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Mental health hospitals are hellish too. I can’t fucking stand Married with Children, not because of how stupid or unfunny it is, but because it was always on and I get flashbacks.
I attempted years ago - because I was dead broke and about to have to drop out of college. When I got out, I had lost my job and had to do survival sex work to eat.
The power structure of those places facilitate horrific abuse. For example, the Indian man whose screams have haunted my dreams for the past ten years - a man who had no family, came to the facility with no clothing… the staff (and patients) bullied the shit out of him. No one in that hospital was interested in helping him.
The psychiatrist I saw for maybe 15 minutes at the beginning of the day. All they did was prescribe me meds. There wasn’t any really meaningful therapy, at least as I understood it? It was more of a holding pen.
I think in the US, the horrifying truth is that mental health resources are mostly illusory. 988 exists so that we can pass out 988 stickers and pens - we can be the good people providing help. Therapists exist, but the waiting lists for good ones can be months and there are thousands of disturbed LPCs who went in to counseling for the wrong reason.
CBT is a shitty modality for things like “I’m miserable because I can’t afford to eat” or “I’m stressed because I got fired from my job when they found out I was trans” or even something as dumb “my body tenses up and I can’t focus my eyes when hear the name Al Bundy.” It’s symptoms focused and can be harmful for certain situations. But it also is often the only modality that one can easily access.
The entire structure of the mental health system in America is horrifically broken, but fixing it would require a complete overhaul of the system. So instead it’s bandaids - employee assistance programs and chat hotlines.
My daughter, who does have psychological issues (don't we all?) but nowhere near the need to put her in a facility, has heard so many horror stories about them that she was terrified we would put her in one someday. It doesn't help that there's a mental hospital that down the road from us that has super severe patients. Her psychiatrist is part of their network and I didn't understand that it wasn't in that building for her first appointment, so she also had the misfortune of seeing some people with problems far more severe than hers when we went to the wrong place. I felt bad for her, but I also think it helped her understand that her symptoms are not even remotely close to the severity that would have anyone consider putting her in one, so maybe it was for the best. She certainly has not expressed that fear since we made that accidental trip there.
I'm glad you made it out of there with your mental health in tact enough for you to come across as a basically mentally sound person to everyone here.
Mental health "hospitals" in America are basically just small prisons, but without even the minimal oversight that prisons have.
You can be held in a mental health institution indefinitely if any doctor feels like it, with no recourse, no appeal, and without being charged with any crime, and not even with the need to actually diagnose you with anything. They can strip you, bully you, take whatever possessions you had on you and destroy them, humiliate you, and within those walls you have no rights. And at the end of it all, they'll send you an astronomical bill proportionate to the amount of time they imprisoned you.
Unless you are, like, to the seeing-imaginary-people levels of out of whack, do yourself a favor and don't think checking in to an American mental health institution will help you. You'll might go in with one problem, and you'll come out with two or more.
This may be the case in many other countries as well.
Thanks for sharing. Hope you're feeling better now. Having witnessed people breaking down myself and it's no joke. If people have no way out of a shitty situation, I mean, what can they do?
988 Worker here.
Every single time someone asks me what we can do to fight the mental health epidemic in the U.S. and the rising suicide rates, I always always tell them the keys are workers rights, affordable housing, a healthcare system that doesn't suck, all of this shit that the person asking typically doesn't want.
Just curious - is 988 using “AI”? I’ve seen some strange and suspect conversations.
988 is not using any AI in conversations with callers to my knowledge. I know that some branches are looking at implementing AI for training purposes, to perhaps give more realistic simulation calls for trainers, but at no point should anybody calling 988 needing help encounter an AI. For the chat platform, I know that the messaging system has some automatic questions that it asks everyone at the very start of the conversation, but it's a machine in the classic sense, and is not AI. Chat/Texters should not be encountering AI either.
I've found CBT actively harmful for mental health struggles that result from ill health and physical disability. Like if I'm anxious about whether I'm strong enough to make it to the bathroom, CBT techniques seem to involve pretending that falling and pissing yourself on the floor isn't a real risk that needs to be accounted for.
Sometimes you're stuck in a situation with no win state and the last thing that's useful is gaslighty bullshit that ignores reality.