Grady Hospital Doctors Excuse: Fill & Download for Free

Edit 5/29/19: I encourage you to review the exchange in the comment section between me and a psychologist about hospitalizations and suicides.Bottom line, the system does not care about the patients with mental-health problems. That will not change until mental-health professionals hold themselves to higher levels of accountability.Until that changes, inpatient stays will remain violating and depressing for most patients. They cannot be ‘stabilizing’ experiences. Suicide rates post hospitalization will continue to increase.Edit 5/30/19:I wish to clarify my credentials. I am not only a disgruntled, former patient, but I was the chief development officer (fundraising counsel) for three mental health organizations. During my career, I raised millions for children’s emergency shelters, youth aging out of foster care. I was the first Director of Development for the first organization in the nation to offer counseling and psychiatric services exclusively to people with HIV/AIDS. I ran a multi-million-dollar capital campaign for a sixteen-acre campus offering comprehensive residential services to children and youth. You can’t raise that much money without knowing these issues inside-out and working with plenty of mental-health professionals.As a patient, I have been in the best of mental hospitals (Harvard’s Beth Israel in Cambridge, MA), the absolute worst (Grady Hospital in Atlanta, GA) and everywhere in between. There are huge disparities in standards of care that produce human horrors to this day – horrors we rarely see in other branches of medicine.There is no excuse.Original Response:It is almost always a miserable experience.I do not know how anyone with any real knowledge on this topic could say otherwise. Most notoriously, suicide rates always increase after hospitalization. [1][1][1][1] Personally, I have so many horror stories I don’t know where to begin.I was in the hospital (maybe five times, mostly for medication changes) for short stays over twenty years until I unraveled my relationship with all psychiatric medications for good. The following anecdote represents the least of my worst experiences. I have more to share, for sure, but the real horrors I have witnessed in a clinical setting happened to other people.Several months ago, I ended up voluntarily in a mental-health hospital after an adverse reaction to Lyrica. There was no substance abuse involved — no prescription, alcohol or illegal drug abuse, not a lick. I drove myself to the hospital and turned the medication over to the staff when I arrived.There was no taper, and I was in a lot of pain.Now Lyrica withdrawal is exactly like acute benzodiazepine withdrawal.That night, my anxieties were pitched so high I was bordering on a dysphoric paranoia that came in flashes and lasted for weeks afterward.For more information, please see this response:Robert Pfaff's answer to What are people’s experiences taking pregabalin?I received no orientation at the hospital, and I was clueless about the rules, so I was blindsided when the nurse (aka Big Nurse) started screaming at me.Some patients are difficult. I am not.I was polite when I asked the nurse standing behind her (aka Big Red) for my medication, but Big Red was not my designated nurse. I could not have known, and I never had a chance to explain. Big Nurse launched into a bewildering rant as I followed her humiliated to a small window where she struggled to locate my medication (large dose of Gabapentin and a non-narcotic muscle relaxant).There, she hollered:“What’s your pain level ?!?”I know this joke, I am thinking.It is a bad one and a setup. I cannot remember the punchline, but I know she wants me to respond on the pain scale from one to ten. I am shaking my head and biting my lip. I do not want to respond, but my passive resistance only incites her. I know better than to explode, but she will not stop.I finally shout back.“It’s a ten!”Then Big Nurse! Oh, how she cackled:“Well, if your pain levels are at ten, how are you standing there, bothering me about your pain medication?!?”What a cheap shot. I had seen it used to mock other patients’ pain in the past. I saw it coming, but I could not stop it. She was hell-bent on abusing me, and I refused to allow it. I broke away from the window, stood in the middle of the corridor, shouting louder, keeping my distance and my arms at my side.