My first two mental hospitalizations.

By Deleted_C

Hi. I'm 25-years-old. In the span of two years I was mentally hospitalized 10 times and spent 5 days in the psych ward of a jail. Before I was 22, I had no mental health issues. The first thing I can tell you is: the bedrooms in all hospitals are identical. Two beds, one closet, one desk and a lock-less bathroom. Collectively, I have spent about 100 days living in this room, in different hospitals in Las Vegas and Utah.

​The first time I was in a mental hospital, I put myself there. I wanted to kill myself, but I didn’t want to kill my niece’s aunt. So, I put down the shotgun and picked up a phone.

The suicide hotline referred me to seven hills hospital in Las Vegas, NV. I agreed to bring myself in for a consultation. I didn’t know then that had I refused to come in for the consult, there was a good chance the police would be sent to my house.

My main memory of the hospitalization was crying. A lot. Constantly. Now, I’ve become emotionless. I can’t imagine caring about something so much it would make me cry.

​Now, I have almost nothing left to care about.

At that time, my forehead was swollen with acne. It was so intense it felt like a third-degree burn. That’s what happens when you’re only able to sleep a couple of times a week.

I found the other patients more relatable than any peer group I had been a part of. One of my closest friends was a young overweight man in a wheel chair.

Eventually I asked why he was in the wheelchair. He was currently hallucinating so badly that he couldn’t stand. He told me he was schizophrenic, and I was fascinated.

“What’s it like?” I asked

“I wish I could explain,” he responded.

“Well, what kind of things do you hallucinate?”

“You see that wall behind you?”

I looked over my shoulder.

He said, “It’s melting.”

Then he asked, “Why are you here?”

“I’m suicidal.” 

We had the freedom to say anything we wanted. Thanks to hippa laws, it was illegal for us to reveal the identity of anyone we had met there. I only got therapy talking to the other patients, I did not receive any meaningful therapy from the hospital. 

Even though I got therapy from some patients, other patients were dangerous for me to talk to. They would trick me, for amusement, into further believing in my delusions, for example.

I wasn’t embarrassed during that hospitalization: almost everyone was in the same boat.

I wasn’t afraid of losing my reputation.

I could finally just speak.

He understandably opted not to ask why I was suicidal and changed the subject.

“What do you do?”

“I own a business.”

“Wow, really?”

I nodded my head a looked down.

“How well does it do?”

“I have five employees.”

He just stared at me for several seconds and smiled.

The Day Room inside the Seven Hills Behavioral Institute

​“What business?”

“I can’t say.”

“What are you doing here? If I had a business, a way to make myself my own money, I wouldn’t be here.”

I felt ashamed. I had everything going for me. I had spent the last ten years of my life transforming from the destitute fat kid to martial artist with impeccable health. I owned a house. I had a six-figure income.

But I knew exactly why I was there. The shame quickly melted into grief and I started crying again.  He didn’t say anything else. I cried all the time and he was used to it

A nurse practitioner I drew. The black coloring pencil was incredibly cheap and when I sharped it the lead would quickly fall out. So I picked up the tiny broken pieces of lead to draw this.

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Artwork I completed during my first hospitalization. Patients were usually not allowed to have pens. They made an exception and let me use a pen next to the nurses desk alone (I couldn't take it anywhere or leave it alone). No other hospital was accommodating at all.

​I received an incorrect perception of the mental hospital. I liked it and it was helping me. I didn’t realize how much it was hurting the people around me until much later.

I was diagnosed with psychotic depression. After five days, I finally felt stable enough to check myself out. I had never been there by force, as far as I knew.

When the psychiatrist prescribed me Zoloft, he did not warn me that it could cause a manic episode.

Thus, my second hospitalization was a disaster.

Drawings made before my second hospitalization.

There are two wards in a mental hospital. The psychotic ward (“upstairs”) and the suicidal / depressed ward (“downstairs”). My first time in a mental hospital we heard loud noises coming from the ceiling all the time.

I asked, “What is going on up there?”

They said, “Upstairs is for the truly crazy people.”

The second hospital was called Desert Parkway in Las Vegas. The rule about up and stairs was the same.

My psychiatrist was Donald Mayes. He was silent and would let me ramble until I ran out of words. He would ask one or two questions. I would ask if I could go home. He would say, "You are still a bit manicy." He said it for two weeks, even after I had completely calmed down.

