What does going to a mental institution do for you?
If you get, say, depressed because of your life being constant shit, how will going to a mental institution help? How does therapy help?
It’s not like therapy is going to solve the problems you face in life, like lack of money, friends, bad job, etc? I guess I’m asking what is the purpose of therapy and mental institutions?
Practically, what voluntarily checking myself into a psych hospital did: was given a temporary case worker who worked for the hospital. She assessed my needs. She called up a social services agency, who came to the hospital to meet me. I was placed in a shelter short term upon discharge, while new case manager worked on finding better temp housing. Was given 3 weeks of meds on discharge. Case manager connected me with an agency that helped me apply for ssi.
Whether you have insurance or not effects the care you receive.
If you voluntarily 5150 yourself, you will not be allowed to buy a gun afterwards.
A good hospital will be mostly safe, group activities, people who come in, teach meditation, mindfulness, art stuff. Made awesome connections. Lot of creative people in psych hospitals.
Bad hospital, 2 days waiting in an overcrowded room, shoved, yelled at by staff, violent patients, screaming, chaos.
In my area, there are crisis stabilization places thatve emerged to fill a void. People who don’t need to be hospitalized, but need help. 2 week stay, more freedom of movement, day trips, can bring and keep your laptop, phone, wear normal clothes. But the tone of these places vary depending on who’s there. Sometimes, hostile, violent clients who make other people feel unsafe. Week later, different group, Uber chill and zen.
If you have ptsd, are fleeing domestic abuse, or have autism, any of the above places can be challenging.
I see you’re getting a lot of answers from both sides of the spectrum. But if you’re struggling, I want to help.
Being in a behavior health ward is good for when you can’t help yourself anymore, or need significant treatment that’s difficult to handle via outpatient (like electroconvulsive treatments). It’s not like a hospital stay where you walk out cured of some infection. It’s more like a stay in the hospital after a huge car accident. They’ll get you stable, they’ll set you up with a therapist for long-term recovery, and meds to manage the symptoms.
You’re right that talk doesn’t fix money problems and things like that. But what it does do is help you keep from suffering alone AND it teaches you how to manage the feelings in a healthier way. That can be the difference between falling apart in the face of money trouble and having the skills to focus on finding a solution–or even just a way to survive.
The thing about depression is that it makes everything feel worthless and hopeless. You have to trust that you can’t properly interpret whether a solution will work for you, and that the medical experts you align with are going to have a clearer view of what will help bring you out of the depression.
That doesn’t mean all therapists are good. Or that a good therapist for someone else will fit you. But those are problems you can start to manage once you’ve taken a few steps toward recovery (assuming they turn out to be problems at all).
I’ve been in therapy for over a decade, on meds for just as long, and once in a ward for a week. Does it suck to be “trapped” in the unit? Yep. It’s not a party in there. I don’t ever want to go back. But when I did go in, it was because I felt like I legitimately couldn’t take care of myself or see a way forward. In that regard, it saved me. So if my biggest complaint is that I felt stuck for a few days, well… so be it.
But there are many other options before being admitted. There are social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, intensive outpatient programs, ketamine therapy, and more. You may never need to be admitted at all if you can get to treatment before you’re completely overwhelmed. Sometimes the solution is incredibly simple, like getting more vitamin D and a proper sleep schedule. Sometimes it takes a little ongoing medicine with weekly talk sessions. Sometimes it’s more. But whatever it is, it’s worth it. You can be happy in tough situations, but if you’re depressed you can’t be happy even in good situations. And that’s no way to live.
Long story short: if you’re depressed you aren’t equipped to judge whether a solution will work without trying it, you have very little to lose by trying therapy, and the potential gains are the difference between misery and a fulfilling life. A mental institution is an extreme measure that’s only part of a longer-term solution, and you may never need it. But it can be the literal difference between life and death if you’re at the end of your rope.
This is the best description of what short term hospitalization is like. The severe car accident analogy is great. In patient hospitalization is like being in the ICU to stabilize, and then you have to do the thousands of hours of physical therapy afterwards to get back to full functionally. I’ve been in a US PHP program twice in the last 25 years and the second time in 2007 started with 11 days of in patient hospitalization after a suicide attempt. The folks that hate in patient hospitalization most likely are early in their mental health journey (2000-3000 hours of various therapies, workshops, and PHP for me so far).
Being early in your mental health awareness makes the lack of control in an in patient hospitalization terrifying.
For me the 11 days were a godsend, and I needed the doc to stabilize me on my new meds. They weren’t going to release me until they’re saw me improve on the SSRIs and that took 11 days. I was then put into an outpatient program for 3 months. I will say the outpatient programs and my workshops are where I did the heavy lifting wrt emotional learning, learning CBT and DBT, etc. Those two PHP stints laid the foundation for my recovery.
