Opinions

Reducing trauma to psychiatric patients

A severe mental illness like schizophrenia can happen to everyday people who may be going about their business of raising children, or going to school; high I.Q. , low I.Q., mental illness is an equal opportunity disease.

How a state treats a patient/ person may determine the prospects for the person returning to a normal life and as a state, we are certainly not going to help recovery by unnecessarily traumatizing the patient.

The mental illness, schizophrenia or a severe psychotic break can leave a person wandering the streets with a form of dementia.

In Alaska, such a person can be detained, handcuffed, placed in the back of a marked police car and transported to a hospital for a forced evaluation.

For the patient it is terrifying, humiliating, embarrassing and intimidating. It is a traumatizing experience that sticks in a person's memory for a long time.

The person is not first asked to volunteer to go to the hospital for psychiatric evaluation; even if cooperative, the person is not given a choice whether they will be handcuffed or ride in a marked police car. (Private transport companies do not always handcuff psychiatric patients when transporting, nor do ambulances.)

A citizen picked up for forced psychiatric evaluation might be put in an E.R. waiting room with an examination table and a chair in a hospital like Providence for up to 12 hours; a person might be picked up a 6 p.m. and released back on the street at 1 a.m. (the hospitals are only required to return the person to the point of pick-up), or the person might be transferred to a psychiatric hospital.

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The next thing a patient/person knows, they are in a world that to a great extent is indifferent to their eventual recovery and returning to something of a normal life.

Stabilization is the key or buzz-word in some big psychiatric institutions as opposed to psychiatric treatment and recovery. (There must be higher goals and standards for all psychiatric institutions or psychiatric units in Alaska that keep psychiatric patients over three days than just stabilization.)

Corporate greed, making things easy for hospitals as a way to make more money is all too common.

In the Lower 48, some psychiatric E.R.s have patients lined up in the corridors strapped down to gurneys as a way of convenience.

You can hear patients calling for a drink of water, asking to please let them up to go to the bathroom; their pleas go mostly unheeded by hospital staff walking past.

This is not really where Alaska should be going.

Hospitals too often are not concerned enough with unnecessary trauma to the patients and recidivism.

Psychiatric hospital policies that are based on convenience equal more money to many psychiatric facilities, but it often means irreparable trauma to individual patients.

It is the job of the state Legislature to set standards that will reduce unnecessary trauma to the psychiatric patients.

Faith Myers and Dorrance Collins are mental health advocates who live in Anchorage.

Faith Myers

Faith J. Myers, a psychiatric patient rights activist, is the author of the book, “Going Crazy in Alaska: A History of Alaska’s treatment of psychiatric patients,” and has spent more than seven months as a patient in locked psychiatric facilities in Alaska.

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