The nursing and healthcare assistants at this hospital were not as professional or as kind as the Unit staff had been. In fact I witnessed bullying of patients by staff. It was disgraceful and made me realise how lucky I had been with the Unit.
On one occasion I witnessed the nurse pre-filling medication into paper cups and when I stood by the counter for my medication, what seemed like a random selection of a paper cup by the nurse, made me suspicious. I queried whether he was messing with my medication. He told me I was being paranoid. Maybe I was but it was also a reasonable question to ask given he had several paper cups with various medications in them unlabelled for who they were for.
Nightly med administration was usually done with burly men standing on guard. I felt like I was in prison and unsafe.
When it came to the end of the week for discharge I had my bags packed. The psychiatrist informed me that the CMHT were very concerned about me. He said I knew all the right words to say to convince him to discharge me. I later found out through requesting my medical records that in fact my CMHT psychiatrist had gotten wind that they were going to discharge me and emailed the hospital psychiatrist asking him to not discharge me. He said that on average people on a section 2 stay in hospital for 2 weeks. I replied it’s an average.
He discharged me. 🙂
Psychologist and Patient 