It’s convenient to have the friendly folks at the Sooper-Sekrit-Place-That-Must-Not-Be-Named to help you notice things. Can’t we leave the Siege-bashing where it started - off-board?
WTF? I need help noticing my own post?
For what it is worth & I am only one of the posters. I don’t look down on people who have had success with Meds and therapy, I only object to people pushing it as a quick choice. IMO pills get handed out like candy. A lot do good and a lot don’t and a few screw people up worse. You started this thread and apparently not too many people agreed with your reason so you have to put up with some negativity.
Jim
Well, “not that often” is too often–especially if you’re one of the unlucky ones. While random people aren’t getting thrown in loony bins willy nilly or anything like that, it does, as AHunter3 said, “happen often enough to generate concern.”
I never would have thought that it would (almost) happen to me. I’m not a raving lunatic or anything. And I’m genuinely not suicidal. So why would I think that my shrink would suddenly try to have me committed?
I’d like to think that if I did go directly to the mental hospital like my shrink wanted me to, they wouldn’t have accepted me, just like they didn’t accept me 3 days later. But maybe they looked at me differently because I walked in there on my own rather than being brought in by a shrink claiming an emergency need for a suicide watch.
Way to go you junior mod wannabe you.
:rolleyes:
I’m really not trying to be difficult here, but… cite? How often does this really happen? Fight my ignorance.
I don’t know, why would he? It just doesn’t make sense to me that there was absolutely no reason for a doctor to try to stick a person in a mental hospital who didn’t need to be there. I’m not doubting there are doctors on power trips who make bad decisions. It happens in areas other than psychiatry. It’s just that, in my experience (and this is only my experience), doctors have not been so gung-ho about drugs, hospitalization, any of it. FTR, I have had several doctors and therapists, ranging from awesome to horrendous, but still, never felt coerced by any of them into treatment I didn’t want.
I have zero doubt that being involuntarily hospitalized sucks enormously, which is exactly the reason my psychologist gave for talking me out of it. She said it was a last resort.
Since we’re giving anecdotal information now, I’ve told two seperate psychiatrists that I was suicidal (at different points in my life) and neither even prescribed me medication, much less committed me.
My aunt, swears there is water running under her house, going to suck her and her grandchildren under. She swears, people are watching and know about the water and is willing to do anything to protect herself and her grandchildren.
My mother and other aunt as well as my aunts husband tried to get her to therapy, she refused. Because my cousins knew she was obviously in need of help, and wouldn’t get any refused to allow her anywhere near there kids.
Many, vague threats of self harm, and harming “the watchers” later, the family decided to try to commit her, basically tricking her to go.
Didn’t work, she wouldn’t sign the paperwork. The only therapist they where able to get her to go see, told my uncle flat out, unless he could prove she was a danger he couldn’t commit her.
Needless to say, I still have a, well aunt that is quite a different aunt than she was just 4 years ago.
So unless something is very different elsewhere, I would assume it’s harder to get committed than some may believe.
The only people bringing up offboard crap is you, idiot. Jesus Christ on a cracker, you sure love to bring up that place anytime you get a bug up your ass about something.
Sorry, you’re right. I should have made it clear that those who piss on people who don’t deserve it are also fair game, even if they don’t direct their insults and bulling at me personally. But the fact is that I did like reading your post. Maybe it’s the mood I was in. I don’t like the sentiments it expressed, and I don’t find it to have expressed them terribly artfully, but I do find I have a perverse fascination with how little it take some people to get their dander up here. It makes me wonder if I’m missing something–and based on Excalibre’s post it would seem that I am.
But the fact is, I have a short attention span, and I’m barely inclined to follow all the silly infighting that goes on on this board without following to to other boards. I’m not Siege’s personal defender, and if I see you throwing shit in her direction again, I may very well skim over it. As you point out, it’s not like she can’t hold her own, and I (sometimes) have better things to do than play kindergarten cop.
You know, maybe you do need to get a life!
Most of them. Many are funny, and a few address genuine problems on the boards. I do lurk there sometimes, even if I rarely have anything to add. But yeah, it’s not usually Pulitzer material there.
You seem to be suggesting that if I find pointless bickering, juvenile whining, and petty bullying (not to mention righteously indignant chastisements, blisteringly hilarious and obscene rants, and silly snarkfests, all of which I enjoy on occasion) not to my general liking, that I must be weak, immature, or otherwise unable to deal with harsher realities and worthy of contempt. If this is, in fact, what you mean to imply, I think it may say quite a bit about your own worldview and personality. “Petty” wouldn’t begin to describe it. Or maybe you’re just an ignorant chauvinist, who thinks that anyone who doesn’t enjoy Nascar and boxing isn’t a “real” man.
