WallyM7 was plausible (if inconsistent in the long run) and Updike was pretty much disbelieved by everyone from the beginning. I don’t think that skepticism is an issue, here.
Ripper, is this because you read A Million Little Pieces and believed it, and you’re determined never to let anyone snow you like that again?
Question O R if you were to encounter a person who recieved substandard medical care, and nearly died in surgery, would you say to them that they should be greatful they got any medical attention at all? Would you tell them to suck it up, and learn to do without their leg, which was amputated by mistake? Would you say they should be greatful that the hospital did also fix what needed to be fixed, and so what if it was only after they amputated a healthy limb? What if they began to amputate, but caught it in time and went on to do the correct surgery. Would you tell them to look at the surgical scar and be glad for the care they got? Would you tell their families to suck it up, and be glad they had a hospital to go to in such instances? It is possible to get good mental health care in this nation, but it is also possible to get horrible care with long term negative results. I do not believe that one should be grateful for forced detention that could have resulted in death or at the least near death due to complete lack of needed monitoring and care.
We are not talking about skepticism, we are talking about acting like a complete asshole.
If you are skeptical of Fabulous Creature’s account based on your own experience, fair enough. Fair enough too, if you want to express that skepticism in the thread.
But you might notice that you didn’t get pitted when you first expressed your skepticism. You got pitted when you said that, even if true, what happened to FC deserved no sympathy because he was lucky to get any treatment at all. In my book, this is a despicable attitude.
In your frantic efforts to defend the mental health care system, you actually make it end up looking worse, because it has assholes like you in it who place so little value on the quality of patient care. With friends like you, the mental health system certainly needs no enemies.
Hear! Hear!
AHunter3 and I have many disagreements about psychiartry. But I agree with him here 100%. Nothing in Fabulous Creature’s account strikes me as being beyond belief. The difference between my own experience and AHunter3’s leaves me believing that the kind of experience described by Fabulous Creature is the exception, not the rule.
Certainly Fabulous Creature’s description of how the first responders dealt with his disorientation and emotional response to an accident rings very true to me. The first time I was in an accident, I lost my glasses - and kept trying, while the paramedics triaged me, to push them back up my nose so the world would focus again. After about 10 minutes of this, the paramedic asked me while I kept touching my nose - obviously concerned that it were a stroke symptom, or something worse. I retained the presense of mind to explain about my glasses, and remind her of the difficulty with sitting still when one’s body is still flooded with adrenaline, but it’s completely believable that I’d have ended up in a psych ward had I been too distracted to figure out the reason for the question.
And, again, no amount of skepticism towards Fabulous Creature’s account excuses the way you’ve been a dick so consistently about this.
In my opinion, they are certainly not ordinary. I think they are extraordinary, if for no other reason than there is a health care facility in Memphis that is clearly and wantonly in violation of several standards described by the Tennessee Department of Health. Is this a facility that cares not for accreditation? It would be extraordinary for a health care facility to operate in such a way as to
invite as many lawsuits as this place was.
The experiences he describes are far outside the range of anything I’ve seen as a mental health care provider, although my experiences with inpatient facilities are not vast. I’ve never heard of any sort of triage or diagnostic facility that would appear to be so like a forensic holding unit.
I can perhaps imagine an EMT or even an ER physician, or any physician, perhaps, asking “Are you depressed?” but I have a hard time believing, or I at least hope to all that is good and good that no mental health professional would rely on “Are you depressed?” as a key component of an evaluation.
Is there any way that Fabulous Creature can share the name of this facility with us? If he did experience the poor care that he describes, he should also report his experiences to a number of state agencies, and to local news organizations that might expose the malpractice of this facility.
For the lazy readers amongst us, in this very thread he says “Just for the record, it wasn’t a psychiatric hospital, but rather the psychiatric triage unit”. In the original thread, he identifies it repeatedly as the Lakeside Hospital, Memphis.
I think that OR should be given the same courtesy that we expect him to give to FabCre. Everybody else acts like they are such great friends of the friendless, and yet when OR gives some dissenting opinion (I myself wondered if this story were true or not; I also wondered what a bunch of retards that FC’s captors were, so I was undefined even as I read) everybody wants to go nuclear!
I still haven’t divined whether the story is true or not. I don’t care, either, so I’ll probably never know. But, I am curious why FC would consent to an outpatient treatment with beds. Aren’t outpatient treatment facilities with beds called inpatient?
hh
I’m sick of debating psychiatry, so I’ll just add my voice in and say “It sounds an awful lot like my experiences too.” Not identical, but close enough that I have no problem believing it.
**Fab **didn’t cosent to treatment - out or in. He thought, anyway, that he was consenting to an evaluation (and thought it would be convenient since he’s suspected clinical depression but hasn’t been diagnosed), and only found out once he got there that it would be the next morning, and later yet that there were no beds.
