Please visit your PP they help Trust me on this one
Just curious - what made you post this now, 1.5 yrs later?
What do you do during the day? Do they make you do arts and crafts or is most of your time spent in group therapy?
Are you allowed to keep and use your phone?
Overall, would you class the experience as helpful or was the Zoloft the main factor in your improvement?
no phone use. Various classes during the day but not after dinner. it was helpful with the zoloft. You did not have to do anything if you did not want to. Some people stayed in their room a lot. One person was there for meth addiction and she worked at another mental hospital.
I saw an article that prompted me to do this thread
Freddie DeBoer (a writer/academic) had a psychotic episode but had trouble finding inpatient treatment without saying such things as would get him committed involuntarily. I’m not sure, but it sounds like your stay was voluntary. If so, did you have any trouble swinging that, as Freddie had?
From here:
We first went to a facility that has a dedicated psychiatric emergency room, which seemed like the place where my problems were most likely to be taken seriously. And yet when I got worked up there the doctor did not take me seriously. I was ambulatory, I was communicative, I was unrestrained, and these facts alone seemed to signal to him that I was not a candidate for emergency psychiatric care. This despite my loudly stated and deeply sincere belief that there was a conspiracy working against me and that they would soon turn to violent means to hurt me. He asked me about my first break when I was younger, an event which certainly qualifies as full-blown psychosis and ended with me shot up with Haldol. He seemed unimpressed.
Eventually it became clear that we were doing a dance that, I have to believe, happens all the time: the admitting psychiatrist would only entertain admission if I indicated I was a danger to myself and to others – that is, if I was willing to say the magic words that can trigger involuntary commitment. But giving up control over my life and being forced to placate shadowy authority figures to get it back was utterly against the desires of my paranoid mind. I was facing a far-too typical dilemma: how I could get ad mitted without being com mitted. How could I prove the severity of my problem without triggering the potentially devastating consequences of involuntary commitment?
mine was voluntary. As I mentioned quite a few people were there due to a court order.
I’ll try again.
nobody thought I was crazy. They knew I was there for depression. Acted the same as I always act.
Now that’s depressing.
Glad you’re feeling better.
I commend the OP for being courageous and starting this thread. It sounds like you are doing OK now, and glad to hear it.
I have not needed this type of help myself, but my brother did after our father died about 10 years ago. He kept going to the hospital near where he lived complaining about heart issues and evidently saying the right combo of words about possibly hurting himself, and they kept taking him to the psych facility where he’d spend a few days, then be discharged back home until his next panic attack about a week later, where the cycle would repeat. No, he has no heart problems. Anyway, after a few round-robins, the paramedics that came to his place to take him to the hospital got tough on him and just cut him off, cold turkey, and the cycle ended. I think getting on the right combo of meds also contributed to his stabilization.
Anyway, I did have the chance on one occasion to visit him at this psych facility, and it was pretty much as the OP described: the environment was professional, clean, and calm. There was additional bad news that emerged after my father was gone, and I called his therapist there to determine how to break the news while he was in that facility one of those times - the therapist told me to tell him right away, while he was still there, since all the safeguards were in place and ready in case he flipped out again.
yes doing OK. Everybody there with a few exceptions acted “normal.” Some people were there for addictions such as alcohol. 2 things were a pain - having to go to eat at a later time than other groups.
we ate at 8 am and noon and 6 pm. And waiting around for medicine in the AM and after dinner. At the end of each day you filled out a form to say how you were doing. I assume most people were honest on that. I know there was 1 person who was there for more than a week but she left a few days before I did .
For me, I think it would have been something of a relief to just write “I feel shit and wish I was dead” instead of trying to make up some “appropriate” statement for people who ask you how you’re going.
Did you get any treatment beyond drugs? Talk therapy?
I’ve been on Lexipro for the last year and a half after I almost got fired for not reacting well to stress, to put it mildly. My very kindly supervisor urged me to reach out to EAP (Employee Assistance Program), which I did. I got lucky and got hooked up with an intern therapist, so we were each other’s guinea pigs. Before that, there were several times where I found myself sitting in my car trying to convince myself to either start driving west and see what happens or drive to the hospital and check myself in.
I’m no where near where I’d like to be - not in therapy right now (economics) - but I was heading for the mental hospital had I not been urged to reach out; had I not gotten therapy and started Lexipro.
Sorry for the digression - it triggers for me.
yes I got talk therapy as well as zoloft
Did you try group therapy? It’s been suggested for me but I was unable to break away from my job and drive across town for it and, for me at that time, the job was important.
no group therapy, just 1 on 1 with a therapist. the day I went I called the suicide hotline and they gave me local contacts. Here is the place I stayed.
you can be admitted 24/7. Sometimes I would wake up and see new people. People typically arrived during the day and went home around noon. If there was an empty bed it normally was filled in a few hours.
some people go back for daytime group sessions after they leave but I did not. They did not ask me to do that.
Thanks for that feedback. I’m a bit curious about the group sessions but the one-on-one with my therapist got me grounded again, and the meds that let me sleep (Trazadone, 4th attempt at finding something that would work) served to get me functioning again. That was over 10 years ago.