I’ve been in the psychiatric hospital for over two months and am getting more and more convinced that I shold never have let this hospitalization happen. On Wednesday, I was given more privileges: I used to be able to go off the ward only with someone else, and then could go out alone for up to fifteen minutes. However, on Tuesday, while being outside with a nurse, I freaked out and stood still in the middle of the road. The psychiatrist didn’t learn about this till Thursday, and when she found out, immediately took away my privileges again. But that’s not the worst thing. The worst is that she granted the nurses permission to put me in time-out - something nurses apparently can’t do without a doctor’s approval.
The time-out room, politically correctly often called “quiet room” in English, is not as bad as I used to think it was, as I wrote a while back. At least, the one on this ward. Still, I don’t expect it to be anywhere near quiet in there. After all, I tend to get stressed out by noise on the ward when I’m in my room, and this same noise will stress me out if the room I’m in has a locked door and no-one can hear me state my distress. Then, of course, there is the reason why it’s called “quiet”: the so-called low-stimulation environment, in that there are fewer objects in the room, and obviously you don’t have your own things when you’re there. The stories I’ve heard from psychiatric survivors (most of which are autistics as well), don’t make me optimistic, but theoretically, a low-stimulation environment could do me well in soem cases of overload. But this is not what causes the majority of my meltdowns these days: mostly, it’s my own thoughts that overwhelm me. And in this case, I’d like to call the “quiet room” a low-distraction environment - which is likely to work contraproductively.
There’s this other thing, of course, that involves the reasons for time-out. The only other patient on my ward with a time-out plicy, was placed in the room because she made an unquiet impression and kept asking the nurses to let her out and go to some punishment place she’d made up in her depressed mind with psychotic tendencies. When I’m distressed, I keep asking the nurses to let me out, too. There is nothing dangerous about asking a question, even if it’s annoying to the nurse when I ask the same question over and over again. Still, this will probably be what I’ll be placed in time-out for first - because it was what happened on Wednesday as one of the nurses called my doctor, too, which was likely what led to my time-out policy. In this case, it’s hard to believe that time-out is supposedly not meant as punishment. The nurses’ flawed logic about calming down, makes absolutely no sense. In fact, the doctor’s fortunately a lot more straightforward explanation that it’s about managing my disrupting the ward, is questionnable: that other patient with a time-out policy rarely bothered anyone on the ward, and a patient who insults fellow patients on a daily basis but apparently doesn’t annoy the nurses enough, doesn’t have a time-out policy.
In the meantime, I’m still officially here just to wait to go to something else, and in fact, the only two other times that I spoke with my doctor since my treatment pland iscussion, she both claimed that I’d magically do better when we have more clarity about where I will be moving to - even though she should know that I’ve always had meltdowns. So, I’m here because all my issues will magically disappear when I’ll go somewhere else, yet the nurses get sick of me anyway so they can put me in time-out. And, by the way, my doctor nor the nurses are listening to anything that suggests that they change something. For one thing, I’ve reported at least five times that 10mg oxazepam isn’t working as a calming drug, and it’s still prescribed PRN (I refuse to take it). For another, I and others have communicated that I want weekly scheduels at least ten times, yet I cannot create one completely on my own, and it’s still not there. So really, I’m going to find the magic key to not having any more meltdowns or I’ll be locked up in time-out.
I’m tempted to ask to be released more than I ever was, but at the same time, I fear it more than I ever did. My doctor (not the same as the psychiatirst, by the way) scared me yesterday when she talked about the fact that I’m now committed voluntarily, but if this or that, they might consult an emergency doctor to see if I need to be committed involuntarily. I don’t know what they could be doing to me if I were committed involuntarily that they cannot do to me now - especially now that they already have time-out permission (which isn’t needed if someone is committed involunatarily) -, but maybe the doctor meant that I’d need to be seen if I wanted to get out of here. I’m pretty sure I’ll be committed involuntarily if I make it a point for an emergency doctor, at least if I continue to be hoenst about how it’s going with me. I guess it’s about time that I learn to lie about my mental state. Maybe if I learn to lie to others, I’ll learn to hide my feelings from myself again, and I might even survive at home. I’m pretty much convinced that I won’t ever find the right placement anyway - and that placement doesn’t have a “quiet room”, I might hope.
