Don’t forget that the staff confiscated “everything” but she was discharged with a suitcase full of her belongings.
If this were a movie, it would be unwatchable due to all the plot-holes. I’d fire the writer.
Also, I think it’s pretty shitty to Munchhausen-by-Internet here where Zsofia is trying to deal with a legitimate problem. Start your own thread for Internet ego-strokes.
I’m not saying mistakes don’t happen, but here in Virginia I’d feel pretty confident that if she’s been in the State psychiatric facility since 9/1, she belongs there.
I worked for five years for the VA agency responsible for treatment of persons with mental illness so this procedure here is fairly well known to me.
First, a concerned person can go to various different officials that have the power to issue an ECO (Emergency Custody Order.) This allows the person to be taken into custody for evaluation, for a period of four hours. The requirements to get an ECO are not that great, and can just be a convincing statement from a family member.
However, the ECO is only for four hours, and during that four hours they need to receive some preliminary assessment.
There is an alternate path, if law enforcement takes a person say, off the streets, into custody because they were exhibiting various behaviors consistent with having a mental disorder or psychotic episode then the whole ECO process is skipped.
After the ECO, a TDO (Temporary Detention Order) can be issued based on that initial assessment. A TDO allows the person to be held for up to 48 hours (more if it overlaps with weekends–up to 96 hours) for a thorough assessment.
At the end of the TDO, a formal civil commitment hearing is held, overseen by either a magistrate, a specially appointed justice appointed by the circuit courts etc. At that hearing a psychiatrist will have always been requested to have done an assessment and prepare their findings for the court. The hearing official listens to the psychiatrist’s opinion and all other evidence available. You can have representation by an attorney at your civil commitment hearing. At the end, they decide whether or not to involuntarily commit the individual to a hospital.
If the decision is made to commit, you are now in custody of the State psychiatric hospital basically until they decide you can be released. The initial commitment period can’t exceed 180 days. You can appeal the commitment beyond the special justice or magistrate who oversaw the civil commitment hearing, up to a jury or circuit court etc. After the end of your 180 days, you are released by default if no other action is taken. But for “long term” guests, the treating psychiatrists and etc will have set up a recommitment hearing for the patient in which basically a whole new commitment hearing is held. They’ll submit evidence from your treatment showing that you are still a threat to self or others and various other things that legally mean you can continue to be committed, and then you get a new involuntary commitment for 180 days. For particularly ill people this all happens pretty routinely, as some psychiatric hospital patients have been in the hospital for years. When I was working for the commonwealth I knew of several patients who had been continuously committed for 30+ years.
If it’s of any value, she’s in Massachusetts. (I am not, so visiting is out.)
A coworker who’s closer to her spoke to her on the phone yesterday (not sure if she called her or vice versa) and reported that she sounded very nutty, seems to be in the right place. Just to make sure, though, I left a message and am waiting on a call back from some sort of advocate from the facility - explain the situation, make sure it’s known there was a complaint, and that way if there are multiple complaints somebody will probably look into it. If nobody says anything about it and anything is wrong it won’t ever get discovered, right?
Obviously the farther I get from that extremely disturbing phone call the more and more likely it seems that she’s fallen out of her tree and needs to be on a nice safe locked ward for a time. But I do remember that study where the psych grad students checked themselves into psych wards and found it extremely difficult to check themselves out again, and also, you know, a terrified person called and asked me for help.
Plus, we tried to keep my half-brother committed and you just can’t here. Believe you me, if we could we would have.
I should be used to it by now, but I’m still appalled at how many of you are fine with a form of involuntary incarceration in which due process is so thin and the rules governing confinement so arbitrary and based on opinion alone.
I think that most of the people arrested for a crime by police officers in the US did something illegal or they wouldn’t have been arrested. But there’s no way in hell I’d waive the right to be charged with a specific crime and the opportunity to argue against those charges, the right to a presumption of innocence that has to be overcome by evidence, and the fundamental right to be free from all such criminal prosecution except for actual acts that I engaged in. No locking people up for their opinions, their non-illegal lifestyle choices, or for things you think they might do. No locking people up for being unpopular with other people who find you disturbing or immoral or whatever.
You on board with that?
But so many of you wave off concerns about psychiatric incarceration’s violation of these principles. “Oh, that’s different, mentally ill people get locked up because they’re sick, not because they did something bad. It’s for their own good”.
You don’t think there’s an inherent problem with designating a disturbing inconvenient socially problematic person “sick” without having prove that they’re sick and declaring that you’re incarcerating them out of kindness, not as punishment?
You’re exposed to stories of rather heavy-handed coercion of people who at least seem rational enough and yet many of you reply “Oh, an expert medical professional says they’re schizophrenic or bipolar or whatever, you may not see the craziness but I’m sure if they say that person’s nutso, they are. If someone’s locked up in the loony bin, they belong there or they would not have been put in there”.
Wake up. Institutional psychiatry has always performed a police function within society, quite differently defined than well-intended provision of help for people who need it. It officially acts to lock up the dangerous, not (primarily) for their good but for the protection of the rest of us. Less officially, that function is extended to facilitate the removal and containment of people who are disturbing and inconvenient, whose “danger” to the rest of us does not stretch to include loss of life or limb or significant property damage but mostly consists of annoyances.
