diagnosis

What it’s Really Like Inside A Psychiatric Hospital

/ Mike Hedrick / Leave a comment

There’s a lot of fear surrounding mental hospitals for various reasons.

Whether it’s the stigma surrounding the unmedicated psychiatric patient, or the numerous media portraying either haunted and abandoned psychiatric hospitals or psychiatric hospitals as essentially prisons full of crazy people, a lot of people are freaked out by the very mention of them.

There seems to be a lot of misinformation about what exactly a psychiatric hospital is and what it’s for though.

The main purpose of psychiatric hospitals is to provide, essentially a resting and rehabilitation place for people struggling with mental illness, primarily those who have exhibited behavior that could be harmful to themselves or others.

While this sounds scary, the majority of the time those patients are just there for the potential of hurting themselves (e.g. suicide attempts, delusional thinking or manic episodes). They are there primarily to rest and get a better handle on themselves through group and focused activities.

The closest thing I can compare it to is like a preschool or summer camp, except everyone is a little nuts.

I wish I had fully realized that when I was a patient in one.

The problem for me was that I was terrified of being crazy and in my brain, at the time, I painted the hospital experience as some oppressive prison where I was being locked away for being a non-conformist mentally ill menace to society.

I viewed it as a betrayal by my parents for putting me there and for treating me like I was some messed up defect that needed to be locked up.

The truth is, I willingly signed the forms for a voluntary 72-hour hold for observation and I fully recognized that something wasn’t right with me.

Whether or not I was fully in the right mind to be cognizant of what I was doing could be a matter of contention.

Further, I believed it would only be 72 hours and I think the betrayal aspect only took hold when I was informed by the doctors that I would only be released when I seemed ready (which turned out to be another five days).

Disregarding the negative connotations and conceptions I had of the place though, it was a relatively soothing environment.

Clean, white walls, private rooms where you could sleep all day if you felt like it, a day room where you could watch tv, play games or relax on couches, and music and art classes, all tied together with rehabilitation focused group therapy and doctor’s visits.

In complete honesty, it really wasn’t that bad.

Certainly not a prison, as one might have you believe.

It’s hard to realize that when you’re in the midst of a breakdown though.

Things are very scary and the only thing you want in the world is to just go home and get into bed.

I won’t forget my time there and I’ve pledged never to go back but in hindsight, my perception of mental hospitals was askew thanks to the chemical imbalance in my brain.

Psychiatric hospitals though, are nothing like the scary pictures of it that I’m sure a lot of you imagine. They are calm, quiet places, where people mostly keep to themselves and where everybody just wants to be left alone. Sure there are outliers but everyone there is suffering in one or another and keeping that in mind helps to humanize the place.

If you happen to find yourself there, try to remember that it’s supposed to be a place to relax, away from the stress of society, it’s supposed to be a place to calm down and get a handle on yourself, not a decrepit prison full of unhinged psychopaths who would kill you at a moments notice.

Overall, it’s ok if you need to take a break somewhere like that, they’re there to help.

Schizophrenia’s Effect on Family

/ Mike Hedrick / Leave a comment

I can remember the weeks after coming out of the hospital and moving back in with my parents, it was a scary time, to say the least.

I was riddled with paranoia and delusions, my meds weren’t right yet and I was suffering from a host of side effects, and though I had been cleared to be released, I was still very very sick.

Remembering some of the things I did and said to my family in those weeks still haunts me, and over the years I’ve had time to look back on what I was like and sit in mortified embarrassment thinking on it.

At one point I was playing the piano with my mom and she reached over across my lap to play, and for some reason the first thought in my head was that she was trying to sexually harass me.

Another instance involved accusing my dad of cutting the brake lines in my car after we had replaced the brake pads.

I was a monster to my family in those early days but I hope they realize that I was just trying and suffering in a really really bad way.

The fact is, schizophrenia (and any mental illness) can really test a family. For many it’s a breaking point causing division. I even remember my mom telling me, later on, that she even went to her own doctor for depression over my behavior.

I count myself incredibly grateful for the strength and the love of my family in those days, and I realize that that type of stuff can just be too much for some families.

