meltdown related injuries and medical attention

Post Reply New Topic

Have you ever had to go to the doctor for an injury sustained during a meltdown?

How did you explain how you got injured? Did you have to try to explain it like a whole story? Did they ask you a lot of questions about the meltdown part of it?

Did they just treat your injury and let you go or or did they worry you were a danger to yourself and have you assessed by a psychiatrist and/or have you involuntarily committed to the psych ward?

I've had smaller damage from self injurious behavior (cutting/punching myself/biting myself) due to meltdowns but the two I can recall having to go to the doctor for was a broken hand which required surgery, and most recently I broke a laptop over my head several times (metal/older) which due to the number of concussion's I have had, this one is still recovering slightly but was going pretty strong for 2 months of constant headache and clouded thinking luckily now it's been reduced in pain and regular sleep decreases the #and severity. I hate going to the doctors....

It was this one. I really couldn't explain what happened or how I felt which they took to mean severely depressed and suicidal and avoiding their questions. The admission so the psych ward had to go through... 3 or 4 people, I think, and it was only stopped by the last person who recognized what it was from the extensive notes taken of me for like 8 hours. The first man just said I was a danger to myself and that people who do what I did later go on to kill themselves. It was incredibly scary and I just wanted to go home, but they wouldn't even trust me to go out of this hospital room in case I tried to kill myself or something. But they recognized autism and then I got out, so that's good...

Thanks to both of you.

legomyego did the doctors treat you like you were a danger to yourself? I also hate going to the doctor.

iliketrees, your story is a mix of reassuring and really horrible...the reassuring part is that someone eventually recognized what was happening and you didn't get locked up for days, but the fact that they misunderstood you so badly at first and kept you there all day is really horrible.

Well, it could have been far worse... and without it happening I'd never have started the route to getting a diagnosis, so I guess in a weird way I'm happy it happened.

I've had small-scale self-harm like cutting and hitting and I have been hospitalized because of non-injurious meltdowns/episodes, but I've never needed medical attention from anything I've done to myself during such, if that was the question being asked.

For several weeks I had a nurse who would call me and ask "are you safe" randomly....quite irritating.

And then during that same period any appointment I had with a mental health provider they would do the same thing.

I often want to stop seeing these people but I need them to get my medications or else it would be expensive medications from over seas which I cannot afford.

"Are you safe?" is an incredibly important question. I not only have therapists ask it, but friends and parents as well. Knowing that my moods can escalate to levels which can be dangerous and self-destructive, it can often be a mandatory question to ask if I'm feeling agitated or spiraling off into an episode. It just means that they don't want you to die.

That's good then -- like the silver lining?


I would be unsettled by that, I think, because of what worried people have done to me in their attempts to help. But I think it's good that they would ask you instead of just assuming that you were unsafe without asking.


It was sort of a multi-part question. The first part was if you had ever needed medical attention from anything you'd done to yourself during a meltdown, and then if the answer to the first part was "yes" the rest of the parts were about your experience/what happened to you when you went to get medical attention.

During a recent meltdown I hurt myself badly enough that I needed to see a doctor to make sure I hadn't broken anything or get treatment if I had (I hadn't). I was afraid of going to the doctor in case I was judged a danger to myself and locked up, and I didn't know what to expect from a doctor or what to say about what happened (just told them the mechanics of how I hurt myself and they didn't ask too many questions about it or seem to think I was a danger to myself).