17:46 Jun 26 2017
Times Read: 318
When I was in my early twenties, I had to be hospitalized for a week in a psychiatric unit. My hospitalization was a direct result of my addiction to prescription drugs and excessive drinking which had altered my mental health in a negative way. My experience in that psych unit was horrible, the staff of nurses and doctors harbored no real care or concern for the patients. Upon arrival, we were forced to sit in an operation room of this hospital for several hours completely unattended. After two hours had past, one patient became extremely agitated and began to act out aggressively due to the long wait. This prompted the staff to finally become involved and what they did to the rest of us was entirely unethical. All because of this one patient's violent outburst, the rest of us were injected with some sort of medication that was so potent it was debilitating. This medicine was so strong it literally made me feel like I was dying. They injected me in the shoulder, a place I was told later that this particular medication was never supposed to be injected because of it's potency. After several more hours, they finally brought us all food, bu by this time I was so sick and weak, I could not even eat. My breathing became restricted, vertigo began to set in, and I forced myself to stumble to the hallway to alert the staff. They were acted very coldly to my plea, and after another thirty minutes passed, they finally sat me out in the hallway and gave me two puffs of an inhaler. The nurse giving it to me was so rude and unconcerned, her words to me were, "I shouldn't even give this to you because I don't believe anything is wrong with you anyway, you're just faking all this shit to avoid going to the unit, you need to straighten up". A few more minutes passed and my breathing worsened and I began gasping for air while sitting right there in the hallway. I stopped breathing and blacked out, when I came to, there were a bunch of staff around me trying to get me to breathe again. They finally believed that I wasn't lying, I was actually having an adverse reaction to the injection they gave me, but they first had to witness it nearly kill me before they'd take me seriously and they still tried to blame me for it by coming there for help in the first place. To make a long story short, that week in the psych unit was completely shitty. The nurses and doctors there handed out medication, checked vitals, and made us do stretches. As far as any actual therapy sessions, there were none. The one time I met the doctor over the unit, he did nothing but question me in an aggressive manner and hurl insults at me after each answer I gave. Every remark he made to me was "you are stupid and childish" and "your parents are lousy people". Mind you, this was the DOCTOR over the entire unit who was saying this to me! But it wasn't just him, all the staff there acted this way, they seemed to delight in aggravating a bad situation. The staff of nurses there would get patients all worked up by belittling them and then laugh when the patient acted out in a violent manner. Granted some of the patients did act up on their own, the staff there made no effort to calm the situation, if anything they seemed to strive to make the situation even worse by pushing the patients to act out. After a week, I was released, I quit drugs, and I will never go back to psychiatric unit or hospital ever. That was one of the worst experiences in my life.
My wife works at a state hospital in pain management, and she is one of the few who is striving to create a better environment for psychiatric patients by not only treating the psychological aspect but the psychical aspect as well in a positive and professional manner. She has put countless time, money, and effort into her research and is striving to educate nurses in treating both the mental and physical condition of patients. She has busted her ass towards getting her PhD and to better the world of psychiatric treatment. I am so proud of her and the work she has done, I can only hope that more nurses will follow in her footsteps and understand that the physical condition is just as important as the mental condition. The physical condition plays an extremely important role in an individual's mental condition, and vise versa. She suffers from chronic pain herself, so she definitely understands the importance of treating the physical aspect as well as the mental. Chronic pain is a very real struggle that can weigh heavily on the body as well as the mind. I am so proud of my wife who struggles with chronic pain on daily basis herself and yet has the strength and courage to fight for others who struggle with the same condition. There need to be more like her in the field of psychiatry, there needs to be more attention paid to those who suffer from chronic pain on a daily basis. I truly believe this will help with minimizing the rise in mental health issues as well as effectively help treat those already committed to hospitals and psychiatric units who struggle with this condition.
COMMENTS
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Dakotah
06:05 Jun 29 2017
Yeah Lily profile background is messed up too
Umyalanaraku
18:41 Jun 30 2017
Yeah, Photobucket changed their policy to where you have to pay $400.00 in order to use it now. These types of websites make these kinds of changes after they get so many users. A lot of people only use Photobucket to store all their pictures, so they waited until there were a lot of people using their site as a photo album and then hit them up with a mandatory access fee. This way the users now have to either pay the $400.00 fee just to be able to access their account or risk losing all their pictures. And out of all those users, you are going to have more than a few users who never stored their photos to their computer or anywhere else. This means even if the user doesn't like the new policy, they'll still have to pay the $400.00 to even get to their photos to download them. Many will pay the fee just to have access to their photos, especially if they are of sentimental value.