Have you ever been committed to a mental ward?

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I was once, for two weeks, after I tried to commit suicide. It was a state law or something, although I think my mother had something to do with it as well. Lovely experience! The thing I remember the most is that I froze my ass off in there. And I remember the big mean-looking orderly who had to watch me when I shaved. And another thing, my room had a light in the ceiling that stayed on all night. I woke up there after an ambulance delivered me from the hospital. What a weird experience that was, to regain consciousness in a mental institution in the middle of the night. They'd taken my belt and my shoe laces. All I had was the jeans I was wearing when I took all the pills, which were now crapped in, and a flimsy hospital gown. And a pair of Converse sneakers with no laces. It was two days before someone was allowed to bring me a clean pair of jeans. Not that I cared, I was so doped up.
I met a pretty good psychiatrist there who seemed to take an interest in me. He got me out of the crazy ward into the not-so-crazy ward. The only difference was that in the not-so-crazy ward they didn't dope you up so much, and you could go down to have a cigarette whenever you wanted.
Like I said, it was a lovely experience!

Okay, so, 3 psych. wards, 5 times total, all from ages 13-16. About 8 different meds, 6 different psychiatrists.

My first visit was full of insane drama. Someone at school saw my cuts and told the guidance councilor. I got called to the office in the middle of class. Crisis was called, and I bawled my eyes out to the guy and told him that if they told my mom or sent me away that "she'd kill herself". He told me she'd also be 302'd. The first deception of many.

I just remember being really ashamed and embarrassed. I couldn't look my family in the eye when they came to visit.

The variation of kids there was a lot like school, actually. Only with a tad more insanity. There were ones I got along with, ones who wouldn't give me the time of day, ones who gave me dirty looks, and that b**** Joanne who made fun of me. There was just as much neglect to the mental and emotional needs of the kids as there seemed to be everywhere else in the world. I still had trouble finding people to sit with at lunch. I still got picked next to last for team games in gym.

Adults still took my trust and stabbed me in the back with it. I remember the time I needed to talk. "I feel like cutting". I didn't. I was just lonely. Sad. And I just wanted someone to talk to me. "Okay, well, you can sleep in the 'safe room' tonight". Wow. Thanks b****. So all my pencils and pens get taken away (GREAT, since my only outlet there was obsessively documenting everything that happened in my journal). My sheets get taken away, in case I try to fashion a noose or something. I get thrown into the safe room (sheet plastic type walls, no furniture, locked door, camera) with a plastic mattress for the night. Good times. I never did get to talk to anyone.

Group therapy was monotonous. "Coping skills" stick out in my mind. Making lists of positive things to do when we're feeling negatively. The gayest s*** ever. Anger management. Basically more coping skill bs. Drug counciling. Basically a dude at a blackboard going around the room asking everyone to write down reasons to not do drugs.

I couldn't understand a word my psychiatrist said. I don't think I ever spent more than 5 minutes in his office per visit, the whole two weeks of my first stay. He threw around the words bi polar disorder and borderline personality disorder. I never knew if I had an official diagnosis or not. No one told me. This is usually the trend in the psych. ward. He put me on some depicoat, some remeron, zyprexa. I never felt any different with them, except for the racing heart and sometimes drowsiness. They'd check under your tongue to make sure you took your meds though, so there was no choice.

I got tired of the negligence real quick, faked "all better", and got out as soon as I could.

Unfortunately this happened 4 more times.

So I've seen screaming kids held down and shot in the a** with whatever kind of downer. I've called a schizophrenic girl's name while hiding from her sight, until she yelled "STAFF, I'M HEARING VOICES" (for some reason, I can't find it in me to feel bad for this one). I've had the kid across the hallway throw crumpled up love notes into my room. I've screamed bloody murder in the middle of the night, just to confuse the staff. I told little kids that my cuts were from getting attacked by a goldfish. They're vicious, I swear. In the adult ward, I heard a grown woman tell the staff to "go to hell" because they wouldn't let her make a phone call. Had a 45 year old man named Rodney rub lotion on my arms; I was 14 (someone tell me where the staff was when this was happening?!). Took an ink blot test. Wanted to know the results with everything in me, but no one would tell me.

