I was there for depression and it helped me a lot. Got on zoloft. People were from 18 to 70. I asked to go home after a week and they said yes but my guess is I would have left anyway due to insurance. Quite a few people were there by court order. Some arrived in handcuffs . Building was about 1 year old so it was in great shape. It was mostly boring , the food was OK.
One of the guys working overnight shift (not a nurse) told me he worked at night for extra pay. He also said he had 4 BS degrees and was planning on going to med school. Then he added his wife was a surgeon! Not sure why he needed extra pay.
Was there a library? Anything at all to read? That’s my personal horror of spending time in any kind of confinement, hospital/prison/whatever: nothin’ to read!
Did you check yourself in or did someone else like a family member make you go?
Were you allowed to wear your own clothes?
Did you have a roommate, if yes, were you frightened to sleep with them in the room?
Did you attend group therapy, if so, did hearing other people’s stories make you feel better by putting your own troubles in perspective, or did it make you feel worse because their stories were so sad?
Friend told me to go ,she had been there before me. I was super depressed . It was 2019 so pre covid. No library.
My area had about 15 rooms and we were locked in that area but not in one room. Only time we left was for meals or some classes. I had a roommate but not worried about him. At night they checked each room every 15 minutes. We had group therapy. The Dr. was not there much , mainly in the morning. One odd thing was everything was on paper except medications. Don’t know why they did not put everything online. No shoelaces or belts. They said they had a “rubber room” but I never saw it used. wore my own clothes like everyone
What were the COVID Safe protocols like? Did you feel they were adequate? Was there anything they weren’t doing that you feel they should be doing? Did anyone get COVID while you were there and had anyone gotten it at that facility since the start of the pandemic?
I was there Oct 2019 pre covid. They let people go outside in a fenced area for smoke breaks. First 2 days were the worst after that you adapted to it. Never saw anyone act “crazy” but some people yelled a lot. One guy I thought was 18 but was really about 30. Every day people left and new people arrived. It was always full.
Food was OK. Did not change my behavior to avoid looking crazy. They knew I was there for depression. I also had bad insomnia so I was a mess . the main goal for the Dr is to get you more stable and that worked for me. Maybe I could have done that at home but probably not. My roommate had been there a month before and went home. Then he took a lot of pills and called 911 and went to regular hospital for a few days before ending up with me. Cost around $1000 a day but my insurance paid
Did you feel safe there, in terms of the possibility of physical violence?
What were your procedures for checking in?
About two years ago I was really depressed and passive suicidal ideation was starting to overwhelm me. And I was on a low dosage of SSRIs. I finally brought this up with my GP and wanted a psych eval. He wrote me a scrip that I could take to psych emerg which would involve an ( or some) overnight stay (at the Jewish General in Montreal).
I did think seriously about it but had concerns about possible professional side effects etc so I went back to therapy, with someone new, and eventually doubled my SSRI dosage. That helped tremendously and I am out of the depression woods.
Anyway, sorry for the hijack but, because of the road almost taken I am quite interested in your thread. And I sincerely hope you’re ok.
I was not worried about violence there. Took me about 2 hours to check in. A lot of that was just waiting around. They do a strip search but no body cavity search. They had a phone for calling out but not for calling in. Visiting was 1 hour per night . On Saturday visitors can have lunch with you for free. At the end of the day you wrote down how you were feeling. I guess if I had said I was feeling bad maybe they would have kept me longer. TV was mostly on Hallmark channel and even in Oct they had Christmas movies. On weekends we had some FB games.
another funny thing - sign on door that said Elopement Risk. First time I saw that term not about a wedding. Every door was locked , not just exterior doors
I’ve been in the hospital for depression on 3 separate occasions, all over a decade ago now, and all within a few years of each other. I had a lot of problems during math grad school adjusting to what my life had become and how I was failing to get anywhere with anything. The first time was when I had trouble dealing with the class I was supposed to be teaching, and then one time overslept and decided to just get in my car and drive around a little and not go home (or to school, or my job at school) for a week. When I did make contact with my mother again (who I lived with), she had filed with missing persons and my psychiatrist told her to take me to the hospital if I came back.
I don’t remember the second time very well and what exactly triggered it, but the third time I got a poor grade on an exam because I studied the wrong things and was very upset with the teacher, and after talking to him it seemed like I was never going to be able to get through grad school because he made it seem like it was pretty common to do what he did. Having set most of my life up around going to grad school in math, I was for the first time in my life definitely ready to kill myself. Though I don’t think I would ever actually do that, I wanted to so much I felt checking into the hospital made the most sense.
Nearly everybody in there is in for depression. Once there was a guy who was a paranoid schizophrenic, but he was pretty stable, and all of the rest were in for depression. Why they ended up there is a mixed bag of things. Most of them tried to take their own life in some way and were unsuccessful. One in particular was still extremely suicidal and was the reason why there weren’t anything that could be used as ropes; even my dental floss was confiscated, and they were concerned about how much I had in my toiletry bag (I never use it, but would often throw what the dentist gave me every visit into my bag). Many of my sweatpants no longer have drawstrings because they had to be cut out, and if I hadn’t gained weight since I originally bought them they’d have been unusable.
No one could leave or enter the wing without permission, though security was pretty lax and it wouldn’t have been hard to get out if you really wanted to and had a good plan. If you brought yourself if, you could get a regular discharge after giving a couple days’ notice. Since that was always the case for me, I don’t know about the people who were put in there against their will.
There was a small selection of books available. At some point I ended up reading the Foundation Series and re-reading Dune, but the selection was definitely not the best. The food was the same as you get at any hospital. It was a long time ago now there’s only some very specific things that I remember at this point.
Having had this experience, are you more or less likely (perhaps because you’ve learned what medication works for you, for example) to go back in the future? What would make you think it’s time to go back?
I almost landed in there but what kept me out was the fact that I hadn’t actually tried to take my own life through years of depression, no matter how much I ideation I had about being gone. The fact that the ward was almost full helped too. With the help of a therapist and psychiatrist, I got enough grounding to determine that, if I could just get enough sleep at night, I could function better during the day. That was during the recession.
I could use some help with functioning again, but no job, no insurance, therefore no therapist. It does worry me. But I am getting through each day.