in gardens, which was nice, I guess. Oh, I'm pretty sure you had a designated nurse? Someone who was supposed to look out for you specifically. That might've been in the third hospitalisation, though. The third one (2007) was a combination hospital/school unit, designed to help teenagers get out of the hospital circuit and back into education. I stayed there for around a year, maybe a little less. The psychiatrists there were incompetent, but the nurses generally meant well. There was a really good OT. This place was set in a historical building, so it felt a lot more like a boarding school than a hospital - generally you slept in group rooms (I lucked out and slept alone), everything was really pretty. You went home on weekends, unlike in acute units. That place had a graduating system of privileges. If you were rank... 3, I think? You had to stay within sight of the residential/school buildings, and couldn't go out back to where the art room was unless you were being accompanied. Rank 4, you could go and sit on the grounds. Rank 5, you were allowed to go out on the weekly shopping outing. Rank 6, you could go outside hospital grounds when accompanied by someone else if you cleared it with the nurse's station. There were also penalty ranks 1 and 2, for people who'd shown destructive behaviours (though suicide attempts and the like got you sent to an acute unit, because this place wasn't designed for that), where you had to stay even closer to observed sections, but I was pretty good at avoiding that so I don't remember what they entailed exactly. The fourth hospitalisation didn't come until many years later, when I tried to take a long walk off a short pier in 2015. (This was, obviously, an adult ward.) Prevailing attitudes seemed to have changed at that point - one of the other inpatients was threatening towards me so I was allowed to stay in my room without complaints. My meds weren't tinkered with. There was maybe one or two group activities a day, I can't remember exactly which, just that one of them was yoga. They actually kept their activities room unlocked. No one was allowed to smoke any more! Because I went in on a suicide attempt, I wasn't allowed to go to the bathroom alone. (This is something that happens when they think you're a danger to yourself. You don't really... get privacy unless you've earned it.) The bathroom door was kept locked the rest of the time. I also had to keep the door to my room open and stay in sight. I wouldn't call it traumatic in itself, but being there definitely brought up old traumas and I was glad to get out a week later. So, like, things I've found to be pretty universal amongst hospitals: There's someone you can go to, to complain if people are behaving badly. I think they're called consumer advocates? Access to this person may or may not be easy to get. (In the first ward, I never managed to reach out to them even though I was made aware they technically existed.) There'll usually be a weekly meeting to air grievances and bring up things which are going wrong, though I can't remember if the advocate attends those - I think they were headed up by nurses most of the time? Nurse handovers happen when the next shift rolls in, and during those fifteen minutes or so there usually won't be much (if any) staff oversight. It's pretty weird. There's no hot water. You get cold water and you get warm water. For the sake of not freezing, I really, honestly suggest just showering with warm water and not even bothering with the cold, because the warm water is already designed to not be able to hurt you. The food sucks even more if you have dietary restrictions. (I was vegan for my first three hospital stays. It was the worst.) You're not allowed to have access to your phone or the internet. This is something which is probably regional, since other people have said they got to keep theirs -- but over here it's verboten, at least in the public health system. That's one of the things that fucked me up the most, since almost all of my social circle and most of my support network is online. You're also not allowed to have cables, or, in some cases, shoelaces or other items like that, because you might choke yourself with them. You can keep charging cables at the nursing station, though. The mirrors are all made of this weird metal instead of glass. Once you see it you can never unsee it. They'll give you access to pads/tampons, but only if you specifically ask. There's probably more I can say here, but my memory is legendarily shitty due to dissociation problems and I'm having trouble remembering the details of my stays. One thing I want to emphasise here is I'm not telling people this to say they shouldn't go to hospital if they need it -- I've heard it's very helpful for the majority of people who don't get abused by the system! But I just... wanted to say that I've been there and it wasn't great for me, I guess. Happy to answer questions if I can remember the answers properly.
Oh god. That all sounds fucking horrible. Especially the first hospitalization. Damn. I'm really, really sorry things were so shitty and you kept having to go back. Wittnessed RE: Dietary restrictions (my best friend in the ward was vegan and she literally lived off of crackers, hummus, and soybeans), weird mirrors, cold showers, and smoking (I went in smoking *maybe* three a day. Left with a pack a day habit.) Fuck. Just... I'm so sorry. Hospitals are supposed to *help* but they obviously failed you, completely and utterly. Assholes.