So how did people react to me being institutionalized? I finally developed a relationship with my dad who I hadn't seen in a good 5 years. That was the best thing to come of the whole mess, so it was worth it. A wake up call for him, if you will. My mom was scared and over emotional, and it was really bad for me. She tried hard to over compensate for whatever she felt I was missing out on in life. The rest of my family send me stupid card with inspirational sayings on them. I freaking hate cards. My friends were curious and understanding, nothing more, and that's all I needed.

Was it fun? Did I make friends? Yes, sometimes it was fun. The times I got in trouble were the most fun. Sneaking into my friend Angel's room, trying on each other's clothes and just being... you know, normal 13 year old girls. I met some interesting people. Vanessa, she was 17. Sweetest girl you'd ever meet, had the cutest baby you've ever seen. Was in for holding a knife to her mothers throat. And wow, Heather. The girl who came in talking to herself, seemingly oblivious to everyone else around her. Weird outbursts. Not social with her peers. A week of meds and she was sitting with me at lunch chatting it up... just as normal as can be. I told her what she'd been like before, and she even had a sense of humor about it, laughing and saying "Hey come on! That's how I get without my meds!"

I feel like I got a decent bit of life experience in the psych. wards. I met interesting people, met a few good staff, one decent psychiatrist. Honestly though, I think most of all what I learned is that no one can help me but myself. I learned that most adults are neglectful. Most psychiatrists try to hurry you along when you speak, and they're usually foreign too. I learned that if you tell people about your lowest low, their idea of help will be much more like punishment. Pretty much, I feel I've been conditioned to take care of myself, because no one can really know how to do that but me.

No, because being admitted to a mental ward for autism would do no good whatsoever. There is no cure or treatment for autism and I do not feel I need it anyway. I am quite content living in my own little world. It would be just a waste of a perfectly good bed like say some poor NT schizophrenic that really needs it.

i've never been to one. my parents both studied medicine and during their studies had to visit some psychiatric wards. the ones they visited weren't like One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, they were much worse, and the children's ward was the worst of all. I gather from what they say that cutting up the chloroform-soaked body of somebody killed in a gruesome accident was more pleasant than even visiting those places. I have also read Ward Six (excellent story, independently of the topic at hand) by Chekhov (he was a doctor so he knew what he was talking about), he describes mental wards as essentially a way of burying alive people others didn't know what to do with (i.e., once committed the patients would only ever leave feet first), some of which really were psychotic, or badly brain-damaged, etc, but others were merely eccentric. The doctor who is the central character is himself committed because he is bored stiff with the scrummy little town and starts talking with one of the patients, who is the only other cultivated person around; he is also depressed because the hospital is so bad that he feels like a charlatan, since the hopital isn't really doing anyone any good.
I realise that there must be many modern psychiatric wards that are better than what they were in Mexico in the 70s (though I doubt the ones in Mexico have improved at all) or in Tsarist Russia, but it still is something I'd rather not discover for myself.

For the most part, they're just hospitals; there's good hospitals where you'd have the latest of laparoscopic surgery without too much worry, and there's others where you wouldn't go near the word laparoscopic due to the inexperienced staff.

"Brain" hospitals have a stigma attached for some reason or another, in part by those who view them from outside in rather than inside out; my stay was better than putting a round through my head, which is a fatal illness; I was cured of it.

Sorry, what I meant was that, in the places my parents visited, conditions in the psychiatric wards were much, much worse than in any of the others. They found the places so awful because of how the inmates were treated and because of people that shouldn't have been there in the first place. Likewise, in 'Ward Six', while the entire hospital was a disaster, at least in other wards patients left as soon as they got better, none of the patients in the psychiatric ward would ever be allowed to leave and there was not even a pretense of treatment. part of the point of the story is how arbitrary internment in these wards was.
I think the stigma is attached to psychiatric conditions as such and that that is the cause of the bad conditions in some psychiatric wards. the stigma is strong in Britain, but still less than in Mexico (though among the Mexican upper classes antidepressants are fashionable).
So I really wouldn't want to be interned in one because of fear of ending up in a bad one, and because of the stigma society has for people with psychiatric problems or who have been in a psychiatric ward. i.e. i hope never to have a meltdown or depression so bad that I need to be committed, and I also hope never to be committed for the wrong reasons. Obviously, staying in one not like the one in 'Ward Six' is much better than suicide (and I'm sure in the West there are none like that anymore). It's like hoping never to need an appendectomy, though it's clearly much better than dying of untreated appendicitis (except that there's no stigma attached to appendicitis).

