Acute psych hospitals are good at keeping people alive and stabilizing safety issues, and sometimes arranging better outpatient care. (Except knives at meals? Yikes!)
They are rarely good at much else.
What was the cause for this hospitalization? They clearly thought there was a reason to admit you. Were they wrong on that reason? Or has that reason for the admission been resolved in less than 72 hours?
Acute psych units sometimes can give a little space for someone to work through a few things. But generally, the goals are not in-depth work with reducing trauma based defenses like minimization. It’s not on their radar. Yeah ir would be good if it was, but it’s generally not. The docs are trained in getting patients to a place they are not a danger to themselves or others and can function on a very basic level and send them out the door to engage in outpatient care.
Going around and pointing out all the ways you could harm yourself while there, and fighting the staff on the practicals of shoveling snow when they were trying to help with developing a cognitive reframing coping skill to manage symptoms... is probably going to lead to them either keeping you for the full 72 hours or letting you go with little help and much more frustration than when you went in.
It’s totally fair to be frustrated about the bipolar diagnosis and not understanding trauma. But you also know you are minimizing the past and current circumstances. What about dropping that defensive mechanism a bit and getting a bit more real with the doc about the hell you have been through in the past and how much you are struggling now? You didn’t end up there looking for a vacation. You are there to get help. Clue her in to how your distress is showing up in your life to lead you to be there. It will be scary to do this, but it might help her get it better.
The doc should at least be communicating with your outpatient treatment team. If that doesn’t happen soon, consider contacting the patient advocate for the hospital or perhaps the social worker. The fact they are doing psych testing and brining in a social worker is actually more than psych hospitals in my area would bother to do and is a sign she’s at least trying to gather info and people to help. I’m not saying she’s a good doc or the right doc for you, but you are stuck there for be time being, and you can either start to confront your resistance or keep fighting them and walking out. And maybe right now, the fight is helping you find your voice, but just know it will come at a cost of not getting as much help as you could during this stay, however long it is that you end up being there.
They may be totally sh*t and not be the right place to work in your stuff but I think the bigger issue here might be to use this time and space to figure out what would help to bring your defenses down, and help you with the real pain and suffering you are in to end up there in the first place. Something led up to you being there. Don’t push whatever that was away.
Any hospital stay sucks. It just does. On acute units, one has to give up freedom, deal with staff that is clueless about the ins and outs of trauma and PTSD, and just being there at all is a sign that things have been rough lately.
Stay or go, my heart goes out to you that things have been difficult and it stinks that they don’t get it. :hug:
