Travels Through Psychiatry

  I’ve been in psych hospitals a lot, sometimes by choice, more often by force. Honestly, I’ve lost track of the exact count. My succession of psych unit stays started when I was 17 and (hopefully) ended with my last one when I was 56. Nobody needs to be in psychiatric hospitals this much. This chronological listing is the best I can recall, except for 2016 through 2019 when I kept an actual record. Most of the units were in the northern Virginia area, except during the 2000-2003 period when I lived in the San Francisco area. The ones in purple were the voluntary admissions. All the others were on psychiatric detention, also called 5150, also called a hold, also known by other terms, none meaning you decided to go in yourself.   1980-1981 - Fairfax (once) - Arlington (2 times) 1986 -Northern VA Mental Health Institute (NVMHI) (once) 1989 - Georgetown (once) -St. Elizabeth’s, District of Columbia (once) for 2 weeks, then transferred -to NVMHI for 2 addi...

  It’s been 19 months since a psychiatrist cold stopped drugs she’d had me on for years. First she said don’t take any more of (like, bring in what you have left tomorrow) these 3: - quetiapine ER 400 mg - benztropine Mesylate 2 mg - gabapentin 600 mg And then 2 weeks later, after I’d spent 2 days in ICU due to severe withdrawal from no tapering off the first 3 meds, she cold stopped these 2 as well: -   pramipexole 1 mg -  desvenlafaxin e  ER 50 mg And then, because I asked for a psychiatrist switch at the mental health center and was denied this for months, and I no longer had a prescriber, I was forced off these 2 without much tapering at all: - lithium 900 mg - Vivitrol inj. monthly supplemented by daily naltrexone 50 mg one week prior to next inj. Initially, withdrawal knocked me off my feet with extreme sleepiness, when I wasn’t running to the toilet with nausea and diarrhea, and confused thinking. The psychiatrist said it must be the flu. ...

  Twenty years ago, I was given a choice, while on a psychiatric detention hold, that I could either start eating, or be tube fed, or try ECT. After a day or two of being heavily pushed toward ECT, I agreed to try. One psychiatrist oversaw this whole psych unit, and he had an ECT suite, and he wanted all patients in there for a good dose of volts. The procedure, sending electricity into my brain to induce a grand mal seizure while I was under anesthesia and muscle relaxants to minimize my body’s spasms, had me waking to intolerable migraines. I did maybe three treatments, then pretended I could eat again so the psychiatrist would release me from the hospital. Basically, I was shoved out the door with my belongings and a note pinned to my shirt instructing me how to get the buses home. I remember seeing a department store that looked familiar, so I departed the bus and somehow managed to find my way walking the remaining few blocks. It took months for things in my house to become ...