I have been hospitalized 5 or 6 times. The first few were in a psych ward at a local hospital. It wasn't terrible, but not a great experience, either. I was hospitalized twice in private hospitals, and once in a state hospital.
It was definetly a learning experience. I think my favorite place was the state hospital. I stayed there for 3 months. That's quite awhile for a 15 yo. It was there that I was popular for the first time in my life. Yes, I was queen of the crazies. I always had friends, and I was able to be a regular teenager, which I had not experienced before. There were also dangers to this place. I learned real quick not to act out by watching how the other kids got treated when they did. It's hard to sleep when the girl in the seclusion room is screaming all night. You wonder how long she's been in restraints, and if they're even giving her food, and water. When you ask about her wellbeing, the staff just give you a look. I didn't rock, scream, or do anything that may place me in the position of the girl I mentioned. I was interestingly not given meds at this hospital, but I was given tons at others. One wrong move resulted in thorazine in the butt. I've been given so much Risperdal that I couldn't move my finger without exerting every last bit of energy in my body. Different rules apply in these places then on the outside.
I also absolutely hated group therapy. It was so pointless. I did not want to sit in a circle, and share my feelings with a bunch of strangers. I still don't understand what on earth anyone gets from that experience.
All in all I'm glad that I had a chance to experience just how bad life can be if you're seriously misunderstood. I will not ever let anyone treat my boys the way that I was, or dope them up the way that I was. The doctors have already suggested giving them Risperdal. They're 4, and 6. I said absolutely not. After all, I have firsthand experience with it that their medical journals couldn't ever make up for.

I went once. 3 weeks when I was 15. They gave me Zoloft which made me hallucinate. I was on suicide watch for the first few days (standard procedure, I was not suicidal, nor had I attempted anything), which meant no alone time, sleeping on a mattress on the floor in the hallway under the Flourescent lights, which were on and buzzing and flickering all night long. It was awful. They forced you to eat specific portions of specific food, which was torture. You had limited access to your shrink, who was the only person allowed to make changes to your daily required routine (i.e. confirming that I DID NOT have an eating disorder so I didn't have to eat any specific food I didn't want to as long as I ate something).

It was in the hospital that I started learning how to manipulate NTs into thinking I was normal or social. I dunno how to describe it, but I observed a lot there and I noticed how to read their emotions based on the words they said, and I noticed how to evoke emotions in them too. I really shamelessly manipulated them eventually untill they let me out. From then on I dunno I kinda knew how to manipulate teachers and "authority figures". That was the begining of my long road to really living among them with my own secret agenda. It seems so weird and distant now.

I was always undiagnosed, it wasn't till the last year or so that I started looking at aspie tests and reading books on the spectrum that I self-diagnosed. It was always misinterpreted as depression before that.

I was put in a teenage ward for twice, for a couple days the first time and a week the second time. The first time was after a monumental meltdown, when my mom was really afraid I'd try to kill myself. I wouldn't, but I needed to get out of that house anyway before I couldn't control the meltdowns at all anymore so I let her sent me to the psych ward for a few days. It was ridiculous, a county "hospital" which was really just suicide watch. No therapy sessions, and we weren't allowed to talk to each other about why we were there. I remember very little of it except watching TV and sitting in the "game room", which had puzzles and colouring books. That was were we went to talk about our problems where the staff wouldn't bother us.

The second time, I was put in for cutting. It was just a stim, but apparently people assume you're depressed and suicidal if you cut yourself (I can see their point of course, but no one knew yet that I had AS). The place I went to was so nice! It was a real psychiatric hospital, unlike the other place. Great food, group therapy sessions several times a day, art therapy, group exercises in the gym. I made friends, one of whom I went out to lunch with when we got out. We were more than encouraged to talk about our problems; we really had no choice. We ended up knowing more about each other than our own families and closest friends knew about us. My family could visit, and they even made an allowance to let my boyfriend visit. It didn't do much good of course because I'll always be autistic, but it did show me how much cutting scares people. I promised never to do it again, and mostly kept good on my word all these years.

Wow, some of the stories on this thread are so scary and surreal!

I had a pretty decent experience... When I was 17, I went to a psych ward for Major Depressive Disorder & Anorexia, and I stayed for a little over a month. I wasn't diagnosed with AS at the time.

