5 Things I learned in a Psych Ward

As mental health month kicks off in the US I thought it would be nice to share a story. This is about the time I was a patient at an inpatient psychiatric hospital or psych ward. I was only hospitalized once in my life. However, I have struggled with mental health for quite a few years and still do at times. At that time it was 2008 and I was 17 years old. I was in an adolescent ward, after getting off suicide watch I slept in the children’s ward. This was due to good behavior because I am a shameless rule follower. So I have memorable experiences from both of those wards.

I have been in recovery from self-harm for quite a few years now and you can read more about that here. So, I would say that the mental anguish I had at this time doesn’t even compare to what I experience now in my harder times. Some of the things I will talk about can be shocking so be warned that this post will talk about serious mental health problems and self-injury/ suicide.

No matter what you take from this please get help if you are struggling with thoughts of harming yourself or others! Now onto storytime.

Why I went into a psych ward.

As a teenager, I was very depressed due to the many circumstances and experiences that I had. Most were traumatic and I was unable to process them effectively. So, I started to self-harm in various different forms when I was 12 which progressively got worse over time. Then, I started to try to kill myself at the age of 17, I tried 2 different times.

I was on medication at this time for depression but nothing was working. So, I went back to the doctor’s to try to get new medication as I was going to go abroad to England on a student exchange program. I had significant anxiety about this trip considering the traumatic experiences I had recently had and I didn’t know these people I was going to be staying with.

If you know anything about me, I am very honest particularly when you ask me a question about myself. I have always been that way. So, when I was asked if I wanted to hurt myself I said yes (I still do to this day when life gets hard, I just put a lot of qualifiers with it). When asked if I wanted to kill myself, I once again said yes.

I was then told I was going to need to go to a psychiatric hospital a little over an hour away. Due to living in the middle of nowhere central PA and none of the hospitals near us took or still do take adolescence or children. I was unaware of what a place like that would be. That didn’t concern me, I just knew that I was telling the truth. I knew I needed help. Which leads me into the first thing that I learned.

1. Safety is their only concern.

When I say safety, what I mean is suicide. Self-harm is not included in this. Their jobs at a psych ward when you are on suicide watch are to do 15-minute checks. They won’t allow you to shave your legs, and won’t allow you to take showers with the door locked or walk off of the ward. The responsibility seems to start and end there.

I thought by going into a psychiatric hospital that I was going to be helped with therapy or by talking about things. There were groups that talked about mental health and there were different therapies like art therapy. Most of the time we spent watching movies or talking about anger issues. We talked a lot about why we were there. Which I now know was kind of ridiculous, because whatever behavior got us there was not the root of our problems. The root of our problems (ie lack of skills, trauma, etc.) was the things that caused our behavior, not the behavior itself.

A reason why it was a little different though, as it was in the middle of summer when I went there. The census of their adolescent population was way down. Which is why they had male and female adolescence mixed and part of the building, which during the school year is all adolescence was children. With that being said, that might be why some of the periods of time were very unstructured, as it was formerly used for schoolwork. Some of the unstructured time led to the next thing I am going to talk about.

2. Safety doesn’t mean self-injury free.

Another thing I learned in the psych ward that really surprised me, was the ability to self-harm. My very first roommate when I got there was a one to one which means that she continued to self-harm and attempt suicide. While she was on the ward. I was actually very much influenced by the nurse who was her one to one to eventually become a nurse myself. She was one of the only kind and caring staff members I met in that facility.

Her story was very sad, and I will not go into it but if I had some of the life circumstances she had, I wouldn’t care about rules or stopping self-injury either. What she taught me was that if “there’s a will, there’s a way”. She would spend hours slowly unscrewing the screws off of our beds. Figuring out ways to pry the metal gang plates off of our walls. This, of course, was only after being good enough to lose her one to one. It made me feel sad for her as she truly had more mental anguish than even I had at the time.

“You definitely could still harm yourself with various different means”.

So, even though I realized that it was pretty well impossible to kill yourself there. You definitely could still harm yourself with various different means. If these situations occurred most of the time they would force you to take a medication that would sedate you. If you refused to take it orally they would hold you down with a person sitting on your legs, one person holding your arms, and one person sitting on your torso and inject it.

It was pretty traumatizing to watch it happen to someone. After they would inject them they would put them in what they called a “safe room” which was a padded room without blankets, sockets, light switches, and bars on the windows. They never shut the door, but a big burly security guard would sit outside to make sure you didn’t move. Not like you were going to move when under chemical restraints like that. Since we are already talking about medications let’s move on to that.

3. Medication is not always well managed.

When you are put on certain types of medication you have to be followed for at least a month after starting. This doesn’t happen at a psych ward, due to the move to deinstitutionalize and everyone going to community resources. That means that a typical psych ward stay is usually anywhere between 3-7 days. You are not going to be effectively managed in this timeframe. The theory is that you are going to be followed by an outpatient psychiatrist who will follow the medication changes and help you if they are not effective.