My parents’ love was never more apparent than when they chose to educate themselves as much as possible on mental illness nearly the moment after I received a diagnosis. They went to the bookstore and bought every book they could find on my condition in an attempt to understand, even just fleetingly, what this meant for me, and them, and the family.

Later they took it upon themselves to attend and even teach a class on having family members with mental illness.

I worry I never properly thanked them enough for taking that initiative because that class changed everything they understood about mental illness. It gave them a basis and starting point for understanding the reality of what this diagnosis meant.

Mental illness can be incredibly tough on families if they don’t understand it. It can cause resentment, divorce, and sometimes even homelessness. Many times, they don’t even understand that something is wrong with their loved one and they justify the behavior by saying they’re just looking for attention or they took too many drugs; if they just stop, things will go back to normal.

It doesn’t seem to really click until a diagnosis by a healthcare professional confirms mental illness. And even then, they could refuse to believe it as anything other than personal shortcomings.

Mental Illness and schizophrenia though, are very real, and they’re there for life.

In my experience the best thing a family can do when they have someone newly diagnosed with mental illness is to educate themselves, attend classes and look into support groups for learning how to take care of their loved one.

Know that it’s a long hard process to get back to stability and understand that the suffering their loved one is experiencing is sometimes too hard to explain in words.

Be there for your loved one, that’s really all they want and need, just be there.

Talk without criticism when they want to talk and just love them to the best of your ability.

The knowledge that someone is with you and has your back can make or break recovery for those diagnosed, it can mean the world in that dark place.

It will be hard, and it will be long but eventually you’ll get to a point as a family where things are easy again, and where things are stable.

You’re not alone in this struggle and you can make it out the other side. I know this and my family knows this.

It’s gonna be ok.

Coming to Terms with Reality

/ Mike Hedrick / Leave a comment

Diagnosis in and of itself does not mean that you are out of the woods. It’s just a label that you have now to put a name to the things you’ve been experiencing.

This can be freeing though, because it also means that other people have gone through the same thing and you’re not alone and never will be.

Those first few weeks/months after diagnosis though, may well be some of the hardest that you have to go through in this new, different, life.

In this period you’re forced to accept that you’re crazy. You’re forced to come to terms with what this means about you and the world and even reality.

For the first few months after my diagnosis I still experienced an overwhelming amount of delusions, paranoia and connections that made it incredibly difficult to know what was real and what was not. I knew that a portion of my conception of the world was skewed and incorrect but where was the line?

Discovering the nuances and the edges of my delusions and paranoia wouldn’t come for years, and even now 16 years down the line, I’m still not entirely sure of everything.

Figuring out what was reality and what was a function of my illness essentially required a kind of reboot. I had to step back, and force myself to look at things objectively. It required me to forget, or push back associations I had made in the years leading up to my diagnosis about how things are, how people are and what my place in the grand scheme was.

I learned though, and was relieved to discover that reality, and my position, as one small human amongst seven billion, who has chores and responsibilities, was far less exciting than I had been imagining it as.

When you think you’re a prophet you feel a kind of power, and perhaps I needed that power to survive and push on in the midst of my illness. Then you’re diagnosed though, and all of the sudden you’re nothing but some dude who has a broken brain, and nothing else. That transition was earth shattering for me.

In addition to this revelation, you are now on a heavy course of medication, and while deemed safe, the new side effects can really mess you up. For a good two months, my body wouldn’t let me relax, it had to be moving at all times or I felt like I was going to die. That’s called akathisia and they don’t tell you about that one very often. It’s either something like that, or you gain 50 lbs. in six months for no reason.

Suffice it to say that this transition period into living comfortably with your illness is one of the hardest times someone with mental illness will go through and support is a necessity.

What’s my point? Well, if you or someone you love is in the midst of this transition be kind to them or be kind to yourself. Take it easy, take it slow, everything’s gonna be ok, I promise you that.

You will get through this.

Recovery is a process and coming to terms with your illness is going to take a while, so patience and work is necessary.

There is a light at the end of the tunnel though, and you will get there if you hold on.