What to Do When a Loved One Is Severely Depressed

I've also never seen it go all the way to court; rather, there's a statutory period of time after a voluntary admission where you have to either be released or taken to court, and that period is something on the order of an entire business week.

The pattern I've seen is (even at the nicer facilities) one of facilities staffed by nurses and counselors but with very overbooked psychiatrists, and all decisions about care are ultimately delegated to those psychiatrists. It can take days to make a decision happen just because of round-trip and scheduling delays.

The (call it) 5-day clock only starts ticking when you're formally acknowledged to have made a request to leave, too, so those same round-trip delays can keep you confined for longer than the statutory window.

When things go wrong, it's a frightening experience. Psychiatric hospitals carefully control your access to the outside world. Visitors are allowed only during limited visiting hours. Phone calls are allowed only during specific phone hours. You reside in a room with one or more strangers also suffering from psychiatric conditions, often significantly worse than your own. You're required to take medication, and the medications issued are rarely the same as a careful psychiatrist you had a preexisting relationship would issue. There's not just a loss of personal freedom but also of body integrity.

Like I said: however suboptimal it is, this can all be for the greater good, if a crisis situation has spun out of control and what's really needed is some kind of circuit breaker to arrest the crisis and ensure that someone ends up with access to professional psychiatric care. I'm not saying people shouldn't go to the hospital! I'm saying that people encouraging others to go to the hospital should be aware of what they're saying.

I also think you could stand to be a little bit less strident and a little more specific. I think it's likely that you have a set of experiences with acute psych care that differ from other people in this community. I've seen good acute psych care too --- in a university system --- but it was acute outpatient, not inpatient.

In other words: less than 25% of them are right. About the same experience here.

My personal gripe: Most psychologists are feminists. If you explain them a problem you have, they’ll percieve it in a gynocentric way. They are in denial that men can be on the receiving end of a problem or injustice, so much that one of them posited to me that male and female suicide rates were the same. Which tells a lot about the state of science on men’s problems.

Two and a bit years ago I was having suicidal thoughts. I had an episode and left the house in distress, but eventually arrived back home where my wife comforted me and my suicidal thoughts went away, and yet I was ripped from my bed and taken to hospital where I was thrown into a seclusion room for five and a half hours. There is no clinical documentation, I’m not in the seclusion register, there was no explanation given, I wasn’t assessed until hours later someone turned up, said I was fine and not only did I leave the room - I left the hospital!

The authorities do not care, they leave you powerless, stripped of your dignity and autonomy and in some cases your life can be at risk. The following review was done last year by the NSW Chief Psychiatrist and it is absolutely damning:

http://www.health.nsw.gov.au/patients/mentalhealth/Documents...

I have been trying to get justice and answers for two and a half years. I went to the body who is meant to investigate these matters after the health service denied I was even in seclusion, they did nothing.

The Hospital has now acknowledged I was in seclusion. They have literally just now started to find out about my lack of clinical records it’s, but they don’t think they’ll ever find out who threw me in that room.

I now have severe PTSD, completely distrust the medical profession and will never speak of suicide to any medical professional ever again, and I strongly believe that anyone who does so takes a grave risk of being abused or mistreated by uncaring “professionals” who act more like jailers than carers. Certainly an ED is the very last place you want to go to - they simply do not care about depressed or suicidal people and you will almost certainly be thrown into a psych ward. Your rights will be servely curtailed, your decision making ignored and removed and it can be very hard to get out of such places.

We equate openly suicidal people to attention seekers because they talk about it without doing it. Facing that disbelief was one of the things that scarred me the most.