“I am not safe with her. I want another nurse. I am not safe! I am not safe! I am not safe!” I am shouting over and over, waiting on Head Nurse to intervene.But no one on the staff responds.When I look up, the nurses and orderlies were staring at me with weary apathy. I could have exploded into flames, and they would not have spit on me to put out the fire. I fled into my room, and waited until I calmed down.I returned to the nurses' station and calmly informed Head Nurse that I was NOT rejecting my medication that night. She never responded to me but instructed Big Nurse to give me my medicine. Then I retreated into my room for the night.When my roommate (a homeless man in and out of these places) came to bed, he informed me that I would have been strapped down and injected at the “other” hospital in this town, as if I should be grateful for my treatment in the town’s only “respectable” joint.The next morning, I discovered Big Nurse had not stopped with me.According to several patients, she continued to berate and threaten the other patients while her fellow nurses turned a blind eye. This abuse escalated through my stay until enough patients complained.There were so many problems with the abusive staff that the facility director came into the cafeteria and apologized to the patients.Wow. I was blown away, and I was the only one to thank him. But I understand why other patients did not. We should not have to petition for humane treatment.It galls me that our expectations are so low - this is what we expect from those charged with our health and safety. After twenty years of horror stories, someone in power actually said “I am sorry,” and promised to do something.It was one HUGE exception that proves the rule.That night was my last one. No nurse was fired, of course, but they were oddly quiet that final evening. I was discharged the next morning.At one point, I asked to speak to a patient advocate, which was one of my alleged patient rights. When nothing happened, I called my mother and she informed the nurses that I wanted one. The nurse who took her call promised me that I would see one “shortly,” but it again never happened.I also tried to initiate a discharge under voluntary commitment laws.At least the nurses did not laugh this time!But they refused to respond, so what I am supposed to do?Start another showdown?I dropped it.What’s the point?The fact that Big Nurse remained in charge of managing my pain medication after she had openly mocked my pain levels reflects a terrifying absence of ethical standards in this profession.I would have been fired on the spot from any job anywhere if I had ever behaved toward a single client in the way this nurse (and the staff in general) acted toward the other patients and me.There is no other branch of medicine where nurses and doctors abuse their patients while the public turns a blind eye.In the same unit, there was an older woman who had dementia.I will call her Miss Edie.My father died from dementia two years prior, and another patient there was a professional caretaker for dementia patients. To us, it was clear that Miss Edie did not belong in a mental health hospital, and the doctors should have sent her home or moved her to an appropriate facility.She had been there for a month, laboring under the constant delusion that her children would take her home the next day.Miss Edie wandered a lot.She would not stay in her room, and she asked the staff the same questions over and over. She had worked in a laundromat most of her life, so she was continually stealing the other patients’ clothing and folding it.Big Red hated Miss Edie.Her station faced Miss Edie’s room, so Big Red received the brunt of Edie’s repetitive questions. It was tedious, I am sure, but she was so damned mean, and it only further confused and agitated the poor woman. The last I saw Edie, I watched as two orderlies wrestled her into a wheelchair.It was a brutal scene. She was howling in protest.I cannot pretend to know much more. In the end, I heard that Edie was taken - because of patients protesting her treatment - to an assisted living facility.But she had been on that unit for months.Finally, I met a man there on my first day.He overheard me telling one of the doctors that I had ended a twenty-year relationship with Klonopin (a benzodiazepine). He was being discharged that morning. Before he left, he came over and shared his story.He was prescribed Ativan (another benzo) for thirty years when his doctor stopped him cold turkey. And he had a psychotic break.He started to seize and hear voices.Those voices told him to buy a car. He purchased the car, started seizing and crashed it. He ended up in an emergency room with broken ribs before he was shipped to the mental hospital.“Can you believe it?” he demanded. Yes, I believed him, absolutely.I was not surprised, not in the least.I am going to add one more point. During my week there, there was a bad cold going around, but appeals from other kinds of treatment and medication were ignored by the staff.Footnotes[1] Meta-analysis of suicide rates in the first week and the first month after psychiatric hospitalisation[1] Meta-analysis of suicide rates in the first week and the first month after psychiatric hospitalisation[1] Meta-analysis of suicide rates in the first week and the first month after psychiatric hospitalisation[1] Meta-analysis of suicide rates in the first week and the first month after psychiatric hospitalisation