Donald Mayes

I was upstairs. I would finally learn what it was really like.

Everything was different.

Drawing I made before my manic episode (as I was heading into it). During my first hospitalization, I became obsessed with drawing with pens. I drew a picture of my Dad and I because we could not take a picture together. He died when I was three.

No one was there by choice (including me). Most had been brought in by the police (some even facing charges). A couple people were forcibly committed by their family.

My mom had committed me because: A month after my first hospitalization, my Zoloft dose was doubled and I was sent into in an incredibly intense manic episode. I had driven from my brothers in Utah to my house in Las Vegas. I was convinced God was talking to me through everyone and everything. That I was the next profit of Mormonism. I sped with my hands of the wheel of my car “trusting God to keep me safe.”

A watercolor painting I made right before becoming manic.

​I also believed that demons were following me and inserting thoughts into people nearby me. I thought they were forcing people to try and kill, hurt, or kidnap me. Since I was later kidnapped (not that anyone believes me) maybe it was true, on some level.
 
Psychiatry is atheistic. Which makes it incredibly difficult for religious people to navigate. You are told everything you have ever believed in is delusional, not just the parts that are negatively affecting your life.

Well thank God he really was looking out and I didn’t die driving back.

The manic episode was my first and it was induced by Zoloft. The doctors new I might be bipolar and if so, the Zoloft could cause this. But they had not warned me or my family.

If they had, my family would have easily seen the warning signs for an incoming manic episode and had me see a psychiatrist on the outside (to be weaned off) and emergency therapy - before it got that bad.

But they didn’t inform us. They do that on purpose because they want people sick.

This time I was in the psychotic ward. Everyone there was enraged.

Many had been held there for over two weeks against their will. There was only three phones and 15-25 adults were fighting over them during the few hours of the day we had access to them.

Because people there were losing: pets, cars, houses, jobs, personal property, air plane flights, and more. And everyone NEEDED the phone.

The majority of the patients upstairs - correction - detainees are drug addicts being detoxed against their will. These people don’t have mental disorders - they have personality disorders. Which means they are manipulative, sadistic, dishonest, violent and emotional.

Group therapy largely consisted of alcohol and substance abuse discussions. I had no issues with these. There wasn’t an alternative group to attend. They were also aimed toward personality disorder therapy rather than psychotic therapy (each should be approached in complete opposite ways).

​My largest qualm: we weren’t allowed pens. Which is understandable. They provide tiny wood golf pencils as an alternative (every hospital I ever went to). Even that I could consent to (I did not want a psychotic person there to stab me with a pen or a long pencil).
 
Sometimes there was a big box of assorted washable Crayola markets. However, most of the detailed (thin) markers had been taken and hidden in other patients’ rooms because there wasn’t enough for everyone. It’s pretty impossible to write or draw anything with the big fat broadline markers. Anyways, most of the dark colors like purple, brown and black were either dried up or missing.

Drawing I made during art group in Desert Parkway

​So we had pencils. They refused to sharpen the pencils. So, we had no way to write or do art. In desperation I sometimes picked out prices of led from the pencil and sharpened them by rubbing their sides against paper, until the pencil was finally somewhat useable.

I desperately need to write and draw while manic (or I can’t sleep and will even start tearing my hair out). This is easily remedied. They have specially designed bendy pens for prisoners.

​Apparently, prisons are better equipped to give detainees more comfort than the hospitals are. Which is unacceptable when you consider that the hospitals are paid thousands of dollars a day for you to be there.

Thousands of dollars and they can’t afford to give you a $5 pen.

We only get one hour of recreational therapy a day. Some days it was an hour in the art room other days it was an hour in the gym. Without gym we were in cramped hall ways and a small dayroom. We couldn’t get physical activity for days at a time.

When I was able to work out it was difficult. I didn't have any shoes because my particular shoes were deemed dangerous, so they took them away at check in. Some patients wore lace-less shoes and the rest wore socks. I can't walk or run much without shoes. Without the arch support I get very bad shin splints. I also slipped and fell many times playing basketball or jogging in a small circle.