Going in-patient saved my life, but it did not cure it. It armed me for the war I would fight with myself on the path to healing, but did little to support it long-term. It is an effective stop-gap, but should be considered only the beginning of the journey, as continued work and treatment (for potentially very long after) may be on the menu.
I was ‘voluntarily’ comitted to a psych hospital (UK) about 6yrs ago. I was a recovering heroin addict with a daily pickup prescription of bupronorphine at the time. It took 3 days of begging nurses to fetch/check my prescription requirements before they arrived. By the time they did I was crawling to the fucking medical room to take my tablet.
The nurse exclaimed: “Oh WOW! I’ve never seen someone change so quickly!”
It got worse…I was comitted to a hospital in a neighbouring NHS Trust rather than my local one due to bed limitations. This meant two things:
My psychiatrist was on annual leave and couldn’t come to see me in the legally established 2 day maximum wait.
No other psychiatrist in that Trust could evaluate me as I was an outside patient.
This meant I was trapped for 7 days when in reality I should have only had to spend 2 days maximum. After 7 days another problem was manifesting. My severe addiction to pregabalin. As the pregabalin in my system wore off I began to experience hallucinations and delusions. So the hospital stay was making me more insane. My bed was a hard wooden block with a faux-leather mattress and sheets on top. It started to melt and hands would grab and punch at me. I paced the corridors listening to the voices of people who didn’t exist.
I tried explaining all this to the nurses but as anyone who’s been to a mental hospital knows they take anything you say with a pinch of salt. So they ignored my deterioration and doctors still refused to even see me.
On the 7th day the delusions and psychosis were so bad I was taking instructions from ‘Wall People’ who told me the ‘Magic Formula to Escape’ was to speak to the “Queen Nurse” and ask to be “released against medical advice”.
When I uttered those words a magical thing happened - a doctor appeared with a sheet of paper. He asked some questions, never once giving me eye contact, and filled in his form. All the time this was happening I was seeing wall people trying to bust through the wall to grab me while I ‘heard’ other patients baying for my blood in the corridor outside.
The form complete I was let out of the front door and given my wallet and keys.
The bus then train home was a nightmare-fuelled Mad Max-like journey with people attacking me and shouting at me. When I got home I immediately ducked into my car and grabbed my pregabalin. Ate a bunch and 20mins later - swoosh - I was sane.
It was the hardest, most horrific shit I’ve ever gone through and scars me to this day. I’m clean now but I’ve always told doctors and psychiatrists that if I’m suicidal I’d never tell them because I’d sooner die than be hospitalised. Then they utter the usual phrase “are you a risk to yourself or anyone else”. Knowing full well I’m suicidal I say “No, absolutely not”.
I’m sorry if my story is offputting, but it’s the truth. I’ve been in touch with the system multiple times, and I was always cooperative and complacent. Aggression doesn’t figure into it. But in my experience, people who genuinely wanted to help were extremely few and far between, and the others were never shy to use their power over me to my detriment.
As for how society itself treats you once they know you’ve been inside… Oof.
I’m 100% convinced that if I hadn’t gone through the system, I would now either be dead or much better off and at this point I would have preferred death. Sure, I’m alive, but only because the people I love would be devastated if I was gone. I don’t live for myself, couldn’t care less about it.
Again, sorry if that’s not what people want to hear, but it’s the sipmle, sad truth. If that kind of truth is unwanted, feel free to ban me. Never been banned on Lemmy before but there’s gotta be a first time for everything, right?
In practice, you will essentially be a prisoner only allowed to leave at the physician’s permission.
In addition you will learn to say what they want to hear, regardless of how you really feel, because from the nurses up to the management, not a single soul will give even the slightest hint of a flyng fuck about you as a person.
If you finally do get out and carry some extra trauma instead of solutions, you get rejected from jobs for it - or worse, if you end up in a bad divorce or other legal issues, THAT HISTORY CAN AND WILL BE USED AGAINST YOU.
I’m sorry that you had such a rough time, but please don’t frighten away people who need these services.
My brother stayed at a facility for a few months, and although he also didn’t enjoy being there, IT SAVED HIS LIFE. Had he not been in a controlled environment like that, he would have continued to spiral into paranoid delusions, he would be afraid to leave the house and too afraid to sleep.
I don’t know you, so I can’t say if you shouldn’t have been there in the first place, or if you were just so resistant to treatment that you never really saw any benefit, but there are people who need that kind of controlled environment to get back to a mental state that allows them to maintain their own mental health and live their life the best they can.
Scaring those people away with horror stories is only going to cause them to fear the ONLY thing that can help them get better.
