Mental Hospitals

If you're unfortunate enough to have a mental illness, there's a good chance that you've spent time in a mental hospital, sometmes known as a psychiatric hospital. Regular hospitals also have psychiatric or mental wards. Whatever the name, I've spent time in one at one time or another.

The first one I stayed in was called McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. I was a graduate student at Harvard at the time, and the place was a country club compared to the psychiatric hospital in which I spent the most time almost ten years later, Las Vegas Mental Health Center (LVMH). After my suicide attempt, the doctor transferred me from the regular hospital to LVMH. That's when I thought I had died and gone to Hell for committing suicide.

I stayed in LVMH about 9 times for various reasons. There the staff, most psychiatric technicians, regularly engages in torturing mental patients. I have spent several days and nights in the infamous "RESTRAINT ROOM". Strangely, I often go to LVMH for suicidal ideation, but once I'm there I become delusional. It occurred to me that the approach the psychiatrists and other staff take is, "Throw medication down his throat and see what happens. If he becomes psychotic, lock him up in the restraint room."

The psychiatrist doesn't know ahead of time the effect of the medications on mental patients. It's all trial and error. My own little theory applies Newton's third law - for every action, there is an equal but opposite reaction. This could apply to medication. Too much antidepressants make you depressed, even suicidal. Too much antipsychotic medications make you psychotic. It's that simple. I suspect that the doctors at LVMH simply picked antipsychotic medications randomly and relied on their army of psychiatric technicians to keep people like me under control if something went wrong.

One time I spent at LVMH, I found myself crawling on the floor for no reason. When I "awoke", I could not stand anymore because I had a ruptured tendon on my knee. The staff had to hold me up to let me use the restroom or to get to the tables to have my meals. Most likely, the psychiatrist prescribed a bad amount of antipsychotic drugs. The "official" cause of my knee injury was my crawling on the floor. I blame psychiatrist for prescribing the antipsychotic drugs. It took several years before I could walk without a cane. To this day, my knee is still injured although I can walk almost normally. I cannot run at all anymore, thanks to the chemical and physical torture at Las Vegas Mental Health Center.

They do still tie people down with belts to a bed bolted to the floor. There are belts for a patient's wrists and ankles as well as for his or her chest and legs. If I ever was restrained with belts to the bed, I have only fleeting memories of it. The pscychiatric drugs suppress memory just like date rape drugs.

Most of the time, for reasons I don't know, I find myself locked in the restraining room. I'd bang on the door for the staff to let me out. Instead they just close additional doors to drown out my screams. The first time the staff locked me in a restraining room was when I started running up some stairs in the patio due to voices in my head telling me I'd go to Hell for doing to the contrary.

An army of psychiatric technicians chased me and dragged me to the restraining room. The nurse pulled down my pants and injected me in the buttocks with what I think is Haldol, a powerful antipsychotic drug. I ran around the bed in circles until I passed out.

There is no such thing as freedom and rights in a mental hospital. Psychiatric technicians will openly insult you if they feel like it. When I was still Catholic, I did my devotions to St. Dymphna, the patron saint of the mentally ill. One technician said to me, "Saints are just dead people." Even though I'm atheist now, I'd like someone to respect my religion or lack thereof.

The restraining room is interesting. Usually, if I do something unusual, the technicians tell me to sleep in the restraining room. They would sometimes take a chair by the door and read a magazine while observing me. For no reason, someone would slam the door to the restraining room and lock it. Then I'd have all sorts of strange dreams while I'm still awake. Again the doctors most likely overdosed me on antipsychotic drugs. Basically, they'd lure me into the restraining room and then lock it once I'm in.

The weirdest experience is a restraining room was time I thought that the hospital had been buried by rubble in a nuclear attack. I thought I was trapped in an air bubble under the rubble. I eventually stopped banging on the door because I figured nobody else was probably alive.