Keep in mind that in their police function mode, the institution can incarcerate people for what they might do.
No, the psychiatrists of America are not running up and down the sidewalks locking people up left and right at random, nor is there any evil plot to label all folks with specific unpopular political or religious or social beliefs as mentally ill and whisk them all off to the locked ward. That’s not the point. Police officers aren’t generally doing horrible abusive things either but they possess a lot of power and I’m very fond of the tight and specific restrictions on when and how the system can lock me up via the criminal justice system. And since psychiatrists also possess a lot of power, I want much tighter restrictions on when and how someone can be locked up involuntarily for being mentally ill.
Back to the subject at hand: you don’t know this person (except for the OP). You don’t know that she “belongs in there”. She doesn’t want to be there. Don’t be so goddamm cavalier with your dismissive assumptions.
Most people like yourself that have been committed have bad opinions of the process, but I think people like yourself are also simply too biased or unreliable on this matter to really be taken seriously. I think the civil commitment procedure in the commonwealth of Virginia is well structured, and I think people that experts say are a threat to themselves or others should be detained or confined.
I also don’t think this thread is really the right venue for rants about the rights of psychiatric patients, as it’s a thread about a person with a specific problem needing answers.
Not wanting to be there is kind of the point of involuntary civil commitment. Anyway, if she’s been there 10 days she’s had a psychiatric evaluation and probably a hearing. The examining psychiatrist has nothing to gain by keeping her there if she is no longer displaying suicidal ideations or whatever got her there in the first place; inpatient psychiatric facilities are not hurting for business.
Unless she has all the goods on the secret CIA mind control programs and the rogue operations designed to turn innocents into government assassins. And she’s in love with Julia Roberts and …
In Virginia this was very much the case. Lack of significant new building of in patient commonwealth psychiatric facilities and a relatively limited number of private hospitals providing the same services meant there were always far more people needing beds than there were beds available system wide. In Virginia commitments that come from the criminal courts always get precedence, and because they have grown as Virginia’s population has grown and the number of State psych beds hasn’t grown much in decades means that criminal court commitments sometimes made up 50% or so of total beds in the State facilities. That basically leaves the ordinary civil commitments and voluntary commitment people “fighting” for a much reduced pool of state and private hospital beds. Many people that doctors felt needed to be in a State psychiatric hospital were instead housed in group homes or other places where they do not receive the care they need.
The idea that doctors would just hold someone “because” is simply incompatible with the reality of how these hospitals operate. We all know abuse and bad decision making and mistakes happen in any government agency or really any organization, but the idea that there is any substantial tolerance or even official under-the-table sanctioning of just locking people up because we don’t like them or something just doesn’t make sense given the funding and space limitations of these organizations. I don’t know about all States, but most States are like Virginia in that the move to ‘community mental health’ has meant very few States have significantly expanded psychiatric hospital capacity since the 80s so I wouldn’t be surprised if similar issues face all fifty states.
For reference: You are probably thinking of the Pseudo-patient experiment by David Rosenhan, done and published in or about 1973.
Wiki article: Rosenhan experiment - Wikipedia
Another article discussing it in some detail.
Another article discussing Rosenhan: Psychiatric Deviance: Diagnostic Labeling
On Being Sane in Insane Places – This appears to be the full text of Rosenhan’s original article.
Google Rosenhan pseudopatient to find much more.
See the Wiki article about the Rosenhan experiment, in particular the part at the end about related experiments.
[I’ve seen other studies about it, e.g. one study showed that psychologists tended to diagnose serious mental issues in - IIRC - 25% of randomly selected people, but this was easier to track down.]
It’s possible that this has changed somewhat lately, but I would tend to be a bit skeptical absent actual evidence.
ETA: beaten to it by Senegroid
Posts within one (1) minute of each other! GMTA!
Astonishing how often this seems to happen on these boards!
– Senegobble 
FWIW, I agree completely; taking away someone’s liberty should be an extremely difficult and heavily oversighted thing to do.
By “somewhat lately”, do you mean the last 40 years? Those experiments took place in 1973, and I daresay quite a few rules and regulations have changed since then.
i tried to put myself in the husband’s shoes and maybe it’s just me, but i can’t see the motivation to call a stranger personally to explain the situation, isn’t the one to HR enough? in any case, instead of casting doubts on either side’s story, isn’t the best thing to do is not to blow up the matter and make sure that someone makes sure that she is properly cared for? whether she is held against her will or abused or just plain sick?
i wonder if it is a good idea to visit her personally, besides further involving yourself into the matter. the least you could do is to hand her a quest list and a map to the place. could a layman tell the difference between a sick person and a drugged up one? could they really drug you up to make you look insane? could they make a slightly insane person more insane? i’m not asking why they would want to do such a thing, just whether if they could, and if they would get away with it. if anything, the ease with which the OP might get a third party to truly investigate would test the system’s integrity.
