Yup, if the evaluation says you’re still a danger to yourself or others, they’ll keep you longer. The courts and a judge will eventually get involved. Sounds like the husband already is. She has a right to a lawyer, though I don’t know how easy that is to do if she’s being held for good reasons.
That part I bolded is really odd though. Patients have a right to make and receive phone calls. Most every psych ward I know of has at least one pay phone for this purpose. IIRC, it’s considered a basic human right.
In many states it is 72 hours, and there are civil proceedings that can extend that if cause can be shown. Here in Calif it runs: 72 hours, 14 days, 14 days. As I recall each separate 14-day commitment requires its own legal proceeding.
It’s not all that difficult to have someone committed against their will. All it takes is a few lies and accusations and you’re in for “observation”.
Her recent poor health is probably a huge factor. Perhaps the husband just can’t deal with it anymore and wants her out of the way. He, of course, is in the best position to lie about her to others, such as her family who will tend to side with him because they think “it’s for her own good”.
I had an acquaintance who was talked into taking a “rest” in a mental institution–the best one in NYC–by her psychiatrist. She signed herself in voluntarily. After a short stay, she was feeling rested and knew she would be better off at home instead of in that depressing place. She decided to sign herself out. Well, lots of luck with that. Once they’ve got you, they’ve GOT YOU and they aren’t letting you go until your insurance no longer covers your stay. My friend had great insurance. She called her insurance company and told them that she was being held prisoner against her will for no reason at all and ordered them to NOT pay for her stay there. Skipping ahead, that worked and the institution never even billed her insurance company for her stay there. She followed up with her insurance company the day she was sprung just to be sure they would not pay the hospital. They knew they did wrong and they could tell that my friend was a trouble maker so they didn’t fight it. She also made a few other phone calls, including one to the Mayor, whom she knew and chatted with regularly and another to Michael Baden, CME of NYC at that time. another acquaintance.
In the meantime, they confiscated everything she had brought with her to keep her comfortable. And I mean EVERYthing, even her guitar. She was ignored and never saw ANYONE to evaluate her. She was denied receiving phone calls and had to pay for outgoing calls. Fortunately, she went in with cash. Others were held prisoner and had no cash were cut off completely from the world. Also, she was promised that she would have a session with a psychiatrist every day and she never had one–not a one–the whole time she was held prisoner.
The staff lied when they wrote their notes about her. They would come in and wake her up several times every single night for no reason except to annoy her. She was acting normally when she went in and they had to make her crazy so they could continue to control her and keep her there. Well, that didn’t work. She kept her cool.
They tried to force medicine on her and she refused to take it. Sometimes they wrote down that she had taken her meds (I’m sure the staff stole them because they were the feel-good, space-you-out, goofiness-inducing drugs) and other times they noted that she had refused her meds. She was aware that she responds badly to medications and never even took an aspirin.
The staff would constantly tell her that she was mentally disturbed and that she would never get out of there. Other patients told her they told them the same things. One woman had been there for months because her husband had her committed because he wanted to be with another woman (according to her) and he never called her. She had no cash and was completely cut off from the world except for my friend who paid for her phone calls. Once, a man came in as a patient a couple weeks after my friend. He was a bit contentious but not a total wackadoo. She and others told him to not take the meds. He replied that he wasn’t taking any drugs and they couldn’t make him. Well, next day, he was staggering around. My friend spoke with him, asked about the drugs and he said, “they got me”. He was forced to take them because he was big and had a bit of an attitude.
BTW, her psychiatrist on the outside never once called to speak with her or to check on her.
For some strange reason, probably just because she wanted out, they put her on suicide watch. That meant that she has to be within sight of an attendant at all times, 24/7. She was annoyed at that too, but since she’s a spirited biotch and a world champion dog walker, she made their lives miserable–lol. She exhausted them. She would walk to the end of one hallway until she was out of sight, making the watcher follow. Then she would wait for the watcher to catch up, smile and then walk all the way around the other side of the floor, forcing the watcher to go round that corner, too. If the watcher dawdled, she waited patiently, making him/her walk all the way to the end. She was used to walking her beagles several miles per day so it was normal for her and she wore them out–lol.
