Bad Inpatient Mental Health Experience @ Immanuel Hospital Omaha Ne

[zabbazooey]

For those of you who are not FB friends with me:

 

http://imgur.com/pUsKoGC

 

 

Can you guys please share my story? Trying to go viral. This place is disgusting and the staff (SOME not all) can be horrible and condescending. Frickety frakk I hate hospitals like this!!!

 

I have already contacted the NE Health Board, NAMI, Omaha Police, and cross posted to a bunch of groups on Facebook.

 

LOL....this is not a drill, Rachel is stable. Rachel is p'oed at being treated like a baby and drugged up with Seroquel until I couldn't feel anymore.

 

I went from 0mg to 600mg in 3-4 days. Wow. That is supposed to happen over SEVERAL days. He had me at almost the max dose, 800mg.

 

If you don't take the meds, you won't get out.

 

Please share, someone with a mental illness is counting on you. Love you, pham!! Pray for me, I need it!

 

 

<3 Rachel aka zabbbbbbba

[NotreDame]

What are your goals?  If you start a blogger blog for free, tell your detailed story there, use SEO on the blog, then promote the blog on social media as you have been doing, then you may be able to quickly get on the first page for googling the hospital, but as I said, it all depends on your goals.

[blazeingstar]

If you're not a threat to yourself or others, they cannot legally hold you, regardless of if you take the medicine or not.

 

Do you have a health care proxy?  If not, you need to find someone you trust, or a health care advocate to be able to legally make decisions for you if you're incapacitated.

 

It sounds like this facility has some major issues that need to be addressed.  You are not doing yourself any favors by going from 3rd to first person in a sentence. You need to be very careful, and one must say even calculated, in what you say and how you say it.

[CatherineM]

I'm a firm supporter of psychiatrist meds. Without them my husband would be talking to himself and homeless eating out of dumpsters. I'm in no position to second guess a diagnosis and the meds prescribed by a psychiatrist.

[zabbazooey]

I was on medication at the time. I am on more lithium and some seroquel. I had to bully my doctor into writing a script for an anxiety medication I was taking in the hospital... My personal psychiatrist said I had to get it from the hospital doctor.

In any event... I told my husband to drive me 6 hours to St. Paul Mn if this ever happened. This place is gross. I had a friend in there who was trying to contact the health inspector. I talked him out of it because I wanted him to go home. If you refuse meds they say you're difficult and make you stay longer. If you leave you're declared mentally ill and dangerous by the board of mental health.

[zabbazooey]

I am all for medication :) but these doctors are overloading medications on tough patients like me. I did not need to be that drugged up.

[Kateri89]

Ah well I feel compelled to reply to this thread because even though I don't work in that facility, I did work for 3 years in an inpatient mental health unit.  I'll start with the part about your grandmother's ring.  That happened sometimes at the hospital I work at because the security department was extremely disorganized when it came to storing the patients' valuables and I would recommend that you file a complaint with the hospital and the police because that is highly unacceptable.

 

As far as anti-bacterial soap, it tends to contain alcohol in it, hence the "anti-bacterial" aspect of it and we also did not have it on our unit because we had patients who would eat/drink it to get drunk.  As gross as that sounds, to an alcoholic who is detoxing and desperate for a drink, they'll take what they can get.  Not all the patients on the unit were alcoholics but inpatient mental health units oftentimes are "community" settings where the patients have group therapies, meals, and activities together.  We did have soap though but absolutely no Purell.

 

I'm not defending the uncleanliness of the unit because that's very important as well but it can be difficult to keep it clean in that type of environment.  We used to have patients who would literally store opened food items like chicken in the drawers of their nightstands and then we would end up with cockroaches.  However, I agree that housekeeping needs to be more vigilant and there also needs to be more housekeeping staff because sometimes the inadequate staffing means that they only have time to clean the very worst of the mess.  I do believe your complaint about that is valid though and you shouldn't back down on that.

 

Now when it comes to the medications, 600mg of Seroquel is a significant dose and it absolutely does make you tired.  Some patients would request it because it helped them sleep.  I suppose it all depends on the doctor though because some of the physicians I worked with were unwilling to listen to the patient and others would compromise.  If Seroquel was too hard on your system, there are other meds that could help instead and that wouldn't make you quite as tired.

 

Mental health laws vary from state to state but where I live, a patient can be forced to take anti-psychotic medication if they are on an involuntary commitment and are otherwise refusing to comply with treatment that will make them better.  Essentially, if they refuse to take the oral medication (and it has to be an anti-psychotic med) then the nurse will give them an injection of an anti-psychotic at the order of the physician but it also requires a second opinion from another physician.  If the patient is on a voluntary commitment and still meets this criteria, the physician would have to get a second opinion and switch the patient's commitment to an involuntary one in a mental health hearing and then of course write the forced medication order.

 

And a last note to Blazeingstar and just in general, the whole concept of "a danger to yourself or others" can be a little broader than simply being suicidal or homicidal.  A patient can be considered a danger to themselves if at their baseline they are so manic that they aren't sleeping/eating for days or if they were found out in the streets walking around without clothes on for example.  A person who, at their baseline, is putting themselves at great risk because they have poor insight into their behavior, is considered a danger to themselves and others.  If someone with Bipolar disorder who hasn't slept for days were to get behind the wheel of a car, they are also now a danger to others.

 

I'm trying to see both sides of the argument here because when I did work in mental health, there were times when I saw how unreasonable hospital staff were and there were also times when I saw the patients being unreasonable as well.  I'm not saying the OP is in the wrong here because I wasn't at the facility she was at and didn't see everything firsthand.  I'm simply trying to give my two cents.  I hope that she does what she believes is right.

[maximillion]

I am sorry but I can't reinforce a situation I only know from only one person's point of view, to me that would be irresponsible, so since I can't verify anything, I will have to remain neutral.

 

For your own good I also think you need to be careful about dissing a facility on social media - does this not leave you open to claims of malfaisance?

[Sandra]

Well my son was very grateful for being there he had a very great outcome on him  He said that he was very happy that they had helped him he feels much better and started outside thyrapy