I can’t speak for mental institutions, but I have been to rehab, which can be quite similar. It helped me to figure out what my issues were and how to solve them without alcohol. I was very sceptical that it would help, but I was amazed at how much it really did. I wish I could go back, even though I’ve been sober for many years now.
In the same way that physical therapy provides you with an environment, tools, and professionals that help you physically heal, therapy helps you with your emotions and thoughts. Therapists may offer advice but the main purpose of therapy is to give you a safe place where you can work through your emotions which can then lead to a better outlook on life.
Often times the reason why we get stuck in a rut due to a bad job, money issues, relationship issues, is because we haven’t taken care of our mental health and poor mental health will exacerbate those issues. If you are doing therapy while all that is going on, it will help you get in a better head space where you can start taking care of those issues or at least mitigate the trauma that they cause.
It absolutely can help you with things like friends and work.
There are often underlying reasons that make it hard for you to make and maintain friendships or find a good job. Therapy can definitely get to the root of those issues.
Many people struggle with setting boundaries or saying no. Both of which are very important for both friendships and work.
Me and my therapist did a pre job interview session and we come up with some phrases and answers to use in the interview. It removed a huge amount of the anxiety I normally experience and I smashed the interview.
As for being institutionalised it’s a break from life. It may be to stop you hurting yourself or others. Or simply to remove some pressure from you.
The mental health institution helps by taking you out of your everyday problems. They provide a safe simple environment, where all you have to focus on is yourself and your mental health.
In a way it is putting all the problems outside of yourself on pause, so you can focus on your mental health.
Therapy can help you manage burdens, and most importantly, manage and ease the influence they have over you® mental.
It’s not about solving practical issues that can’t be solved. It’s about how to approach, view, accept, and handle them.
Having mental burdens doesn’t help resolving the unsolvable. In du cases the mental mechanisms are not helpful but detrimental. Easing them can improve both subjective and objective, practical situations.
In du cases the mental mechanisms are not helpful but detrimental.
I’m sorry, I don’t understand this, could you explain more? Shouldn’t people develop mental mechanisms to cope with things? Or am I understanding it wrongly?
Humans are not good at solving their own mental problems. Trying to do it on your own can often just get you deeper into the same rut, or cause new problems. Sometimes family and friends are able to help, but for most people that is also not an option or not helpful.
Your brain is in control of how you interpret the entire world around you, when it starts interpreting things incorrectly, there really isn’t much that can be done from within that world view to fix it. How can you get yourself back to right, if you don’t know what right even looks or feels like anymore?
Yes, developing coping mechanisms can be helpful and fruitful.
Other mental mechanisms were useful in the evolutionary past, or are useful in some cases, but not others.
Anxiety can be useful and important in selective situations. But when it generalized or fears the non issue it becomes unhelpful or problematic. When it has negative impact on us without usefulness we call it a disorder.
A good therapist will help you to find reasons to and ways to deal with your problems. A mental institution provides a place for people who are a danger to themselves or others to get mental health treatment.
So a therapist will give you advice on how to deal with the issues you encounter? I’m still not really sure how it will really help with life issues. Thanks for the answer though, I’m just trying to learn what a therapist does for a person. I think I got a bit confused as to what a mental institution is.
While they will definitely not have the answers or advice on how to solve all the issues you encounter, they do have insight into helping people deal with issues that often feel insurmountable because of mental illness. i.e. if you are depressed, and that is preventing you from finding a good job or performing adequately in your current one, they might be able to help you understand why you are depressed and what’s keeping you from doing anything about it. They can help you reveal things about yourself that you didn’t realize, which can help you then move forward with things that you’ve been avoiding or deal with things that you’ve been holding onto for the wrong reasons.
I see. I have been considering going to a therapist. I find myself staying in bed most days and feel tired all the time, I can’t really motivate myself to get out and do stuff. Today’s a good day though, I actually managed to make some food and turn on my computer to do some work.
My friends and family just keep saying there’s nothing wrong with me, and I’m just lazy. Maybe they’re right, who knows? I only know I haven’t always been like this. I also live in Singapore, where they don’t really care too much about people’s mental health, just their productivity, so maybe that’s contributing to their opinion.
If it helps, “unintentionally lazy” is kind of not a real thing. There’s always a cause if you want to be doing something but can’t bring yourself to do it. Lazy is choosing to do nothing with your time on purpose. You don’t sound lazy, you sound as though something is preventing you from doing what you want to do.
They’re not just people to talk to about your problems. Find a friend or family member or write a journal or something for that.
Basically, if you have a harmful behavior, a therapist can help you understand what’s causing it and maybe correct it. For example, in my case I worry constantly about my work. The the point where it’s more or less paralysing and I’m afraid to leave my house. Therapy can kind of help me dig into the underlying misconceptions which cause the worry.