There was tons of other stuff they did to try to torture her, too, but it was about 10 years ago and I don’t recall everything. My friend kept a daily log which I sneaked out every day or two so it wouldn’t be stolen by the staff.
So, with people on the outside, including me, doing things and making phone calls for her to get her released, the fateful day to go before the judge finally came after perhaps a month.
The night before her court appearance, she was kept up ALL NIGHT LONG by the staff and not permitted to have a wink of sleep. They pushed the drugs harder than usual too, even though they knew they never had any success with getting her to take any.
I can’t remember how I did it, but somehow I managed to get one of her nice business suits to her along with stockings and high heels and pearls and everything she needed to look not only normal but great. Most inmates are forced to wear their hospital gowns and go drugged before the judge who decides their fate and most have families who never even show up for the hearings.
Then, it got kind of funny. The judge asked the insane asylum people in a demanding voice with a real attitude, “Why has this woman been held against her will?” They tried to answer but he dismissed them and asked my friend a few questions. She was lucid, of course. Then he asked me a few questions including whether I would stay with her and, of course, I said yes. And then he ordered her to be released immediately.
We left and observed the insane asylum people on the phone. We got a cab back to the hospital to pick up her things. She was not permitted to go upstairs or to speak to anyone at all. Her suitcase was packed and at the door waiting for us.
After I took her home she immediately called her new friend in the asylum who had been betrayed by her husband and said she was free and at home and gave the woman her home phone number so she could call her back and confirm it. The insane asylum people always told the patients that another patient had been sent to another hospital when they did not come back from the appearance in front of the judge. Those control freaks really hate an “uncooperative” patient. Drugged patients are easier to handle than lucid ones and they don’t walk miles every day inside either–lol. Of course, she was asked why she did that and she said she needed the exercise and it was doctor’s orders–lol.
As for the psychiatrist who recommended that hospital, his life and attitude changed drastically because of that. He actually (said) that he had no clue that the hospital abused patients like that. Of all people, wouldn’t you think a psychiatrist should know those things… She called him all kinds of incompetent, worthless sob’s and gave him all the gory details of the stuff that he was responsible for inflicting on her. He was extremely apologetic. I hope he thought twice before recommending a “rest” in one of those prisons to anyone else.
Well, anyway, Zsophia, I do not find your coworker’s story to be implausible at all. My friend asked every single day when she was going to see the psychiatrist and NEVER saw one the whole time she was imprisoned.
This woman probably called you in desperation because everyone else has betrayed her and you may be the only one left that she could turn to. What was she like before her health problems started? I suspect her health and the stress at work and most likely problems with her husband is at the root of this and not necessarily that she has gone crazy.
I doubt that you will be able to get any information from the hospital since you are not family. Since she seems to have no one in her corner, she could be there for a very long time. Patients in mental hospitals have no rights. The hospitals may try to make people think they do, but they don’t. It’s a prison.
LovesBeagles-that is an incredible story. Do you have a cite for any of it?
Or maybe, she did actually go crazy. I know that bipolar manic episodes can include paranoia because a good friend believed that she was under surveillance as part of a big conspiracy, including her husband and government officials, and that just one method of surveillance was via speakers in fast food drive-thrus. One day she drove halfway across the state before having a little inkling that maybe this wasn’t entirely making sense, and sought help. She was lucky that she had that much of a connection to reality left.
These days she takes meds and sees a therapist, and still holds her same (productive and rewarding) job. She’s still got her vibrant and funny personality, too.
Of course not. How could I get that? It’s a personal story about someone that I knew personally. I don’t even remember the year although I remember the decade–lots of shoulder pads and perms–yuck.
This reminded me of another story from about that same time of my life. I had a neighbor who was also seeing a psychiatrist whose office was in a hospital. In one session, she was particularly emotional and worked up, crying and carrying on about her broken marriage.
He listened and watched her until she was winding down and then he said, quietly, “You know I can’t let you leave here like this, don’t you?”