In any event, I’m forced to concede that you may have a point. This has been rather fun, even if I don’t feel like I’ve accomplished anything worthwhile. Maybe next time, I’ll try a more challenging target.
Wow Alan you think quite a bit of yourself don’t you. That was the smarmiest, snidest, most pathetic post I have seen in quite a long time.
Hey, I’m just trying to fit in here!
For the record, of course I was being smarmy and self-righteous. That was rather the point, wasn’t it? I was being attacked for keeping out of the pit and above the fray. For once, I thought that the appropriate response was to eschew the high road and give into the temptation to be as whiney and arrogant as my attacker. If I overshot the mark, or if I failed to convey the irony–Eh, well…I’m not perfect.
Just better than the rest of you. 
Green Bean:
Check. In most states, the involuntary commitment takes the form of a “2-PC”, or “two psychiatrists in accord to commit”. If your own shrink thinks you need to be committed, that’s one down, one to go. You are escorted involuntarily to a facility and the shrink on the floor sees you as you are brought in, in whatever emotional and cognitive state you are in when you are being brought to a psychiatric facility against your will. (Everyone who thinks they’d be unfazed, unfrazzled, not angry, not scared, and clearheaded under those circumstances, please raise your hands). Different hospitals and different localities handle things differently — you may be immediately seen by a psychiatrist who asks you things like who the President of the United States is (if you’ve ever seen Miracle on 34th Street, you’ve seen a decently accurate portrayal of a mental-status eval). Or you may be put on a locked ward until such time as the psychiatrist has an opportunity to see you, and while you wait you can make the acquaintance of the nurses, orderlies, and other mental patients, including of course the other emergency arrivals.
Where you generally aren’t going to be is out in the same waiting area you’d be in if you’d walked in on your own. Usually, that waiting area is a place people can walk back out of. The people who are out there — which would include you if you come in of your own accord — do not have one shrink’s opinion that they should be held as an inpatient, or at least not the opinion that they should be held as an involuntary inpatient. What they do have, most likely, since they are there and haven’t left despite being able to walk out of there, is the belief that they need psychiatric help, or might need psychiatric help.
Now, think about this for a moment from the perspective of a psychiatrist. Why do you need to be on a locked ward if you already understand you need psychiatric help and are wiling to accept it? Outpatient therapy will do, won’t it?
Oh, but you say you’re suicidal! :eek: You say you think you need to be locked up! :eek:
Play along with me, thinking like a psychiatrist —who are you going to be more concerned about, a patient who brings themself to the hospital and says “help me, I think I’m gonna kill myself”, or a patient whose private psychiatrist had them escorted here involuntarily because of a professional opinion, as the patient’s regular treating pyschiatrist, that you’re likely to try to kill yourself? So, OK, maybe the patient in the first example really is suicidal. As the doctor, you ask the patient questions: Patient, are you actually planning it, or do you just feel like you would if you could not get help? If I send you home with instructions to come into the outpatient clinic tomorrow at 9:30, can you tell me that you’ll refrain from taking your life until then? I see which meds you are on, have you been taking them? You haven’t run out or anything? MM-kay, look, you’ll feel better once your regular doc gets your meds right, or I’ll start working with you in the morning and we’ll get your meds right, and in the mean time as long as you aren’t determined to do yourself in, you’re better off at home. Locked wards are gloomy and unpleasant. Etc. If you were really bent on your own destruction, you would not be here, you would be somewhere else making yourself dead. You just want to issue an ultimatum, “I am not going to continue to feel this awful, so fix me or I’m doing Final Exit”. So we’re gonna fix you. Go home and get some rest.
[SNARKY]: I will also add that for many psychiatrists I’ve encountered, the fact that you think you might need to be locked up means you don’t, just as if you didn’t think you need to be locked up that would mean you probably do. [/SNARKY] But as you can perhaps see, there are some legitimate reasons for thinking that way, as snarky as it sounds when you put it like that.
Rubystreak:
You keep asking for cites w/regards to “how often, isn’t this rare?”, and we keep giving you anecdotes, sorry!
http://makeashorterlink.com/?A22221ACC
http://www.antipsychiatry.org/unjustif.htm
(The latter source — being on a domain “antipsychiatry.org” that’s run by one of us schizzy-libbers — is one you might consider superficially impeachable & far from unbiased, but it names names, and articles, and so on, which you can follow through on)
I’ll dig you out some more / better figures if you want.