For me, personally, 100s of hours of therapy was nowhere as beneficial as reading a few books about Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and Acceptance Commitment Therapy (ACT). Learning about these therapies isn’t enough, you have to put them into practice which is hard work.
That said, feeling tired and unmotivated can be caused by a plethora of different physical and mental ailments. Honestly I think step 1 would be to talk to a GP. Here in Australia you can get a full panel of bloods that will show if you’re deficient in any vitamins.
A mental institution is not the right place for you. We are all of us a bit messed up in the head. If you’re 20% messed up and I’m 40% messed up, being somewhere surrounded by people who are 80% or 90% messed up would not be a nice place for either of us to recuperate. Institutions are usually for people who are at risk of harming themselves or others. Another commenter said that’s only for involuntary patients but honestly, you’d only volunteer to be in a place like that if you acknowledged that you were at risk of harming yourself or others.
“Can’t get out of bed and tired all the time” are hallmarks of depression. I’m not saying you’re depressed, don’t let someone on the internet diagnose you. But a therapist can really help you understand what’s going on. Meds can be a life changer in a lot of situations.
You should know that depression usually doesn’t feel like “super sadness” and crying all the time. It’s more of a numbness, a disconnection from life. Things don’t make depressed people happy, everything is just turned down.
Talk to your doctor asap. Staying in bed all day, feeling tired, and not daring to do anything looks like a depression (or may be some other disease)
Being lazy is stuff like, staying 30 minutes more in bed, taking the car instead of the bicycles, leaving work early to chill at home.
Your ‘friends’ behaviour is my mental health professional are useful, unlike your friend they won’t make you feel guilty and adress the psychological mechanisms behind it, with or without medications depending on your specific case
Simply talking about stuff usually offers relief. On top of that, by trying to explain everything going on in your head to another person you end up understanding the how and the why and it helps you manage it better as well. And then they give you exercises to do and things like that which help.
Also, remember that we’re talking about a therapist. Even tho they’re trained and stuff, they’re usually not doctors and can’t prescribe medicine. At least not where I live. For antidepressants and stuff like that you need a psychiatrist.
There’s therapists for—well—therapy, doctors for medication, and social workers for problem living situations. However, the time away is just a break; a person has to continue all three of those aspects after they leave. Inpatient treatment is just to get started.
The confusion of the OP was how would a therapist help fix financial issues? The thing about depression and other mental health issues is that they will remain even if the financial situation gets fixed (e.g. you come into a windfall). They are due to underlying problems.
Depression needs to be treated along with getting financial advice from a different expert.
I think OP was confused that financial problems cause depression rather than it being a separate thing that is exacerbated by life circumstances. If that is your line of thinking then it makes no sense for a therapist to treat depression unless they're also really good with personal finance or can get the patient a good job.
It sounds like you feel helpless. You’re having difficulty understanding how a therapist can help because you see all of your problems as “uncontrollable things that happen TO you.”
The point of the therapist is to change how you view yourself and your world. You think that the only way your life could get better is for some external force to remove your problems, but YOU can fix the problems yourself, or, at least have the ability to continue living a happy life despite the problems.
Ah I think I understand. The therapist doesn’t really solve any of my problems, they just suggest steps I could take to fix them myself, or learn to accept things?
First off, therapists can be accessed without institutions. Second, a therapist will help you to learn to recognize your own patterns, strengths, and weaknesses, and will help you to learn from, process, and grow though experienced trauma. They can also help with recognizing emotions, toxic behavior (either your own or someone else’s), and give you tools to adjust.
I’m trying to think about a good medical analogy for what therapists and psychiatrists (that both prescribe meds and do therapy).
The best analogy I can come up with is thinking about mental health in 2 categories, and using medical treatment as an analogy like a previous user mentioned. You can have low level mental health issues where a little therapy is needed to reset your approach maybe using therapy every couple weeks for 6 months. Or you can have a serious condition that results in a threat to your or others life. That that doesn’t have to be death, it could be serious illness or physical injury.
It’s like the difference between someone needing a physical trainer at the gym to get back into shape, where you can white knuckle the process on your own but it’s WAY more efficient to get outside guidance. That example is someone with low level mental health problems. Then there’s the severe stroke victim in a coma for 3 months, this person will NOT benefit from a physical trainer, they need a medically trained physical therapist. This example is someone suicidal and non socially functional with MDD, or bipolar disorder that is cutting themselves, and other severe mental health issues. They need significant help, maybe PHP, or skilled weekly or even twice weekly therapy. And an individual can process through both low level and extreme states over the decades.
You can recognize you are a danger to yourself or others and voluntarily commit, or if you believe you can’t commit to therapy without external help you can also voluntary commit
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