And I very specifically did not assert that they’re doing anything of the kind. They are detaining people that they believe to be problematically delusional and/or problematically upset, in ways that, at a minimum, make them disturbing and disruptive to other people. In this case, to the patient’s spouse who contacted the doctor, thus indicating to the doctor that this patient has exhausted the patience of her primary social support.
What I said was that the doctor making this assessment doesn’t have to prove anything. The patient need not have done anything specifically. The doctor merely needs to be of the opinion that the patient is “dangerous” or (in many venues) “gravely disabled”, which in practice can mean merely “annoying and disruptive and unpredictable”.
That’s just wrong. People should have the fundamental civil right to be batshit insane, disturbing, inconvenient, annoying, and disruptive up until their doing so breaks the law, assuming they aren’t incompetent. Incompetent is not a synonym for “batshit insane”. Incompetent means you aren’t able to make decisions sufficiently well to keep yourself alive and uninjured from hour to hour. It does NOT mean you would not make some decisions that the majority of other folks would not have made and would consider atrociously bad judgment. The standards of civil incompetence are, and should be, decently strict.
No non-incompetent person who has not broken laws should be incarcerated involuntarily, period. The individual liberty interests at stake outweigh the alleged benefits to loony people of being locked up for their own good, and outweigh the convenience benefits to society as a whole of being relieved of disturbing annoying crazy loony people who make them uncomfortable.
Or if we’re going to say “naaaw, actually we are going to enforce sanity and no, you do NOT have a right to be weird and unpredictable and distraught in public and disturb us all with your bullshit”, then let’s be honest about it (don’t pretend it’s a medical issue, it’s a police function at its core when that’s the justification) and let’s formalize the line and clarify what people’s rights actually are.
Going by my own experiences, as the adult child of a bipolar parent, I expect your co-worker believed, with her entire heart, that the story she told you was true when she told it to you. Delusions are like that. I hope she can find a way out of her situation, but I doubt that being turned out on the street would be the help she needs.
I expect the details vary from state to state, but it’s been getting steadily more difficult to commit someone for an extended time. Still not impossible, and I’m sadly sure that some mistakes are still made by malice or by simple ignorance, but the days of easily locking someone away in the loony bin for the rest of their lives are past.
Even when a person demonstrates verifiable delusions, if they don’t pose a threat to themselves or others, even the doctors can’t force commitment. Several times over the last few years, my family has begged medical professionals to get inpatient help for my mom, and other times for my aunt. We were told it can’t be done by the family, unless we were ready to pay the entire bill, since insurance (including Medicaid/Medicare) would not be party to it, perhaps to avoid being party to a false-imprisonment charge later. Since none of us could stand up and say we’d pay, I’m not certain if the hospital would have refused us even IF we promised.
Wait a second!
Am I the only one that noticed that Personnel gave the husband the name of the OP? I don’t know if that’s illegal but it certainly seems unethical, especially if anything the wife said turns out to be true.
Can someone who’s worked the mental health side explain how they distinguish the “problematically” upset (or angry or fearful) from people who are merely upset (or angry or fearful) because they’re being held somewhere they don’t want to be?
I’m thinking of all those episodes of that reality program “Jail” where the detainee is asking over and over and over again why they’re in jail, and not getting any answers, and getting progressively more agitated when they continue not to get answers. And their agitation is further proof that they need to be in jail.
It looks like a reasonable response to me, a layperson who hopes never to be incarcerated anywhere, but looks unreasonable to the professionals. Help me understand.
Nope, you’re not. But from my re-skim of the thread we’re not sure that’s what happened. The wife could have told the husband, for instance, that Zsofia knows and is going to rescue her.
I mentioned earlier in the thread that it’s possible Personnel didn’t know exactly what she was “out sick” for. I know that even in pre-HIPAA days, at my last job (also in a hospital), my officemate had (from what I could tell and from what she let slip) mental health issues that apparently got out of hand and she was suddenly not at work, with a doctor calling in who would only say that my coworker needed to be out for medical reasons and could/would not give an estimate of how long she’d be gone for. A few weeks later, she was back.
"What I said was that the doctor making this assessment doesn’t have to prove anything. The patient need not have done anything specifically. The doctor merely needs to be of the opinion that the patient is “dangerous” or (in many venues) “gravely disabled”, which in practice can mean merely “annoying and disruptive and unpredictable”. "
first of all, this is **not **true. I have the legal authority to initiate an involuntary hold (in this County only), for example, and there are very specific criteria, and there needs to be supporting evidence. If I tried to get you committed based on “because I just think” so, it wouldn’t fly. You don’t work anywhere in the mental health field, I don’t think.
To answer the question about discriminating momentary agitation vs more significant symptomatology is hard to do, in brief. Part of it is duration. Part of it how rationally the person presents. Evidence of disordered thinking in other areas. Some of that may be history from family or coworkers. Again, though, you can be walking down the street delusional as hell, and that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll meet the criteria for danger to self/others/gravely disabled. The world is full of crazy.
There are lots of instances of abuse in medicine and psychiatry, of course, but some of the contributions in this thread sound more like a Scientology disinformation campaign than anything real.
One last thing. the person from the facilty isn’t going to be able to give you any specific info about a patient.