After multiple hospital stays, I started only wearing my "hospital safe" shoes. Which were tennis shoes with the laces removed, wrapped in two rubber bands to keep them from falling off (I learned that from the first time I wore them in a hospital). However, for this stay I did not have shoes.

​Why, when it costs thousands of dollars a day to stay there, can they not provide lace-less shoes to patients who don't have any? Some of the hospitals did do something: they gave us socks with rubber patches on the bottom of them. But I can’t image cheap shoes cost much more money. Other patients often stepped on top of my feet on purpose, since they were wearing shoes and I wasn’t.

My mom brought me charcoal pencils during my second hospitalization. If I'd had art supplies during all my stays, who knows what I could have created?

​For all the hours of the day that I had nothing to do except: sit in the dayroom watching tv (but never having a choice of what we watch), playing cards with insane people, talking to insane people, and walking up and down the hall.
 
I did want to read, but if our families brought in hard covered books, we wouldn't get them. At first my Mom would bring me books, but later on I was on my own. I desperately wanted the Bible and the Book of Mormon. Most of the time, they didn't have any (which is against the law).

Also, I was usually wearing something I wouldn't be allowed to wear in the hospital. So, they would give me God AWFUL clothing to wear. Once I was in a hospital gown that wraps around you three times. Usually it was super cheap scrub like hospital gowns. One hospital it was nice, we got plain grey sweat pants, a shirt, and a matching grey hoodie. Once someone gave me a shirt and it was a god send.
 
However, in most hospitals there wasn’t enough underwear. They give you the cheapest pair of thin grandma underwear ever, but they can’t afford to have enough? I was only given on or two pairs of underwear.

We did our own laundry, but they didn’t have enough machines, so we fought over that as well. With only one outfit and two pairs of underwear, I had to wash my clothes at least once every three days. Some people had the luxury of only having to wash their clothes every 6 days or even longer. Sometimes I would go several days without being able to snag a washing machine and smelling bad was another huge embarrassment in the ward.

Families were able to bring in outside clothes deemed safe by the hospital. Most patients wore them. My mom did it at first, but you did have to wait days for them to "inspect" them for dangerous elements (they were always backed up and had too many outside clothes/items to process).

​When I no longer had outside clothes it signified to the other patients that my family didn't care about me (which usually meant you must be a bad person). In a hospital gown or cheap scrubs, it was even more incredibly embarrassing. It was also cold, sometimes difficult to hide your private parts, and easily attacked for the amusement of other patients.

Manic drawing from second hospitalization. I was obsessed with letters and numbers.

​A mental hospital is like a deranged dystopian high school.

You had to attend every single group. Your attendance was marked and if you didn’t attend group you were absent. Absence of more than one group a day met that you “weren’t complying with treatment” and they could use it to justify keeping you longer to your insurance. Groups were 6 hours a day.

Worksheet assignment from a group.

The 72-hour rule was a lie. After 72 hours your doctor can choose to continue detaining you until you request to go to mental health court. Many people had been there for weeks with no ways to appeal the decision.

The upstairs was chaotic, dangerous, emotional and physically violent. Sometimes people were yelling and throwing things. These weren’t the most harmful moments.

During the quiet “calm” times are still constant emotional (and sometimes physical) abuse from other patients and staff. A psychotic person is in a fragile state: they are easily manipulated, paranoid and incredibly vulnerable to emotional attacks. They are forced to live in this state with criminals and drug addicts, who are bored, very bored, and angry.

When my mom admitted me, I was so manic that I had no problem with it. I thought it was a test (I had to prove to God that I was submissive and positive or he would stop helping me and demons would kill me) and if I passed all of the tests the leader of the Mormon church would come get me and take me to my life of painting for them.

I baptized myself in an intake room with styrofoam cup of water while my mom watched. I then did cartwheels in the hallway (I hadn’t done a cartwheel since I was like 6 years old). I had period blood running down my pants (which the entire ward saw when I was first brought in to change in my room). 

Manic Painting

​For the first two days I was convinced that at any moment the leader of the Mormon church would walk into my room to collect me. Everyone would stop acting like they didn’t know I was the prophet. I just had to stay committed to the act.

​I made up my own sign language and took a vow of silence.

That night I had a delusion that I was being possessed by an African slave. I hallucinated being on a slave ship, including banging my arm on the bed to create a song in unison with the other slaves slamming their hands.

