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Mental Hospitals



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Fri Feb 20, 2015 4:51 am
queenofscience says...



Please dont laugh at me about the 'characters' or other things that exsist to me because I have a loss of touch with reality. And my condition is challenging, too. The loss is touch with realiy is very weird and scary and confusing.
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Fri Feb 20, 2015 7:21 am
Snoink says...



@Arkhaion (omg, I feel bad because I feel like I ought to know you, but you changed your name) your story reminds me of my initial response to this post, as far as people being picked up for becoming irrationally violent in school. :?

I didn't grow up in a very good place and they didn't have enough funds, supposedly, for a school nurse, let alone for a school psychiatrist -- BUT, they did have funds for several police officers. Anyway, if you attacked somebody violently, you were either 1) ignored, or 2) picked up by the police. But, back ten years ago when I was high school age, or at least where I was, you would probably be sent straight to juvenile hall if it were really bad, because there was this sort of idea that young people couldn't be suffering from these mental illnesses because they were totally just faking it. So, there really wasn't any support at all for people who were suffering from these illnesses (except for maybe the very extremist cases), and it pretty much sent somebody straight towards the criminal system. If you completely lost control and started attacking people, the police would pretty much tackle you and you would be sent to a juvenile detention facility. There was protocol back then, much like @Carlito described, but how are supposed to follow protocol when you don't have the trained people or if everybody doesn't even believe that the illness is real and thinks that you're just being overly dramatic because you're a teenager?

And if you were non-violent and you were suffering to the point where you couldn't tell what was real and what was not (one of my friends struggled with this), you could pretty much expect no help from anyone and be told to suck it up. Or, if you were lucky, you would be pulled out of school by your parents and put into independent study (which is what happened to my friend). As far as me? I was homeschooled. This was a good thing, trust me. :P

So yeah. I am heartened to hear that things are getting slightly better in that people are not being sent straight to the juvenile detention facilities and are instead being sent to mental hospitals. Not sure how much better that is, but it is a step in the right direction, at least. But, we have a loooooooooooong way to go in destigmatizing mental illness and giving people the right sort of help that they need consistently. (And sending them into the criminal system that young is NOT helpful, imho.)
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Sat Feb 21, 2015 3:00 am
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queerelves says...



@Carlito I can personally testify that it's definitely not true thst you have to have a definitive plan to harm yourself or others to be admitted.

Neither time I was admitted did I have a specific plan to harm myself or anyone else. My therapist knew I had been thinking about suicide but hadn't ever had a plan. She didn't think I was in immediate danger of harming myself, just that I needed something more than outpatient. The second time, my therapist and my psychiatrist knew I was feeling really hopeless, and as I described it to them I felt like I was waiting for something, and I thought death might be that something. I thought about killing myself but I didn't actually want to kill myself. I was still sent to the hospital.

It takes a little more to commit someone against their will, but not much.

And while the opinion of someone studying this is important, it's a whole different world to actually have lived it. Yeah, you can have toured a psych ward, or even worked at one, and you can have seen and talked to people there but you were able to go home at night. This is just your day job. We were there constantly. You can never really know or experience the sheer terror of being commited for the first time, the utter lonliness you feel when you spend your first night in those bare, uninviting rooms. And that sounds super cheesy and dramatic, but it's really hard to put into words what it's like to get there. That's not counting actually staying. And I was only there for a week! I can't imagine what it's like to be there for months.

Edit: to go a little more in depth about what it feels like to actually be admitted for the first time--it's terrifying. You get there and they take your vitals and you talk to a staff member, meanwhile everyone is staring at you and talking about you. I don't just mean you think everyone is talking about you, they actually are, which I realized when the first person arrived after me. I felt a little bad, but the first thing we did when we saw a new person was talk about why we thought they were there and about how hot they were.The firsr night ia really bad too, especially if you get there at night. They'll probably give you some food and send you to your room, where you'll probably sit up all night lonely, scared, and unable to sleep. I wrote about ten pages in my journal describing absolutely everything (though that may very well have to do with the obsessive temtendencies related to my mental illnesses)

I feel like I've probably replied way too many times, but accurate portrayal of mental illness is really important to me
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Sun Feb 22, 2015 2:03 am
Holysocks says...



I'm not sure if this has been mentioned yet, though I think it's quite important to remember; we're dealing with different countries in some cases here. Just like everything else, I'm sure that the rules and such will vary from country to country, and even possibly from state to state, or province to province... and so on.

Carlito mentioned working on getting a masters in this, and even though that conflicts with experiences, that doesn't mean that their advice is invalid- because it's very possible that that is how it is where they are from.

That's also something to consider in the research though, for sure. Where is the character from? Things certainly vary depending on where you're from, and where your characters are from.
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