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Jul 27, 2012, 05:23 PM
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Member Since: Jun 2009
Location: Wonderland
Posts: 11,542
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Quote:
Originally Posted by purpledaisy
What is inpatient like?
Does it vary according to the individual hospital?
Can you take your computer? Your cell phone?
Do they really ban things like sneakers because of the strings?
What do you do all day while you're there? Constant therapy? Group? Time to rest and deal?
Do they let you have visitors?
What if the one person who triggers you more than anyone else in the world wants to come and cry and tell you to just snap out of it, as she has done for years? Will they keep people like this away?
Do you interact much with other patients?
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I don't know your definition of inpatient, but when I was diagnosed I was an inpatient at a teen mental facility in a hospital with different wings. Next to my wing was an elderly mental facilitiy and during PE I would go out and wave to the elderly.
Patients had visiting hours after dinner and then were able to make phone calls usually before bed and we had about 5 minutes because all the patients wanted to call home.
Yes. Shoes with string or metal were not allowed, so the nurses gave us socks and my mom gave me slippers to wear that I still have. We were not allowed to walk around barefoot. We weren’t allowed to have strings on our hoodies or jackets so I had to pull of the string of my hoodies. We also did not have mirrors in the bathroom because they are breakable. We had something similar but it was hard to see the reflection, so for two weeks I had no idea what I looked like and I kept trying to pull the mirror apart to see what was behind it because it looked like a medicine cabinet.
We had a schedule of activities every day, some we did every day like art, school, and group therapy, and some were different to change things up like drama, movies after dinner, and meditation with a Chinese monk. We also had PE which consisted of a small patio with a garden and a basketball hoop, but we got to look at the outside world from atop of several stories high and I would watch the people walking by or I would look at "the order of the pheonix" which I named because all these expensive looking cars were parked in a crummy looking alleyway, or I would look at the elderly next door and wave. The point of the scheduled activities was to calm the patient and to also evaluate how the patient interacts with the other patients, staff and their ability to partake in the activities. Some I could not do like school others I really loved like art.
Yes, after dinner we had about an hour (I cant remember it was probably a half hour or 15 minutes for all I know) to spend with family. I think they only allowed close family to come. It was after dinner and it was in the area of the dining area and the “living room” and all the patients and families were visiting in the same place. The visitors were not allowed to enter the patients rooms and I’m not sure why.
I don’t know about the last part. That wasn’t an issue when I went. I wanted my best friend to come visit me but my parents said no, probably because when I was at the hospital before being transferred I told my parents I wanted to marry my best friend and have her live with me in the hospital.
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