I've been admitted to psychiatric wards in Virginia about 20 times in 18 years: AMA

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

On Saturday, October 25, I went to Obici Memorial Hospital in Suffolk, Virginia for psychiatric treatment. They eventually found a bed for me at Virginia Commonwealth University hospital in Richmond, where I was from the 28th until November 3.

I was diagnosed with Bipolar 1, manic/depressive, back in August of 2007 after a nervous breakdown. I’ve been hospitalized approximately 20 times since then, for periods ranging from a week to a full six weeks.

VCU was the best hospital I’ve ever been to. They focus on you and don’t make things hard for you.

I met every weekday morning with my full medical team and social worker, and every day with my nurse. They gave me the use of a CPAP sleep machine pre-loaded with the settings I use at home. They had peer groups, and art therapy. They allowed us to watch TV and didn’t complain about us changing the channel.

The wards were sex-segregated. They fed us three hots a day and gave us snacks whenever we wanted. They even did our laundry for us, the first place I’ve been to where patients didn’t have to do their own laundry. Visiting hours were from 8-8 and so were phone hours.

Ask me anything about my experience with the hospitals or my experience with my illness. Please be respectful.

2

Did you meet any interesting people there?

3

At the most recent hospital? The first two guys I met were relatively normal. A white guy named V and a Black guy named Walter. V had a lot of tattoos, including an Airbender tattoo on the back of one of his hands. I don’t remember much of what we talked about. Basic stuff.

Walter and I bonded over watching sports together. We watched a couple of games of the World Series, but my CPAP machine arrived in the eighth inning of Game 7 and I had to go to bed before the game was over. (It went 11 innings, anyway).

Walter was at the table with us when my mother and my sister @EllieNeo visited from home. I mentioned that the hospital provided food whenever I wanted it. They were also kind enough to provide sandwiches and drinks for Mom and Ellie. While they were there, we played UNO and I Declare War. Separately, I played I Declare War with Walter as well.

V and Walter went home before I did, and were ultimately succeeded by a white guy whose name I can’t remember precisely (so let’s call him Joe) and a Black guy named K.

Joe was a high-functioning neurodivergent who seemed to know everything there was to know about the Seattle Seahawks football team. He lived in Seattle from about the time the Sonics left in '07 to the start of the pandemic in '20. He knew the names of every member of the offensive line, and everyone’s tendencies.

And he’s actually bored by watching sports.

He has a great knowledge of hip-hop lyrics, saying the genre saved his life. He’s about 48 years old, five years older than me.

He was socially anxious among groups of people greater than three or four. He couldn’t bear for his entire medical team to be in the same room with him at the same time, so most of them had to wait and listen around the corner while only one, his actual psychiatrist, was his visual range. (I wasn’t eavesdropping on him. I saw this as I was passing his room in the hall.)

K was a strange cat. He told me that he had killed Batman, who was Asian. He and I bonded over watching the Hoosiers on Saturday and the Colts on Sunday. He rooted for both of those teams with me. (I’m from Indiana.)

We also bonded over the Winsome Earl-Sears “I AM SPEAKING!” commercial for now governor-elect Abigail Spanberger, which played on literally every commercial break on local channels, it seemed. Every time she said it, we said it along with her and repeated it and laughed. But why shouldn’t we? It’s funny as Hell!

4

I don’t understand. The Pit is for lashing out at people, places, or things that really upset you. You, on the other hand, seem pleased with the service offered to you. Did I miss something?

5

This is in the wrong place. I meant to put this in MPSIMS.

Flagged.

6

They’ll move it for you.

You’ve been in and out of hospitals many times. The “out” suggest that they were able to help you improve enough to make it on your own at home. What would that be, and is there a way for you to avail yourself of that without having to go to the hospital to get it?

7

My cousin had severe, crippling anxiety among other issues. He had been involuntarily committed in the 80s and was apparently deathly afraid of it happening again. He ended up committing suicide in his 40s. Have you seen an evolution of care over the years, and do you feel like the stays help? IOW, was his fear justified?

8

Sometimes I’m able to discover minor fluctuations in my mood or the effectiveness of my medication or therapy that I’m able to get my treatment team at the Western Tidewater Community Services Board (CSB) to help me through it without requiring hospitalization.

I have also availed myself of the National Suicide and Crisis Hotline (988) many times, including seven times in seven days prior to a month-long involuntary commitment in '22.

9

Who pays? If not you, do they require a doctor’s referral?

10

That’s scary, but you have been doing the right thing to reach out! I’m sorry that you’re going through this on a lifelong basis. I can only hope that they can come up with something that is at least close to a cure.

11

There is a dramatic improvement in the care afforded me at Maryview Hospital in Portsmouth in '07, my third hospitalization, and my most recent two hospitalizations - Southern Virginia Mental Health Institute (SVMHI) in Danville in '24 and VCU in Richmond in '25. The difference is night and day.

But I do distinctly remember being terrified of going into the hospital last year. I was dealing with severe pre-Election Day anxiety (Trump Derangement Syndrome is an actual thing that I deal with, but it’s justified because he’s so sick and evil), and flipped out the day before Election Day. I went into the hospital on Election Day, and remember vowing, “DEATH FIRST!” rather than going back into the hospital.

