Well, apparently Rye has been doing really well is having a blast on his fishing trip. They have been fishing, crabbing and clamming and he has sounded really good each time Don or I have talked to him. Apparently the trained staff at the psych hospital can’t handle him without drugging him to death or putting him a locked room but a frail 76 year old man that can barely even bend over any more can with ease. Go figure.
Why is our psychiatric model of hospitalization in this country so pathetic? Urghh. For such an ‘advanced’ nation you’d think we’d have something better to offer. Something more healing and less creepy and Siberian.
Anyhoo, he comes home today and I am really excited to see him.
With Rye gone and having fun, I was really able to relax and let down and man was I tired. I mean pooped. Exhausted. To the core fatgued. But this weekend starts today and I am glad. Some normal family time will be nice for a change.
2 Comments
I share your frustration. Why in the world do we still feel the need to punish people who have mental illnesses? It’s ludicrous.
What’s really interesting to me is the contrast between the psychiatric establishment and anti-psychiatry. They’re both right! And we (people with mental illness and their advocates) are stuck without the thing we really need: compassionate care in which medication is just one facet.
I’m so, so glad that Rye is doing better and having a good time with his grandpa.
Do you have other inpatient options if Rye needs that again? We haven’t had to hospitalize Carter but last fall, after he’d come very close to needing inpatient treatment, I investigated our options. There’s only one option for young kids (thankfully, it’s good), but much more for adolescents. There’s wide variation among them.
Adrienne,
I am puzzled by your comments. You seem to be inferring that people who have the anti psychiatry label are not compassionate. By the way, that label is very loaded and often, it is extremely unfair just like it is unfair to make general assumptions about a group of people.
Anyway, I just don’t think framing the discussion that way is helpful. The issue is that people with mental illness are being tortured in psych hospitals and that needs to be the focus.
I know that is an extreme statement but when you use meds to punish people, that is exactly what it it is.
By the way, people who are falsely deemed as anti psychiatrists such as Robert Whitaker mentioned the types of program you talk about in his book, Anatomy of an Epidemic. They are for adults but I could seem them easily being adapted to kids.
First, there was the Soteria House. Medication was used if necessary although it wasn’t used that often.
There is also a program in Lapland, Finland that sounds similar to the Soteria House. Even though they seem to have gotten really good results, it isn’t mainstream in that country.
Anyway, it sounds like these types of programs could greatly benefit your kids. But they will never see the light of day even though they exist in a few places because of the anti psychiatry label. In the end, because of this push to label everything either or instead of seeing issues as gray, everyone one loses big time.
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