Personally I'd avoid them at all costs due to the loss of control. You can't just decide "I'm done" or "I don't like it here", you getting released is at the discretion of people that you don't even know.
You are part of the problem - you're making it seem like some evil doctors tie you down. The reality is if you bring yourself to a hospital you just request to leave and . Doctors have the ability to petition the courts to keep you there. It goes to a US Court, not some evil medical doctor's back office.
Even if you're forced to go a mental facility by family/friends/other, it must be legally addressed within 72 hours, and a physician must see you within 48.
Without getting too far into anecdotes, I’ve personally seen multiple people reach out to hospitals for help, and all of them were in a worse condition for it - Both by their own account of the events, and from my outside perspective.
While you might be right in an ideal world, real experiences don’t live up to that standard.
> If you have admitted yourself into a psychiatric hospital, you can not simply sign yourself out and leave when you decide to do so. There is a process which must be followed in order to leave.
I'm sorry, but have you ever been to one? I have. It is an arcane movie-like entrapment.
So I check myself out. Great, they petition me. Now I spend the next Monday locked in the same holding cells they put the accused in before they appear before the court.
The hearing itself seemed like a total formality. Doped up on medications, without internet or phone to contact people, no 'real' legal representation, it was basically all for show. They did my case and five others in less than 5 minutes total.
The end result? A possible court order giving them permission to keep you locked up longer than was legally able beforehand.
It's not even worth attempting. You end up with less rights than you started with.
My comment implied no such thing. I was simply stating that you can't just up and leave should you so wish, you getting released is not in your control.
Except that its /rarely/ not in your control. I'm unable to find numbers, but I find it hard to believe that any significant amount of people's requests to leave are taken to court.
I've never seen it be in someone's control, in the sense that they were able to say "this isn't working for me, I'd like to leave now" and then were allowed to leave.
I've also never seen it go all the way to court; rather, there's a statutory period of time after a voluntary admission where you have to either be released or taken to court, and that period is something on the order of an entire business week.
The pattern I've seen is (even at the nicer facilities) one of facilities staffed by nurses and counselors but with very overbooked psychiatrists, and all decisions about care are ultimately delegated to those psychiatrists. It can take days to make a decision happen just because of round-trip and scheduling delays.
The (call it) 5-day clock only starts ticking when you're formally acknowledged to have made a request to leave, too, so those same round-trip delays can keep you confined for longer than the statutory window.
When things go wrong, it's a frightening experience. Psychiatric hospitals carefully control your access to the outside world. Visitors are allowed only during limited visiting hours. Phone calls are allowed only during specific phone hours. You reside in a room with one or more strangers also suffering from psychiatric conditions, often significantly worse than your own. You're required to take medication, and the medications issued are rarely the same as a careful psychiatrist you had a preexisting relationship would issue. There's not just a loss of personal freedom but also of body integrity.
Like I said: however suboptimal it is, this can all be for the greater good, if a crisis situation has spun out of control and what's really needed is some kind of circuit breaker to arrest the crisis and ensure that someone ends up with access to professional psychiatric care. I'm not saying people shouldn't go to the hospital! I'm saying that people encouraging others to go to the hospital should be aware of what they're saying.
I also think you could stand to be a little bit less strident and a little more specific. I think it's likely that you have a set of experiences with acute psych care that differ from other people in this community. I've seen good acute psych care too --- in a university system --- but it was acute outpatient, not inpatient.
I think we have very different definitions of control.
To me, having control over when I leave is being able to walk out of the building at any time. Full autonomy. Having to petition some entity is the antithesis of control from my point of view.
This is the kind of horror story I was preaching against. They don't do such things unless you become violent. This is not one flew over the Cuckoo's Nest.
I have to argue from personal experience and my own eyes that lesser offences can be harshly punished and everything that is legal or in the rulebook is not constantly followed. Of course this will depend on location but you're talking in absolutes.