Written 03.04.08
Am I too naive to think that the principal aim of a hospital should be to help its patients? Well, apparently I am, because during the last two years that I have been working at one of the nation’s top psychiatric hospitals, I’ve seen very few examples that would back up this idea. The overwhelming majority of people and procedures employed by the psych hospital have very different objectives, ranging from maximizing the profit to minimizing the effort, and culminating in an all-consuming urge to cover one’s ass. Among the people who genuinely tried to struggle with the system and help the patients, during these two years some have been fired, and some have “gotten used to it”, but no one lasted long. As a matter of fact, I am fairly close to losing my job right now, after an argument with a charge nurse yesterday, during which she tried to din into me that the most important thing for her was not to lose her license. Not that I cared too much, because I had already given the termination notice anyway.
Too many people assume uncritically that if they go to a psychiatric hospital they will get help; even more believe that their children/parents/spouses will be helped if they send them there. This is what all the propaganda is about. But it is a lie. A mental hospital in this day and age is not an institution of help - it is an institution of confinement, much like a jail. It is a place in which kept are people who have not committed a crime but have nonetheless made their relatives or friends very uncomfortable with their being around. This point is so obvious that it doesn’t even need to be proved; just look at all the door locks and security guards in any mental hospital. If this institution was helpful, people would want to be there, and none of this would be needed.
Really, think about all the homeless people, all the battered spouses, all the terrified youngsters going through a psychotic episode, all the misunderstood children and suicidal adults longing for understanding or at least for a pacific place to curl up in the corner and sleep it over. Think about everyone who needs to get away from their environment for a while. If the proclamations of the psychiatric industry had some truth in them, if there really existed a place where they could relax and get help, those people would line up to get into this kind of institution! Obviously, a psychiatric hospital is not such a place, because most of the patients hate it there and struggle to break out. Until, of course, they lose their life drive and become dependent on the system.
Now, this is of course not to imply that the mental hospitals are completely worthless. There are people, and many, out there who are either morbidly stupid or completely out of their minds. They cannot survive in a demanding environment of a today’s city and therefore need to be confined and cared for. But to assume that the same mental hospital is a helpful place for all the able people just going through a difficult time, is a tragic mistake.
People who send their relatives to a psychiatric hospital never find out what actually happens there. Parents are told all kinds of stories about how helpful the place is and how much therapy their children receive. They don’t know that the therapy is heartless and superficial, or that the place is extremely boring and unfriendly. They never see their kids crying and begging a nurse for a breath of fresh air after being indoors for days and weeks, or being dragged to their room on the floor by uncaring strangers. They never observe their kids’ free spirit being broken into submission; if they did, they would not forgive themselves.
If there is only one thing to be remembered out of this whole journal, it is this. Please, don’t put your children and loved ones in a psychiatric hospital for help. Put them there because you want to confine them, get rid of them, forget about them! Put them there because you don’t care, or because you hate them - but not because you love them. Don’t fool yourself thinking that you are doing them good. Because nothing can be farther from the truth.
Monday, December 1, 2008
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2 comments:
Dear Skpsycho,
I agree with you, that choosing a psychiatric hospitalisation for our mental diseased relatives should not happen only for personal reasons. But in the case of mental diseases we have to consider that we deal with diseases!!! The people who are for example psychotic are sick, they suffer, they put themselves in danger, they put other people in danger. They are scared to death, they consider their lives being in a permanent danger and they act like that. And the worst of all is that the situation is not getting better by itself. It is constantly getting worse...
Sometimes it is not enough to provide a place to relax for those sick people. Often they are not even aware that they are sick, that they have some kind of problems and need professional help. They need medicine, they need the kind of help relatives, friends or other people can not provide! They need the chance to calm down, to get back in the reality and to get the chance to sort out their problems. The only chance relatives get to help is when those sick people realize that they are sick and that they have a problem which needs to be solved.
I think it is more important for all people involved to cooperate with the psychiatry. To peak the positive effects and the most important thing is not to leave the person who got there alone. If someone we love and care for is mentally sick, we should not expect a magic or miracle to happen in the psychiatry, which will get our beloved person totally healed and all their problems solved. We have to help them, to be there for them and work with them on solving their problems.
To be the person who has to make the decision whether or not to hospitalize someone is not an easy job!!! Not if you love the person and if you care. You have to consider that in some cases there is no other help, that there is no other possibility to help or to make the sick person feel comfortable. For better or worse, the psychiatry is the only possibility you have. The other is to loose the person or let her suffer much longer. And you have to help, it is your job to help, otherwise you look away and ignore the reality and your instincts.
Maybe the better job is to work on the awareness of the people not to give up their mentally diseased relatives or friends. And not to expect a miracle to happen in the psychiatry! The mentally sick people need a perspective and a reason to fight for, to work on themselves and to get healed. And that is the point when they need even more their relatives, their family and their friends. The job is definitely not done, when the doors in the psychiatry close for the people we bring in, but the job starts when they open and the person we got in gets out!
Best whishes from Germany!
Biljana
Biljanka,
Your logic is right and your heart is big. The problem is this logic is based upon things that have never been proved. If you believe that psychiatric diseases are diseases, that mentally sick people are sick and that the professional help is help, then you come to the conclusions that you describe. But in fact, those questions remain the biggest dilemmas in psychiatric science. Today they make it sound like they know; but in fact it is just a theory promoted for political and financial reasons.
Read Thomas Szasz's "Myth of mental illness" for starters, if you're really interested.
Perhaps it would be helpful if we stop referring to the mentally sick as "them". Imagine that it is you who is in panic, and scared to death about going to a durdom. (Why, silly? - say your relatives. - Because they torture me there! - Ha-ha-ha!) Would you want to be dragged there by force, even if it's "for your own good"?
Have you ever looked in the eyes of a child who is being overpowered and tied to the bed by several adults who say they do it for his own good? It is hard to forget that look.
I have nothing against voluntary psychiatry; let people do to themselves whatever the hell they want. Let those who want to be in the hospital be there. Leave alone those who don't want - that's all I'm saying.
Best,
sk
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