That was her cue for her exit stage right–lol. She jumped up and RAN down the down the hall to the stairs and out the nearest exit. She knew what his comment meant. He was going to commit her right then and there. She had worked in the medical field and was a medical writer and she knew what insane asylums were like. They didn’t have a chance to catch her. She was also a 5’10" former runway model and a runner. I’m sure she was out of the building before he could get security on the phone–lol. She ran down the block and never darkened his door again. Good for her. I knew her for years after that and that woman didn’t need to be imprisoned anymore than my other friend did.
It’s even harder to keep somebody institutionalized against their will since insurance companies has patients discharges as soon as possible (assuming they even cover inpatient mental health), private institutions general won’t touch the uninsured, and public institutions always have very limited resourced & bed spaces that are perpetually stretched to the limit.
Dang!
If her story is true, that would be like a nightmare.
Although . . .you say she’s had various health issues, including serious cancer therapy and stress. Now she tells you she’s been locked up in a mental institution, and she’s pregnant, and she wants you to tell everyone, on FACEBOOK!?
Sounds rather . . . dramatic.
Are her prior health issues verifiable or credible?
Like others in this thread, I can’t understand why she’d call you and not a relative or close friend, or even her boss.
Either way, that’s a horible call to get. You have my sympathy. Really.
Perhaps you could ask Personnel to contact her parents, just in case her husband is lying.
(On a sepparate point, what the heck is wrong with your personnel department that they’d give out your name to someone, especially in a situation like this!? I would be extremely pissed off if my company did that.)
As another person who has worked on psych units, I would agree that this is most likely a symptom of her illness. It is very, very common for psychotic people to have very poor insight into their behavior so that they are unable to recognize why (for example) screaming about wanting to kill themselves or someone else resulted in being held against their will in the hospital.
The laws about involuntary commitment vary from one state to another. In general, though, you do need to have a court approve it if the person is being held for more than 72 hours. In my state, the defense attorneys that the patients get are quite good and very aggressive about fighting to keep people out of the hospital. This means that you sometimes get people who are very psychotic who end up getting discharged due to some technicality on the paperwork, but it also means that you don’t see people getting held in the hospital unless there is a very clear reason for it.
And LovesBeagles, that really is an incredible tale.
Quite literally.
My bolding. You slipped. Your friend is you, isn’t it?
Uh, I work in the medical field and to me that phrase would mean something like “Before you leave, we need to figure out something you can do to make your situation bearable” or even “Would you like to freshen up in the bathroom so no one sees you looking like this” or something similar.
What a lucky coincidence that she was a medical writer, a former runway model and a runner, otherwise you wouldn’t have a tale to tell, would you? It was also quite fortunate that she could also read minds, getting all that from such an innocuous sentence.
There’s so much opportunity to make up plausible scenarios building upon the info given. I’m going to try to resist, except to wonder:
if the pregnancy part is true, maybe she had to discontinue some medications, and is having trouble because of that.
This is quite possible. For instance, lithium is commonly used for bipolar disorder, but strongly contraindicated during pregnancy due to documented risk to fetuses. (For those familiar with the FDA use-in-pregnancy scale, rated D in that there is documented risk but in certain cases, benefit to the mother may be important enough to take the risk. Drugs rated as X, the next level up and highest level of warning, are completely contraindicated during pregnancy.)
That, and the doctor didn’t know where the patient lived or any other useful information to track her down.
But once she reaches “home” he can’t touch her-it’s in the rules, y’know.
No, no slip. You misread. That’s exactly what I intended to say.
To be more detailed, my friend kept a log and every time I went to visit her, she slipped the folded pages to me while I had my back to her watcher I put the pages under my blouse or in my pocket and I got the pages out of the prison. I visited every day or two. She owned a business and I kept her up to what was going on with it and took checks for her to sign, etc. She continued to make all decisions about her business and I helped carry them out. I knew what to do because I had a very similar business of my own. In fact, we were friendly competitors and helped each other out.
A woman held against her will was allowed daily visits from a non-family member, and this woman trusted her business to a rival(friendly or otherwise)? Might I suggest that adding details to your stories don’t help you?
edited to add: Don’t you think they would have put two and two together-missing pages from her log, and your daily visits?