[PuppyTailWags]

You might benefit from looking at personal experiences of what a psych ward is like. There's a furry comic called Fresh Meat about the partially fictionalized experiences of a teenaged girl in for attempted suicide, where one of the beginning sections she is forced out of bed from a dead sleep in order to be transferred to another ward by being shoved out of bed and then when she's asked not to be touched the nurse tells her there's much worse that can be done to her besides touching. She is also withheld food and water until she signs a consent form that allows her to be kept indefinitely, but also she cannot leave the facility on her own will because she's in a psychiatric hold.

[kelseyfrog]

Thanks for sharing that. Great comic - read it straight through. :)

[trogdor]

I am sympathetic to stories like those, and I don't doubt that bad things happen, but it's important to recognize that people suffering from serious mental illness are often unreliable narrators. It's a difficult situation.

[PuppyTailWags]

Question: if a non-psychotic psychiatric patient cannot be trusted to perform first-hand accounts of their own abuse, and psychiatric wards are tightly controlled such that lawyers and patient advocates can only be allowed in when deemed reasonable by the hospital, how does a sexually assaulted patient navigate reporting their abuse?

Believing that all patients, regardless of their exact illness, cannot be trusted to accurately describe abuse done to them is precisely what enables abuse in the first place. Suicidal thoughts is not a condition where you cannot tell if you're being taken out of bed in the middle of sleep. Suicidal thoughts is not a condition where you cannot understand someone is threatening you.

[trogdor]

I really don't know.

With the caveat that this is just an anecdote, one of my family members is an extremely intelligent and highly accomplished man. He graduated from Yale law, worked at a very high level in the executive branch, and during his professional career, I don't know anyone who questioned his character. Retired, he is now suffering from severe intractible depression.

Last month, I drove my relative to a doctor's appointment, and due to his own mistake, he showed up at the wrong time. And on the wrong day. Since I had walked him into the office, I heard his conversation with the receptionist, and then with his doctor, who came out to calm things down.

On the ride back to his house, my relative phoned another member of my family and angrily explained what had happened. He blamed everything on the doctor, and made baseless accusations against the doctor and receptionist. My relative's account of the situation wasn't based in reality. And he related his account right in front of me. He truly believed every word he was saying. But it wasn't true. I saw what had happened with my own eyes. I heard it with my own ears. I, fortunately, am well.

It wasn't the doctor's fault, nor was it the receptionist's fault. Quite the opposite, my relative had made a mistake. His illness, however, — depression — blinded him to that reality. And his reaction was to sling baseless accusations at his doctor.

Like I wrote before, this is a really difficult problem. I don't have a solution. I wish I did.