I've told the story several times here, of going to the ER with terrible stomach cramps, and being treated as if the stomach cramps didn't exist, once they found out I had a mental health diagnosis. I suppose they then thought it was all in my head, and they put me on the back burner. Fortunately I wasn't on a 72-hour hold or anything, so I walked out of there and went to another hospital, where they didn't assume it was all in my head, and looked at my stomach.

It was an ulcer forming. I later turned out to have food allergies.

Just because we have mental diagnoses doesn't mean we never get physical illnesses.

On another occasion, when I was at the ER for mental/SI reasons, I was kept within sight of the nurse's station because that's the way they did things there. I watched a nurse take a telephone call. After she hung up, she rolled her eyes and said to a co-worker with a heavy sigh in her voice, "We've got another psych coming in."

Oh, how dehumanized that made me feel.