Again, I don’t care if anyone believes Fab. But it’s perfectly reasonable to not believe him and not be a dick. (You just did, in fact. Not believe and not be a dick.)
OK, imagine that you’re an attorney. In walks potential client.
“I wanna sue somebody”
“OK, way cool, you just sit right down here and tell me about it. Slip 'n fall? Vioxx?”
“Just got out of the damn hospital…”
“Ooh, even better, medical malfeasance! Tell me more!”
“I was being held on the psychiatric ward to be screened for being dangerous to self or others, because they thought I was a bit suicidal you know, and while I was there they refused to listen to me telling them about my diabetes and blood-sugar le…”
::lawyer slides chair back and looks around for an escape route::
“Umm, I see, yes, they would not LISTEN, uh huh, well, yes, umm, you know, I don’t really specialize in that kind of case and you’d be better off going to an expert, hold on a second and I’ll recommend someone for you, ::hits intercom button:: MS. THOMPSON WOULD YOU COME IN HERE A MOMENT RIGHT NOW PLEASE?”
TAKE II
::abused patient goes to the “expert” in the field, a NARPA lawyer specializing in the civil rights of mental patients::
“I was being held on the psychiatric ward to be screened for being dangerous to self or others, because they thought I was a bit suicidal you know, and while I was there they refused to listen to me telling them about my diabetes and blood-sugar levels. They also kept the lights on and didn’t provide chairs, it was a very traumatic experience and I was at risk of serious complications from being deprived of my diabetes medications. Etc.”
“Yes, that is a dangerous and frustrating situation. Listen, I don’t suppose you have any witnesses who are in a position to substantiate your account of things?”
“Well, there was Jerry, the guy who thought they were plotting against him and all but aside from that little thing he was pretty together and he knew I needed meds and wasn’t getting them and what it meant, but I don’t know if there’s any way he could testify, being still locked up in there and all. Then there’s Richard, he was in for the same thing as me, more or less, tried to slit his wrists, they released him last week, I even have his home phone number. But I don’t know how he’d feel about standing up in public and saying ‘Yes your honor, when I was on the dangerous ward under observation down at the psych floor of the ER, I did indeed see these events occur’, I mean if it got into the papers, his boss, you can imagine…”
“Um, what I really meant was, umm, do you have any, shall we say, less impeachable witnesses to the events? I am in no way saying that a mental patient, or someone under observation after doing the kind of thing that gets them worried that you’re mentally ill and dangerous to yourself or others, isn’t a reliable witness, but we’ve got to consider how the jury is going to take it.”
“Well, no, I really wasn’t in a position to call my friends and have them sit there with me, and if I had, I could have had them raise hell until I got my diabetes meds. Nope, just us nuts plus the facility personnel”
“Well, I won’t say you don’t have a case, but to be honest I don’t think there’s a very high likelihood of recovering much here, or of setting a useful precedent to reference in cases to come later. We have limited internal resources. Are you in a position where you can lay down the filing fees up front? Etc…”
How about, instead, we give him the same degree of respect that he did show to Fab? That is perfectly fair, IMO.
One more time, for the apparently comprehensionally-challenged: NO ONE is giving O R any grief over his dissenting opinion. Believe, don’t believe, whatever. He didn’t have to be a complete ass about it, though.
Right. But that doesn’t answer the question. Lakeside Hospital is the psychiatric hospital.
The triage unit is apparently housed in a different general hospital, the ER of which Fabulous Creature was apparently taken to for his medical care. Of course, I could be reading it wrong. If I’m not reading it wrong, however, you’ll kind of look like an asshole for the “lazy reader” bit.
So what was the name of the hospital with the ER to which FC was taken, which housed the Lakeside Triage unit? Was it also Lakeside Hospital?
This Lakeside Hospital?
D’oh! :smack:
Ahh, I see, was just a throwaway to the OP, who asked “what the fuck is your problem,” guess it was on my mind.
Where the heck did I say **precisely ** that?
That’s a little disingenuous. You’d didn’t say precisely that - word for word. But what else did you mean when you said “As hard as it is to get treatment these days, you strike me as a fat man complaining about finger bowls.”
Well, not at all what Colibri said, how is that disingenuous?
If you want to split hairs, your sticking point seems to be that you think he’s embellishing, or simply making shit up, about what really happened to him in the psychiatric triage unit. Still, you’re harping on him to be grateful that he was placed under observation at all, while insisting that it had to have happened differently from the way he described. So you take it for granted that he was treated humanely and clinically, and has to be griping about nothing.
You also claim that he attempted suicide three times. How far do you want to take this? Do you believe that, as he states, the reason he walked out into traffic was because he was hallucinating, as many do after head trauma? Then why was he in psychiatric triage instead of being given a CAT scan? You really think the car accident was a suicide attempt? Based on what?
You’re throwing out all kinds of accusations, with little to support your faith in medical professionals. Freudian_Slip, in the other thread, draws on his own experience to counter FabCre’s account. What are your credentials?