How mental-ward people handle depressed and suicidal people.

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I've heard stories of them being physically restrained. This in my opinion is WRONG. Many are also given sedatives. You don't give a depressant to a depressed person. And they are often only able to talk to the therapists every once in a while. IMO this is how it should work: they give the person an emergency dose of something good, like ketamine (no crashes or depressive or withdrawal effects, no side effects aside from psychadelic effects) which works within hours rather than days. Then they give the person a journal to write everything they feel in when the shrink isn't around, all their complaints, etc, and the shrink lets them talk for as long as they need and writes down everything they say.

Last edited by Ana54 on 08 Nov 2007, 11:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.

In my neuroscience class, we learned that ketamine causes substantial permanent brain damage in humans. This was in the text book, described in scientific terms and illustrated with an MRI picture. Because of this, I don't think it's legal for humans to use ketamine under any circumstances.

Otherwise, I think you have a good point.

there

Yeah, they do pretty much everything you've described. The patients definitely don't get enough time to talk to anyone. They're essentially 24-hour day care centers for the mentally ill. It's just some people there watching to make sure you don't get into trouble.

Hospitals really are a mess.

Man, that was the choppiest, most robotic thing I've ever typed. I must be kinda out of it tonight. XP

Iwas in mental hospitals years ago and Igot so much Thorazine and Melaril andthe like...I'm still f****d up by it,I believe.

You can be assigned a nurse (often unqualified) for observation. This could be a visual checkup (someone puts their head round the door) to make sure you are safe every 5,15 mins etc. Or it could be 'continuous observation' - where someone is watching you round the clock. In extreme cases a patient can be assigned several nurses for continuos observation, although this would probably be for other reasons beside suicide/self-harm such as being 'disruptive' or aggressive.

Thats how its done in the UK, where they dont (afaik) have strait-jackets etc (just lots of drugs) Im told in Germany they do use straitjackets, but dont use controversial ECT (electro-convulsive therapy).

I met a woman who had been sectioned in both countries & she said she preferred it in germany, as when you are stright-jacketed it enables you to calm down naturally and reflect on what hapenned, instead of just being knocked out with drugs. (she probably wasnt talking specifically about suicide however)

Mental ward is an extremely stressful and pressured environment for a person. Especially if they have high anxiety when they are away from home. Sometimes there is no place where you can be alone. If you share a room with four other people like I did and the ward is overcrowded with visitors. The staff dont seem to regulate the amount of visitors on the ward and sometimes there is so much pressure because there are so many people that there is no privacy. People get irritated with you when there is no place to go and they want to have a private conversation.

These places should be peaceful where you can rest and get better but they are not they are the opposite. If i was there longer then i was then i would have gone mad. Its so hard to keep leval headed when the thing that causes you anxiety is a lot of people and there is no place to be alone. I came out of the hospital more stressed then when i came in! Also for the drugs they give, i wont accsept them and thankfully they have never forced me to take them. I feel that psyciatrists often cross the line where the boundary of treating a person for their illness ends and judging someones character begins. some psyciatrists see themselves as god, and then seem to accuse rather then treat.

thats my experience of mental wards

I know it is hard, given ongoing difficulties, and any associated trauma, but people who use the mental health systems need to provide a strong voice towards improving care. Things really need to change, I am sure some good work is done, but a big problem is lack of money and lack of well educated staff.
People who know most about the suffering and needs of patients - are the patients themselves. Life experience is the best teacher.

Would they also play some Rammstein for you too? Yeah, I'm a Rammstein fan. I'm not saying their music is at all what some people would consider relaxing, except for their mellower stuff.

Ana, you might be interested in this website:

http://users.1st.net/cibra/

It is a site for people against use of restraints and aversives. I want to warn everyone though, there are stories of personal experiences on the site. Those could be triggering.

According to the local mental ward where I live all the rooms except for one or two are one person rooms and they never actually fill the two person rooms with two people.

What about E Nomine? I like them a lot too. My daughter got me into liking them.
Unfortunately, there is often this very judgemental attitude when mental health professionals are involved and some doctors and psychiatrists definitely act as if they are god. Better pay would be a start in getting higher quality staff too.

That was horribly disturbing. Poor kids! I can actually relate, only my stress and depression was caused by cumulative effects of this and that and the other thing, certain demeaning stuff that was supposed to help me but was just insulting and thus made me worse.

Believe it or not, I used to work on a mental ward (years ago, in California, when there were still mental hospitals in California). I don't believe in restraints or any of that stuff, or Stellazine or Thorazine, but I do want to tell you that it's no fun to have someone come at you with every intention killing you.

The worst part of it was that the one girl who used to try to kill me was a friend of mine, and when she would try to kill me or another member of the staff, she was just gone.

After a couple of hours, when we took off the restraints and let her back into the day room, she wasn't concerned about herself. She'd always be check us out for damage. One time she really did a job on me, (my fault, I wasn't watching) and she spent an hour afterwards trying to put an ice pack on my eye and telling me how bad she felt about it. She used to tell me "I told you, stay the hell out of my way when I'm like that. I don't know who I'm hitting, and I sure don't want to hurt you or anyone else here, and I can't control it."

Sometimes you have to restrain someone or they're going to hurt themselves. I know that's not the context of the discussion, but I'm just sayin.

I wasn't restrained in the two times I was in a psychaitric hospital, I was just given some meds and that was it.

Tim

I always thought that mental wards were places of torture, where the doctors' goal is to break the patients' spirits, and make them submit to authority. The most common method, from what a doctor once told me, is putting the patient in a confining straitjacket, and constantly injecting them with calming drugs. Just think of the movie The Jacket for visual (and very graphic) examples.