My first memory of the Danville hospital was someone helping me take a shower before I was admitted to the ward. My second memory was being in a diaper and shitting myself. I was not okay for a period of about three weeks. And I didn’t understand what I had done wrong.

As the medication, therapy, and groups started to work, I turned a corner and SVMHI turned into the goddamn Hilton. The groups were diverse and interesting; I got to meet with an educated and liberal chaplain several times a week; we played basketball; we had computer lab time on occasion; I even got to watch “Mastermind”, the episode of my favorite show, Helluva Boss, which dropped on YouTube while I was in the hospital.

It sort of depends on what hospital you get. When I needed to go into the hospital again this past month and was told there were no local beds available, I requested a return to Danville but was very much satisfied with Richmond. The groups were less frequent, diverse, and interesting. The chaplain was either less educated or less engaged. But there were fewer patients and they weren’t as crazy as some of them were in Danville. Richmond was closer to home, so my family could visit me, and had unlimited food privileges, and I didn’t have to fight over the television.

I can’t spell to how it was in the 1980s. I was born in 1982. But he was wrong to commit suicide, of course. Psychiatric wards in the late 20th and early 21st centuries aren’t punitive like old-fashioned insane asylums. They’re places to get well.

12

I don’t know if they needed a doctor’s referral. CSB was probably in contact with them.

I’m on Social Security disability and receive Medicare, and at least on this most recent trip, Medicare covered the entire bill. Even the cost of my transportation to and from the hospital (to the hospital strapped to an ambulance gurney, and from the hospital in the back of a Chevy Silverado on Uber, driven by a man with exquisite taste in R&B music). They also gave me a pair of Crocs in my exact shoe size, 10 1/2, because the only clothes I had that belonged to me were three T-shirts that Ellie picked up for me from home and a set of six boxer-briefs that my former pastor, Tracy, had her husband drop off. (She lived in Richmond the entire time she was interiming at my church, and traveled to Suffolk on Sundays and Wednesdays.) The only pair of shoes I owned were back home. (And they need to be replaced or repaired soon). And it had been raining, so now I’ve got a comfortable pair of Crocs for the first time in my life.

13

What kind of things could be done outpatient, in the community, to help you not have to go in again - or at least go in less frequently?

14

@SunUp My psychiatrist and therapist insist that I could benefit from getting involved in the community, like with book clubs or peer groups, or meeting people in the real world.

I find it difficult to do that since I’m the only non-driver in my family.

I did, a few months back, come up with the idea of taking swimming classes at the Y. I know only how to tread water and swim from one end of the pool to the other using just my arms. I’ve never been able to get my legs to cooperate.

My therapist encouraged me to do that. I might. Medicare, I think, has a Silver Sneakers program I can take advantage of. I need their help getting the paperwork together, though.

15

I’m also involved in my church. I go there every week that I can, though there are times we can’t make it because of Mom’s migraine. I sing in the choir and do a couple of solos a year. I do Worship Leader duties once every few months. I’m always there with encouragement for people. I stay involved.

And I’ve been well-treated by my church in return. I had upwards of 15 cards sent to me in the hospital in '24 from my church family. And the interim pastor, Tracy, even spearheaded a successful effort to get the church to pay for a new trailer for us, to replace the old one which had become a health hazard.

16

At the previous hospital, I met a guy about 15 years younger than I was who became a good friend. I’ll call him H.

We bonded over watching football and wrestling together, and played a lot of UNO and I Declare War with each other and with the staff.

The last week I was there, H. escaped from the hospital during a period of outdoor activity and was soon retrieved and put on 24-hour watch. It ruined things for the rest of us, because outdoor activities were summarily cancelled facility-wide.

17

My mother was on call for a Asylum in the 70’s and 80’s. She told me that “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, book (1962) and Movie (1975) were really about American mental health care in the 50’s. Anti-psychotics were introduced in the mid 50’s, They took a while to catch on in the USA, which was still in the grip of Freudian psychoanalytics, but even the USA Lithium and Anti-psychotics were standard care in most of the USA in 1975.

On the other hand buildings sometimes have a very long life. My psychiatrist sibling tells me that they try to get people out of the locked wards as soon as possible, because being in a locked ward can make you crazy. And one of the main psychiatric hospitals in NSW.aus has that particular reputation: it’s long corridors, plain walls, and closed doors are suggestive of Kafka’s “Castle”.

18

Do you ever wish there was a long term inpatient facility where you could stay for months or years at a time, with a care team and similarly managed routines? Like is it better to get treatment during acute “episodes” once in a while, or would it be better for you (in your opinion) to be at a place for a longer stretch at a time?

19

@Reply The hospital in Danville had a few people who had been there for years. One of them had pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to killing his stepfather, who frankly had it coming. He was only a few more months from being discharged while I was there. Nice guy, but he didn’t seem happy exactly.

Another guy, an older guy, had been there 15 years and was miserable.

Danville is probably a long-term stay hospital, but no - I wouldn’t want to be in one of these places for longer than I have to.

20

Fair enough. Thank you.

Did you often see the same people (care team or other patients) while you were in? Did you make friends?