Posted by vwoolf on July 17, 2006, at 12:13:39
In reply to hospitalization, posted by wishingstar on July 16, 2006, at 19:29:27
Wishing Star, I don't often post here, but this a subject I have thought lots about, so I'm breaking my rule.
I have been hospitalized twice, both times voluntarily, both times many years ago. Like you I needed to get away from my parents. I didn't think I could cope any longer.
I remember very little about the first hospital. I have since learnt that it is a very small psychiatric unit in a general state hospital that only takes 16 patients for three months at a time each. It is closed off from the world and very protected - at no time are you out of sight of a member of staff. There are more staff than patients. It is highly therapeutic - you see a therapist every day, a psychiatrist once a week, there is group every day, as well as OT, meditation groups, breathing exercises etc etc. In other words it is quite hard work. Only high functioning patients are accepted on the programme. When you leave you go into a day care programme.
Second time round I went into the admissions ward of a large state psychiatric hospital, which is one of those huge Victorian buildings with towers and gargoyles set in a huge park. This was very different. It was a very heterogeneous group of people, many of whom were actively psychotic. We sat around and smoked all day. The main purpose of the institution seemed to be to stop people from committing suicide. There were bars on the windows and no doors on the toilets. It smelled sour, of deep depression and onions and urine. I spent a couple of months there. I saw a therapist twice in that time. Then I was released. One day I was in, the next day out. Boom!
Yet strangely, of the two is the second one that I yearn for. Often when things get rough I ask my t to send me to hospital. She says I can go if I wish, but on two conditions: not to the second one, and it must be my decision. If I feel that I can't manage then I must admit myself. Then she asks me if that is what I want.
I have always said no. It's funny, simply knowing that I can go if I want to takes away the desire, and gives me the strength to carry on. Also, knowing that she can see my pain, that she acknowledges it makes me feel stronger. I so long for dependency on the one hand, to be cared for and nurtured. But on the other I long for autonomy. I want to be an adult. By putting the choice in my hands, she places me in an adult situation and my choice is for strength and growth rather than weakness and regression.
Because in a sense that is what the second kind of hospital encourages. Passiveness and dependency. Once you have been there you understand that it is not satisfying in any way. But you keep longing for it because the opposite implies hard work and growth towards maturity.
Although I sometimes long for it, I would not go back there. If I were desperate, I would go to the first kind of hospital again. But not the second.
There is also another thing that would stop me. Once you have been hospitalized you feel as if you really are mentally ill, really are mad. You carry a stigma in your own mind. I have never told anyone about my hospitalizations, because I have always been filled with shame about them. Only in the last year have I begun to be able to integrate them in some way, and have started telling select friends about what it was like.
I am sure that there is a place for hospitalization. I am sure that at times life can simply become too much. I am not sure that I would be alive today if I hadn't been to those hospitals. Yet I would make it my last choice. I would try and exhaust all other avenues first.
I am sorry things are so rough for you. It must be hard to have to appear competent and in control when you are so full of despair inside. The teaching world is also not very sympathetic towards mental illness. Try and hold out for the four weeks if you can. It is not a long time. But if you must go, make sure it is a place that will open up possibilities for you, not close them down. And then go and give yourself up to it.
My thoughts are with you
A warm hug.
vee
poster:vwoolf
thread:667573
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20060703/msgs/667751.html