[jackflashdrive]

Slowhabit: Yes, very much like Ken Kessey's book. There's no way he could have written that without a lot of experience in a psych hospital. Things are better now then they were then. 15 years ago the state was removing patients teeth if they bit a staff member, and doing much much worse. Patients have a lot more rights now, which is a good thing. Still, power hungry [censored] take what they can get.

WhoIam: I am 6'3 and weigh 160 pounds, so no I am not big by any means. Just another skinny white dude. There were a few big black dudes, but they were the minority.

The bigger people were generally but not always more likely to get into altercations because they felt they had less to fear. This is of course more dangerous for everyone.

Youngone:

1)On average, how long did each patient stay at the psychiatric hospital?

They were all Baker Acted so we could legally hold them for 72 hours without a court review. In practice we basically forced all the patients to sign in voluntarily by telling them that if we had to send it to court then it would indicate that they were not cooperating with treatment and that they would end up staying much longer. Of course once they are in voluntarily they can't just back out of it on a whim.

Some people were there for months, but it was a short term facility and average stay was probably a week to 10 days.

2)How much was the psychiatric hospital charging per day?

I think about a thousand per day at my first facility. The second place I worked at had two different units, one that was for people with insurance and billed at much higher rates. Same staff rotated through both units and there was no real difference in treatment except that they got to be around other people with insurance if they had insurance.

3)What's your take on the psychiatric hospital's role on the patient's improvement?

I primarily worked on short-term units for people with acute disorders, though towards the end I worked more with people who were more stable but chronically ill. I think the tremendous financial cost and life disruption associated with being confined unexpectedly against your will has a lot of long lasting negative effects. There are some benefits to some people to being locked up for a period. Appropriate psychotropic drugs are also helpful for some disorders and they get that in the hospital.

4)How cool were the Psychiatrist that you were working with?

I didn't have a lot of personal contact with the psychiatrists so I'll just say that they didn't strike me as very interesting one way or another.

5)What's your opinion on psychotic meds?

At my hospital, for any potentially violent or actually black patient we would use 'chemical restraints' quite liberally. I didn't agree with many of these uses. For disorders like bipolar disorder and depression and a few others, psychotropics are often indispenisble and have helped turn around the lives of countless people.

6)Best/worst part of your job?

Best part was that this job was often very interesting. I got to know people and have experiences and stories that I simply couldn't get any other way. Even the experiences that I thought were awful at the time (I'll tell a few if people are interested) make me smile in retrospect, and I'm glad to have had them.

Worst part of the job was the sense of futility about so many of the patients situations. The most you could do was be kind and treat the patients with more respect than others were giving, but I often had little hope that the lives of these people would be anything other than miserable.

Edit: Oh, and yes whoami sometimes staff had to go to the hospital. One patient snuck up on a nurse he didn't like and picked up one of those big metal trash cans and whalloped her across the head with it, seriously injuring her.