Meanwhile re: her particular close-call event —Green Bean told you the reason: her shrink probably sincerely, if quite erroneously, thought that she was suicidal from a comment she had made. My colleague Grace’s shrink had a reason, too — I don’t know for sure what it was and I doubt it was even remotely within the purview intended by involuntary-psychiatry statutes, because Grace wasn’t dangerous or even particularly nutty, but it wasn’t for no reason. (Her shrink found her refusal to acknowledge his expertise to be so illogical as to constitute a symptom of her “disease”; and he found her stubborn insubordination towards him to be a psychotic rejection of social structure so severe that, well hell, if she was going to backtalk her psychiatrist, she would probably disobey the police, too. Loose cannon. Is never going to get her life fixed until this willful “acting-out” rebelliousness is conquered. And that, in turn, is not going to happen until we get her on the right meds. And some non-nonsense institutional structure would do her a world of good. Etc. These aren’t reasons I find at all defensible, mind you, but they are reasons, nonetheless.
Sorry, I’ve missed some of the commentary here in this thread, esp in response to my last post.
First, What Exit? and AHunter3, the reason why I’d said that Jim’s anecdote didn’t sound right to me was that for an involuntary inpatient stay, in NY, it takes an actual court order to hold a person beyond 72 hours after they’ve made the request to be released. (96 hours if that happens on a weekend.) I’m assuming, since Jim didn’t mention it, that his friend’s case was never put before a judge. This is still something that can be abused by the system, no question. First off - the request has to go up the chain, and when one is inpatient it’s damned easy to keep someone away from other people. When I was inpatient the hospital made a point of giving me an introduction to the social worker who’d handle that if I felt it was necessary, and I never saw anything to indicate that the nursing staff would interfere with anyone’s attempt to get that message out.
That doesn’t mean, AHunter3, that I disbelieve your account, nor the history of that person you linked me to. What’s legal is alas, not always what happens.
To Lute Skywatcher, and MsRobyn, I don’t doubt that there are yahoos in the military’s psych services. And many of them will be on the same “keep people in” rather than “treat them” mentality that is common in other military fields such as recruiting and training. The reasons I feel differently is, when I told my ship’s doctor that I sometimes felt that the chain of command was out to make blue shirts hang for anything that goes wrong, he told me that it wasn’t a sign of unreasonable paranoia on my part, but a reasonable conclusion from events aboard ship. Oddly enough I trust him, still. And, well, given his relationship with the then CNO*, I don’t think his opinion would be swept under a rug. So, I don’t think I’d have been pigeonholed as someone looking for an “I love me” shirt. And, given how my mental illness has gotten worse since I got out, there would be a good deal of benefit to me if I’d had that on my service medical record.
*They were related. I can’t say how close, but the CNO did make one “unofficial” visit to the command to see him.
Well as I said, different state and it did happen only a few years back and the wonderful free Psych people went from a diagnosis of suicidal to extremely hostile and didn’t see what assholes they were. I had to keep reminding myself to hold my anger from fear they would try to lock me up. Really shitty what happened to my friend and it did him no good and actually set him back in job hunting quite a bit.
I guess what pisses me off the most is how easily they got him in for observation and then decided he had a big problem because he was angry they wouldn’t let him out. If I ever found myself in for observation and not allowed out, I know I would be extremely hostile.
Jim
That’s why I’d asked about when and where it happened. I’m glad I didn’t seek help in NJ, when I thought about it.
I think Guinistasia’s ranting is just the polar opposite of AH3’s view. It’s similarly jaded and worse than Hunter’s in arrogance.
It is the arrogance of human certainty. It is an argument backing an Institution that has a God-Complex and worse yet, a financial interest.
Yep, NJ, I kind of love it but it has more than its fair share of problems. In NYC children were being left with blatantly abusive parents in the 80’s and in NJ kids would be taken into protective custody due to anonymous complaints. Our level of political corruption seems abnormally high also.
Jim
Would you have the courtesy please to post exactly what I said either in this thread or the other that “pushed” people too quickly toward “Pysch” (sic) and expounds upond the wonders of drugs? What is it that I said that you consider “crap”?
The only references that I’ve found to medication were regarding prozac in which I cautioned that it is not a “happy pill,” but went on to say that
And I had this to say about my own experience:
Here’s a summary of my “pushing”:
No one diagnosed Kytheria. We did what we’re supposed to do right off the bat. We suggested that she see a professional. Some suggested that she watch her diet and get exercise and fresh air. They are right.
You might want to reexamine the question that I asked:
Your friend is not a participant here and apparently it was his aunt who sought help from a social worker. What I was asking for was personal experiences from people who understand clinical depression from the inside.
And as I said at the beginning of this thread and as AHunter3 knows from many previous discussions, I am in his corner on involuntary committment issues.
Siege, mental illnes is personal! Good for you!