Fortunately, I was able to have this happen, as my parents had good health insurance and the psych hospital set me up with Medicaid. Unfortunately, I have shortly kicked off my parent’s insurance for having a “preexisting condition” and was stuck with just having Medicaid until the ACA was passed.

There are some people who aren’t as fortunate as I was, due to there being a shortage of psychiatrists in our area. Some people fall through the cracks of community resources and end up just continually cycling through psych wards, ultimately ending up in a long term residential facility. Or sometimes just continually cycling in and out of short term stays. In this way, they are very much like your typical medical hospital. Wanting to get you in and out in the most cost-effective way possible.

4. They may have “hospital” in the name but they aren’t a hospital.

There are very few medical components to a psych ward or psych hospital. They drew my blood on the first day I was there. They would take our vital signs once a day in the morning. Most of the time with an electric blood pressure cuff. All the while the nurses would scream that various people were getting “level drops” due to the kids not keeping quiet. Once I was even told that even though I wasn’t talking I started to cry. So, I was told to go to my room.

At night we were asked by the nurses if we were having side effects from our medications that they were starting us on. I had no side effects until I was put on Geodon a mood stabilizer. Then, I was given it in the morning and I was very tired in the afternoon. I could barely keep my eyes open during the movie. That was very unusual to me, as I didn’t trust many people to fall asleep in front of them. So I never fell asleep in a situation like that. I never fell asleep in class or even when I worked night shift I never fell asleep. It’s a trauma thing. Anyways, that is why I knew that it wasn’t normal for me. They decided to just change it, to giving it to me at night.

“They told me to throw up in front of them”.

The next day, I started having nausea and vomiting. I told the nurses. They told me to throw up in front of them. As I was just trying to get out of going to groups all day. I was unable to produce more vomit, and I stayed in groups all day with very severe abdominal pain and nausea. Those symptoms I had off and on for over a year until I eventually went to an ER where they did blood work on me and found out that the Geodon was causing my liver functions to go extremely elevated which was causing me the abdominal pain and nausea. After being taken off of it I never had those symptoms again. The treatment I had from some nurses was unkind and often traumatizing. But, some of them actually cared about you.

5. Staff can be cruel, but some care.

A lot of the people who worked at the psych ward I was at were students at a nearby college. They were employed as mental health technicians and often were majoring in psychology. Some of these people were very much burnt out and jaded by this job. They would constantly accuse you of manipulation and of “attention-seeking” I was once told that I was a very angry person as a cutter because that’s obviously the only reason people cut.

Most of the nurses were this way too. I remember overhearing a nurse talk about the only reason children and adolescence were there was because they weren’t beat enough by there parents. So, now there all little shits.

However, there were a few people I met there that were actual caring human beings. They understood that being there for most of us was a circumstance of incredible mental pain and anguish. Most of us had been through some kind of trauma. I had an incredibly nice mental health tech. She talked to me at length, pulling me to the side and listening to me. She taught me some very important lessons that I remember today. One is that if people are talking about you, you must be special because you are on everyone’s mind!

“However, there were a few people I met there that were actual caring human beings”.

The other one I remember is the nurse who helped me on that very first day. She had to stay up and watch my roommate who was already asleep. She talked with me into the wee hours of the night. That nurse cared about me. She told me that talking to people like me was the reason she loved her job.

All these people I wish I could find now and tell them that they gave me a glimmer of hope in a very dark place. I wish I could thank them and show them where I have gone and where I am now. Unfortunately, I will never be able to do that because I don’t remember their names.

So, if you need to go to a place to get yourself help, do it!

It might seem like there are more negatives than positives in my experience but this took place years ago. I am sure experiences differ from hospital to hospital from psych ward to psych ward. That doesn’t mean that these things will happen to you if you seek help. It doesn’t even mean they will happen to you. If you seek help even at the same hospital.

I am sure that most of the staff and policies have changed in the past 11 years. I am not looking at this post as something that gives others advice. These are simply my experiences and some of the things that surprised me about our mental health system as a whole.

I want people to read this as a story. Something that will help set people on fire for mental health month. I want them to see that there are some real systematic flaws. That there are people that need to be advocated for. I want to give a face to mental illness. Do not fear mental illness. All of the people I came in contact with were sick, not creepy psychopaths, you should feel saddened. Next time you see a horror film being advertised about someone with a mental health disorder. Don’t go see it. Because you are continuing the stigmatization of people who are oftentimes in the worst place of their life.

To those of you who have similar experiences to mine drop them in the comments below. Keep fighting, we are survivors and we got this!

Until next time!