Ah, this reminds me of the time a psych hospital (Bradford at Carraway) billed me $7,000.00 to sit around a locked ward in a hospital gown menstruating with no "feminine hygiene" products, playing bingo with the other psych patients while fox news droned on the tv mounted high on the wall. We all got written up for poor hygiene even though we didn't have shampoo.

Lucky me, I had a friend bring me tampons, shampoo, and even conditioner after a day and after my first night when I took the full pill cup and swallowed the pills and woke up sometime later haldoled and terrified, I held the pills under my tongue, drank the water the nurse gave me and spit the pills out discreetly later. This not taking medicine caused a drastic improvement to be noted in my chart, and in addition, as the only non drugged patient, I won every time at bingo, until I started purposely losing so that the staff wouldn't suspect I wasn't taking the meds. Hint to mental health workers, if a patient is lucid enough to win at bingo, increase psych drug dosage and consider IM administration.

Brilliant comment! This also reminds me of some pretty miserable experiences I've had in the MH system.
I think this also reenforces the feelings I alluded to in my October 1st comment, that we consumers/patients/survivors of the MH system are often seen as little more than commodities by the so-called "professionals" for whom we are the justification for their jobs and their relatively lavish salaries (relative to what most of us will ever have, anyway). No wonder they get so angry when we oppose any kind of forced treatment - what would happen to their lifestyles without us to make them seem deserved? Their hostility towards the consumers self-help movement (or whatever you want to call it) is similar to the hostility of slaverholders towards any slaves who try to escape. Recently I saw an ad on my local Craiglist recruiting for a psychiatrist to work in the California public mental health system - that ad promised "light duty" and an annual salary of $150,000.

Liz, I am grateful that you and other mental health bloggers provide a forum where ideas like this can be expressed in print, because when I see or hear of some of these things I literally become too angry to speak.

Don't forget the soda must be caffeine free and the cookies vanilla. Great post anonymous!

If a comment is posted in the main body of a blog, is it no longer a comment? Can something be a comment and a post at the same time? Anyway, I meant my previous comment to refer to the thing written by anonymous - though the other comment was good, too. Am I making any sense?

Hello Liz:

If you and a colleague or two who are recovered/in recovery, would be willing to present yourselves as willing guest speakers for a top notch creative arts therapy program or nursing school, I think you might help to make a difference. Even you went to just one school, you and your colleagues would be making a difference. Perhaps each of you could present once or twice per year in that program. Students are hungry for these personal narratives and often open-minded about making change. You would have to find the right health science educator contact, but in a good program, there should be some faculty who would definitely welcome/facilitate your personal narrative presentation.

Ayana

I love the Mentally Ill Party post. Oh, how I can identify. We didn't have bingo, but we had elementary school type crafts to make. The funny thing is, I refused to participate in craft time, so I was labeled non compliant with treatment (even though I swallowed all my pills). Noncompliant with crafts, lol. I was also noncompliant with "group" because I left group when they wanted us to go around the circle and answer the question "If you were an animal in a circus, what kind of an animal would you be?" People have no idea what patients are subjected to in the madhouse. When I left "treatment" AMA, I actually called my insurance company and asked if they were aware they were paying for people to sit in a circle and answer assinine questions about circus animals. The customer service rep just sighed, and said I'm not surprised. What a waste of $$$.