This is Off Topic to the title of the tread, but on topic for you and some other women on here.

In Sept of last year, I had a several day inpatient stay at the county mental hospital. It was my first time at the county hospital. My hospitalizations in 2009 were at Stanford, which is a private teaching hospital, where doctors appear with an entourage of residents and the room, both private and semi-private, are so big that it is completely absurd. The nurse-to-patient ratio is also absurd.

Not so in the county hospital - in psych ER, there is one big room for women and one big room for men. There are no assigned bed - you take whatever bed happens to be free. There are no PhD psychologists trying to get distressed patients complete CBT worksheets (I am not trying to discredit CBT, but just saying that an acute facility is not the right place for it at all). There are no residents, no entourage, no overstaffing. On the unit itself, the rooms are private, but are tiny - just enough for a bed and a small wardrobe.

But they have BRILLIANT clinical staff. Compared to every single psychiatrist I saw during my stay - that is several psychiatrists, one per day on rotation - pompous, condescending, ego-long-blown-out-of-proportions, total-lack-of-people-skills-and-compassion psychiatrists at Stanford need to go back to premed, and I am not exaggerating.

So I went there because I had not been sleeping for days - for the first time in my life. G. (remember him from late 2012? I am still with him and he is truly a blessing in my life and thinks the same of me in his life) was out of the country, so he arranged for his son to take me to the hospital. I was in ER. I asked for Seroquel. 2 hours of sleep - not enough. Asked for Zyprexa and got a decent 6 hour span of sleeping. At that point I no longer had ER-level issues, so I was sent to the unit. There I went through the intake with the head nurse. She was a viciously pretty young woman - dark hair, dark glistening brown eyes, very pleasant dimpled cheeks, a tiny waist and huge hips/thighs - very pleasantly zaftig, especially pleasant looking because of the swift grace with which she carried her body.

So she started the intake, asked me some questions, to which I tried to give more or less coherent answers, which was hard given how much history is involved.

She nodded as I was talking and then summed it up for me: "We smart women are sometimes no so smart."

And that is one of my most fitting diagnoses.

She later apologized for being unable to give me Zyprexa since it was 7 o'clock in the evening already, and they have no night doctor, and told me to avoid other patients since many of them can be crazy. Obviously, that last utterance underscored that in her eyes, my diagnosis was not "crazy", but as above.

And it was very tough not to sleep at all, and kind of ironic, since I came to the hospital in order to sleep, and they could not give me the only medicine I needed (since then I have wisened up and will always keep a stash of Zyprexa for PRN for the rest of my life). But in the end I was OK, and again, it is better to be at an understaffed hospital if whatever staff people are available are brilliant than at an overstaffed place where everybody is just doing their job.

"We smart women are sometimes no so smart" is the very best and the most concise explanation for what has been (and to some extent, still is) happening with me, and, methinks, might be your diagnosis as well. And the head nurse gave it to me after a ten minute intake. All the psychiatrists were equally helpful (in other ways, but similarly effective), also without spending much time. I won't tell you about each of them now (I will post it on the bipolar forum eventually), but just the last one, a short pleasant looking Japanese American man. So I prepared a spiel about my readiness for discharge. I wanted to say that after two nights on Zyprexa, I needed to bolster the sleep/wake cycle by being outside during the day, etc. - I thought that he would want to keep me longer and planned to convince him that due to reason A, reason B, and reason C, I would have been better at home. As soon as I started, he said: "You look good - you can go home." I did not need to present my spiel - he read my face. And I was duly impressed by everybody's clinical acumen.

Again, it is OT to the thread, but since you started talking about being stupid, I thought I'd share what I think is one of my main dx's - a woman who is "not always so smart".