Journal entry written two days after the incident: describing what I experienced.

That night I had a delusion that I was being possessed by an African slave. I hallucinated being on a slave ship, including banging my arm on the bed to create a song in unison with the other slaves slamming their hands.

They put me on “one on one” this is when one of the nurse practitioners always sits near you and watches you. She sat outside the door to my room while I acted out these hallucinations.

Eventually I became convinced that God could hide me if I snuck out under a sheet. Then I could wait, invisible, at the locked door at the end of the hallway until someone opened it and I could escape.

Remember this manic episode was entirely induced by a high prescription of Zoloft. I had never had a manic episode before.

When I ignored my one on one nurses demand to go back to my room, things changed. Two other nurses grabbed me and threw me into the “quiet room” which is a closet sized room with a bed with restraints on it in the middle. I wasn’t tied down to the bed this time, but they left me locked in the room.

I continued to act out hallucinations, stand on top of the table, etc. eventually they decided to give me a shot. They came in, held me down, pulled down my pants in front of three men, and administered a shot to my butt. I don’t remember much after that.

I woke up the next day feeling too sick to do say or think anything. They had taken me off a medication cold turkey and I was going through immediate withdrawals. I was not warned that I would be going through withdrawals.

I was so sick the room never stopped spinning, I vomited several times, and it felt like I had the flu. I did not know I was going through withdrawals, so I assumed the new medications they had put me on we’re making me that sick.

​I refused to take my medication. Anthony the nurse warned me that he would give me another shot if I didn’t take it. I had no choice. I took it and I felt even worse.

I became so sick that I couldn’t get out of bed. Any movement hurt. I was freezing cold, but they didn’t have any more blankets. Made worse, my roommate was completely out of her mind and was up talking to people that weren’t there all night, walking around in circles and turning off and on the lights. I desperately needed to sleep but she wouldn’t let me.
 
My roommate was also violent. She had multiple personality disorder and was completely psychotic at all times. I was terrified she would kill me in her sleep and she threatened me verbally and physically all the time. She should have been in her own room, alone. I had seen it done at other hospitals.

The ward didn’t have one single open bed. They were doing a good job at turning a profit by being full all the time. I went to the nurses station and asked if I could leave (mostly because of my roommate - at this point I understood that I did have an episode and I needed to be there) because it had been more than 72 hours. They said they needed my doctors approval and they would ask him.

Charcoal drawing of my roommate while she paced and ranted.

Twenty minutes later the practitioner came to my room and told me that because I had not been attending group, I was not participating in my treatment, and I couldn’t be considered for release until I started attending all of them. They marked your attendance (and sometimes wouldn't mark it if you weren't active enough).  Since I was so sick all I could do was lay in bed all day. I wouldn’t even go downstairs for meals. At first they brought them up to me, but eventually they said if I wanted to eat I had to go to the lunch room downstairs, or I would go hungry. I went hungry. I was barely eating anyways.

This delusion was traumatic: I became convinced that the medications were designed to make me so sick I couldn’t get out of bed. Then I wouldn’t be able to go to group, so they could tell my family and insurance company I wasn’t participating, so they could continue to give me poisonous medications, so that I couldn’t get up to go to groups... basically I thought I was in a designed program to keep me locked up for years while they milked my insurance for money.

It literally felt like the sickness would never end. I was convinced it wouldn’t for days. I thought I was going to die there - after years of torment.

After I was finally able to force myself out of bed, I started attending group. I remember how impossible it felt to sit in the chair. I was so sick I needed to lay down, but I had to get out of there ASAP. So, I forced myself to go.

I had to listen to drug addicts and criminals tell stories hoping to win validation from their peers. This is one of the most boring obnoxious discussions you can listen to. I had to do it for hours every day feeling so horribly ill.

That’s when I had to start socializing with the patients who had witnessed all my psychotic episodes for the past three days.

Manic Drawing - I couldn't get a wet marker.

There was never any beds open downstairs even if you were stable enough to be there. Near the end of all my forced hospital stays, I would finally be moved downstairs, and being in that environment would help me again. Like it helped me the first time. But at that point I was so tortured from captivity I just wanted out.

So the 72-hour hold is a lie. The police/family can demand a person be held for at least 72 hours. After that, the doctor can keep you for as long as they want or until you request to go to mental health court.