When I arrived, I slept for about 2 days. I vaguely remember waking up to strangers who would be in my room asking me questions, I suppose to learn about my current mental state. When I finally left my room to have a shower, a schizophrenic male walked in on me - we both screamed. It was funny I guess, but after that I got my own private room and bath since I was the only female on the floor.

I remember really enjoying my time there because:

a) I had a very structured day. I woke up at the same time everyday, ate meals & snacks at the same time, had scheduled group meetings and activities, and a scheduled medication time. There were hardly any surprises and I had my own "routine".

b) Even if the others were not on the spectrum, they were still psychologically different from the majority of society and did not judge me or think I was "weird" when it came to my AS traits. They just saw me as another patient. Most of them were too wrapped up in their own problems to pay any attention to me. I had no obligations to "play normal" when I was in there, which was a huge relief to me. I had plenty of alone time and would spend hours in my room zoned out, listening to music.

c) It was never really boring. There was always something interesting going on. Whether it was a movie night or one of the patients in lock-down throwing feces all over the walls and making "Tarzan" noises - there was always something interesting going on.


What I did not like:

a) Nurses and staff treating me like a baby. There was this one nurse in particular that would talk to me really slowly, in condescending voice, as if I couldn't comprehend "big" words. That was seriously annoying and insulting.

b) The surprise blood tests. Occasionally, a nurse would appear on the floor without warning, and tell me that it was time for my blood test. I have had a gabillion painless blood tests in my life, and generally do not fear them, but these people must have had no idea what they were doing because every one I had hurt terribly. The incident that ticked me off the most, was when I woke up at 5 in the morning with a strange man standing over me, sticking a needle in my arm to draw blood. The guy didn't even bother to wake me up or explain what the hell he was doing in my room. That scared me and really bothered me. Sorry, I may be a little crazy, but I deserve to know when someone is going to stick and needle in me and draw my blood.

c) Not knowing that I had been diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder until I was being discharged. Apparently they had diagnosed me with MDD before I was admitted and didn't tell me.

I was commited once when I was 9 and once when I was 16. It was rather tramatic to me at age nine being tworn away from my parents into the hands of strangers and having all kinds of tests done and talking to people who talked down to me. It felt like a dream really it was so surreal. I'm still sort of messed up emotionaly from it and don't like to talk about it.

I was then commited again at 16, and asigned a so called "AS expert" he just said "So you have AS?" and that was it and he let his inten do all the work and the intern dxed me with skitsofrenia. The other kids consisted of drug adicts, a girl with PTSD and anerexia, a boy who couldn't seperate fantasy from reality. We had to go to group therapy everyday several times. Group situations never worked for me and the nurses were manily students. It was like a circus really. I came home worse than I was when I went in.

I never have been, and I hope I never will.

I spent 80% of my childhood from age 8 to age 17 in mental hospitals. The reason is because I didn't always listen to my mom and because I didn't always do my homework and stuff like that. And she never let me get further than 10 feet away from her my entire life unless I was at school.

The reason she did this is because she had Münchhausen by proxy disorder. Basically she made up all kinds of stuff about me 50% of it was a flat out lie. And she would go to meetings and stuff where there would be 20 professionals sitting around a table praising her about all that she went through to get me help. And they would have these meetings once a month. Basically she did it to get praise and sympathy, she is a sick piece of scum, who ruined my childhood. I now realize that I have Aspergers which means i would be screwed up anyways, but the point is that i would be a lot less messed up.

So yea I have been in a mental hospital before.

The stories in this thread are heart breaking.
Your honesty in relating your stories is quite brave.
I shake my head in disbelief at the cruelty visited upon people in the name of 'treatment'.

I agree. People just don't know how to manage us.
I've been told that I may suffer from some of my schizophrenia symptoms for a long time to come.

I never have...It has been threatened though....

I came to this thread because I found out tonight that my crazy ex-roommate and bandmember Steve was committed to a mental hospital a week ago. He called my boyfriend Flakey tonight.
He has conciderable AS symptoms...as well as bi-polar schitzophrenia issues. He goes in cycles and for a long time now he has been in a bad cycle....really paranoid and angry and stuff.

Now they have him on ALL kinds of meds....but according to Flakey, underneath all the meds he is still really messed up...the mental hospital does nothing good for him but keep him out of people's hair.
His neighbors called the police on him for yelling in his house....that is how he got committed...it is not the first time.