"You'd better be a good little patient, or we'll send you home!"

I've been very good lately about letting my pdoc and my t know what is happening with me. Today during session, however, my t said something that scared me:

"We don't want things to get so bad that we'd have to send you home.

What? I thought that the worst thing that they as mental health professionals could do would be to hospitalize me, but apparently they have power over whether or not I can stay in the country?

Scary, really scary. I feel bad for all the patients who've had their study abroad experiences cut short because they got too sick and had to go home.

My t said that they send people home because hospitalization in a foreign country where most doctors don't speak English is a traumatic experience. Well, I think that having to explain to everyone I know that I had to come home early for mental health reasons would be more traumatic!

Any thoughts on this issue? I seriously doubt that I'll get to the point where they'd need to send me home, but I find it disturbing nonetheless that that is their go-to protocol for psychiatric emergencies.

When you go through customs entering mainland China they give you a piece of paper asking if you're manic or psychotic or diagnosed as such and I guess will refuse entry if you say yes. Or at least that was how it was several years ago. I did wonder though, who is really going to say yes?

wow. Just wow.

Calm down first because they are not sending you home any moment. If it happens or not is in the tomorrows. You need some time to calm down.

I am more concerned how you will do with your t in the future. It is very difficult to do it alone. Maybe that won't be an issue here. Maybe I am wrong.

in US they ask simmilar thing.

what do they think is going to happen if you say yes??

won't let you in, I suppose

No I mean why not let you in- what do they think you will do?

The statue of liberty poem says send me your poor, your tired - but not your crazy. You are stuck living in the country you were born in. Yeppers.

So they don't care to find out what you would "do". They're not going to let you in to find out.

Well, first off, your T isn't completely wrong about the hospital experience thing. I had a friend in college who went to study abroad in China. She was extremely brave and ate a 10,000 year old egg from a little dive in some run down cafe somewhere. (If you haven't heard of these, they are hard boiled eggs with something done to them and kept a long time until they are actually black eggs!) Well, it is a delicacy, yes, but maybe not the best advice to eat something like that when you're a foreign student.

So, she got extremely ill from it and ended up in the hospital. Her experience was completely traumatic. First this particular hospital did not have private rooms, so she was in a big room with many other girls. Second, they don't have nurses that assist you with things like showering, getting to the bathroom, etc. They expected her to have a family member who would come and help with that. Of course she had no one and was so weak she couldn't get out of bed. Fortunately, one of her roommates had a kind mother who helped her. Third, the antibiotics were different than the ones in the US, and she got even more sick off of them. No one from the foreign exchange program even bothered to check on her while she was there. She eventually did come home early.

So yeah, it can be traumatic. I'm not saying all experiences would be like this. I think she was very unlucky (and I can say perhaps she was very unlucky because she needed to learn something from it.)

Also, she has bipolar and was diagnosed before she left. She never said anything about having to disclose to anyone about that.

Also, it's true that many countries will not want you if you have any type of chronic medical condition, to become a citizen. I joke all the time about moving to Canada, but they won't take us. I know this because I know a lady who has diabetes type 1 and can't afford insurance, so she looked into moving to Canada and right away immigration told her that she couldn't because they won't add her to the national health. That's for either people who already moved their before they were sick, or born there. It's like a pre-exisisting condition clause....

Also, if you're in Italy - they just had trouble with one American student, they don't need more. Plus It's probably in the contract you signed to go there, with the university?