After you make the request it can take up to two weeks (and usually does) before your case is heard. If the mental health court doesn’t find you competent and you are court ordered to stay in the hospital: you lose many rights permanently, including the right to own firearms, not disclose your diagnosis to employers, etc.

So at first, you don’t want to go to court because the doctor says you just “need a few more days.” Why take the risk? You’ll be out of there before the court date anyways.

Then a week passes, and you start to panic, the doctor is finding all these tiny reasons to keep you, and now it seems the only way out is through court. From that point, you have to wait another two weeks.

This is how I met people who had been detained there for over a month without any sort of hearing or appeal process.

After I became a bit more stable, I started writing short stories. I thought I was scrying these from angels and God.

After witnessing this happen to consistently to hundreds of people, I know this is a fact. All the psychiatrists at the hospital care about is: Liability and Insurance. They do not care about your mental health. I have met over 12 different hospital psychiatrists and every single one of them were the same.

There are good psychiatrists. None of them work in mental hospitals. They see what is going on - and they quit. And they do everything they can to keep their patients from ever going to one. I know this because now I have a good psychiatrist and he was appalled that I had been in so many hospitals in the past three years. He told me he was aware of how awful they were, and we would work together to not let it happen again.
 
I had the same conversation with two other not-so-good psychiatrists. Even they agreed. All my therapists have agreed as well. It's not a place for treatment. It is a jail designed to keep people from hurting themselves or others - which is needed. What is not needed is keeping people for weeks after their acute risk.

After fully stabilizing (instead of being released as I should have) I was finally moved downstairs with the other sane people that didn't need to be there. I became friends with them and drew them playing cards.

If you had good insurance, they will use anything they can against you to prove to the insurance you need to be there. Health insurance is the true decider. If they think someone is at risk, they will opt to continue paying for the hospitalization.

This is because if they refuse someone treatment and they hurt them self or someone else, they can be held liable. Also, if they let go of someone prematurely they (think) they can get worse and will need to return for a longer stay / costly trips to the er, etc.

​The standards insurance requires to continue paying thousands of dollars a day for your bed are incredibly low for this reason.

HUGE TIP: if you find yourself or a loved one in a mental hospital when you shouldn’t be: call your insurance and ask for your case manager. You will have a case and a case manager as soon as you are admitted to the hospital. This person who really decides if you stay or go. You and your family will have a much easier time persuading this person rather than the doctor. No staff or patients at the hospital will tell you this. I figured it out myself, and it worked once. (Other times I couldn’t get anyone to give me the phone number to my insurance).

​
The doctors know the game. Many hospitals are privately owned with the doctors earning a percentage. If all their beds are full all the time (which they are, every time I have gone in, they were at max capacity) they make a good profit that quarter. Profit = larger dividend. There is a clear conflict of interest. 

Most hospital psychiatrists are purposely harming their patients to make money off their insurance. It’s like a doctor in the ICU prescribing the wrong medications on purpose to keep a person there just to make money off them. They do it, it hurts the person, and that ends up helping them make even more money later when they relapse and must come back.

The hospital is not liable for letting a person leave early. Your insurance is. When an uninsured person walks out of a hospital and kills them self, no one will be held responsible. Which they often do since someone is 100-264 times more likely to kill themselves within one week of being released from a mental hospital.

No uninsured person stays for longer than three days. That kills people, too. The doctors say they are good to go because they can’t pay to stay.

My two closest friends downstairs. Drawing helped my social status tremedously. I drew pictures of everyone and gave them away. I noticed people always gathering around me. I would sit in the hallway waiting for the phone for ex. And ten minutes later half of the ward was standing in the hall way talking around me.

​It’s written in the law: if someone was held at least 72 hours the state/hospital did all that they were required to do.

However, if an insured person was forced to leave by their insurance when the doctors disagreed with the course of action: the insurance will be held responsible. So, you must make a good case to your claim manager that you are stable and there is absolutely no need for you to be hospitalized anymore.

I did not know this for the first two years of hospitalizations and instead felt helplessly at the mercy of my “doctor.” This would lead me to later lose my health, teeth, house, all valuable possessions, dog, cat, and family.

Drawing made after being released from the hospital.