Note to any Mental Hospital staff that may be reading this: People with Bipolar Disorder are people, too.

When I was admitted to the mental hospital for a manic episode, I had to undergo a long admissions process that began with a two-hour wait before I could even see anyone at the hospital.

The woman started off by asking me my name, medical history, and the usual questions. I had just arrived from overseas and had not slept in 36 hours because of a long flight, an anxiety-ridden evening at home, and a VERY long morning and was not in the mood to answer 453 questions about my life. However, I was in sufficient enough medical shape to understand that she needed to ask the questions in order to complete the mounds of paperwork.


At that point, I was about ready to crash. My energy was all gone and I needed to sleep. I told the woman for about the tenth time that I hadn’t slept in several hours; she then told me, “You are like a child right now. You are so immature. You don’t understand anything.”

I wasn’t delusional then; the problem was my family didn’t know what to do with me. Telling me that I was like a child did not help matters at all and I don’t understand how it would help anyone else. She could have told me the truth- she could have said that I was extremely jet-lagged, needed to sleep, and that I was probably feeling a lot of stress at the time. Instead, she made me feel a little angry, hurt, and that I wasn’t a person of value.

Even when people are having problems related to Bipolar Disorder, they are still people of value- I don’t mean that it’s easy for friends and family to cope with the situation, but I do think that medical professionals from the Hospital Admissions staff right on up should pay attention to the needs of the patients. I know that the hospitals are frequently understaffed, but the reality is that it is important to listen to the needs of individual patients.

The nurses at the facility weren’t any better- they reminded me of Nurse Ratchett from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”- they were unfair to the patients and treated us as if we were sub-human.

As a result of my experience there, I’m skeptical about some of in-patient facilities available for people with Bipolar Disorder- there have got to be some better alternatives out there.

Image from flckr.