In a psychiatric ward

Depressed and desperate for help, this woman admitted herself to a psychiatric ward - what happened next will horrify you...

By KERRY HIATT
Last updated at 10:52 AM on 5th October 2010

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Three-quarters of Britons suffer from depression at some point in their lives. While this is often managed with counselling and medication, every year many people end up in hospital on psychiatric wards. But are they really the best place for such patients? Writer KERRY HIATT, suffering from terrible anxiety, admitted herself and was traumatised by her experience. For the sake of the other patients, we are not identifying the hospital.

Terrified: After her ordeal at a hospital, Kerry eventually recovered from her breakdown after being given home care

A huge television set dominates the dimly-lit room. It’s 1pm, but children’s cartoons are on a continuous loop and the people slumped in armchairs stare numbly at the flashing images.

Opposite me, a man in a worn suit and stained overcoat empties a handful of old cigarette butts from his pocket on to the coffee table and examines them.

As I timidly look around, I see a toothless older woman staring at me, a snarl curling her lip. I turn away but out of the corner of my eye, I catch her making obscene gestures. 

The walls appear to be covered with hand prints and unidentifiable smears; the only decoration a handwritten poster listing banned items; nail clippers, razors, tweezers, lighters, medication, belts, shoe strings, spiral bound notebooks, jewellery and underwired bras.

Two cagey-looking men are exchanging money in the corner and my heart begins to race in case I’ve witnessed something I shouldn’t have. I hear the front door slam and lock automatically as the staff come and go. Am I in prison? In fact, I’m an inpatient at a mental health unit in London.

Just a week before, I’d been leading a normal life. In fact, life was good: I had a wealth of great friends and had recently married. My husband Joe and I were living in a beautiful rented home in London, and my career as a journalist and author was flourishing; Joe, a web developer, was also doing well.

I was on top of the world, until, seemingly overnight, everything changed.

It started with feeling I couldn’t get out of bed for work one Monday morning — but after a few days of exhaustion, slumped on the sofa, I began to feel overcome by feelings of worthlessness, failure and inexplicable guilt.

I kept having this image of myself lying in a bathtub with slashed wrists. I would shake uncontrollably, twitch nervously and had ferocious nightmares — when I managed to sleep.

Work emails went unanswered, calls from family and friends were ignored and if my husband tried to suggest something to make me feel better, he would experience the wrath of a temper I didn’t even know I had.

I couldn’t help myself. Nothing had changed in my life, yet I was hopeless and wanted life to end. 

I had no idea why this was happening — and I was terrified, but of what I didn’t know. I had suffered from depression for years and, at 22, was put on an antidepressant, Citalopram; with this, my moods settled with just occasional bouts of feeling low.

But this was the worst bout of depression I had ever experienced.

With my close friend Cathy, Joe took me to our GP — me wearing my pyjamas and panicking about the thought of being outside.

Shaking and sobbing, I begged my doctor to tell me why I was feeling this way. But, instead, he asked whether I’d had any suicidal thoughts and whether I thought I would act on them. I admitted that I had and that dying seemed like the simplest answer.

I knew they weren’t the answers a normal person would give, but I was beyond caring. I just wanted someone to take care of me. Wasn’t this what every TV show, magazine article and online support group instructed you to do when you were considering suicide; seek help?

Fact stranger than fiction: Winona Ryder played a woman on a psychiatric ward in the film Girl Interrupted

My GP, a young doctor, conferred with his colleagues and decided I should be transferred to the nearby mental health unit.

I was afraid, but Joe and Cathy were incredibly supportive, telling me that being in the unit would keep me safe until I felt better.

From the outside the building looked like any other hospital, complete with a bright, clean waiting room and smiley receptionists. I had a long talk with one of the emergency assessment team in a cosy room.

The doctors’ conclusion was that I was suffering a breakdown and was a high suicide risk, and needed to be admitted to 24 hours-a-day psychiatric care for a few days to be supported through the worst of it.

I was flooded with relief. This was a breakdown, it was temporary and people were going to support me. I was safe and I was going to be OK.

The relief was short-lived. Escorted to a ward on another floor of the building, where the door slammed shut and locked behind me, I encountered the real hospital.

The air was stiflingly hot and smelled of unwashed bodies and cooking. Men and women roamed the halls aimlessly, some screamed and shouted, while others stared into the distance with an alarming lack of awareness.

Some looked like the normal well-dressed types you’d see on any High Street — but others wore filthy clothes and were extremely dishevelled.

'I was supposed to be safe from myself here, yet I had everything I needed to inflict serious personal damage'

By the way some patients behaved, it became apparent that some were suffering with far more than just depression. I was surprised that people with different mental illnesses were grouped together.

In all honesty, I was frightened beyond belief. 

Needing to calm my nerves, I asked if I could go outside for a cigarette. Without speaking, a casually-dressed nurse pointed to a door, which led to a small, cramped outdoor cage.

The moment I stepped in, three male patients — one in his 20s, the others middle-aged — followed me.

I was shocked by their stained clothes, unwashed hair and filthy hands. They began to paw at me and, although I asked them to stop, they forced me back into a cramped corner, blocking my escape.

They demanded my cigarettes, and I handed them over, seizing the chance to flee to the nurses’ station.

A nurse listened to my story with a slightly sceptical look before leading me to a women-only lounge with two sofas and a TV. ‘You’ll be safe here,’ she said slowly as if talking to a child. Did she think I had made it up?

Not the best place to recover: Kerry found being on a ward disturbing and unpleasant (file picture)

‘I’ll keep an eye on the door to make sure nobody comes in. We don’t have any available rooms so you’ll have to stay here until we do.’ She closed the door.

I wept. I loathed myself for being so afraid. But I felt so alone and vulnerable in a place where I had truly believed I would get help and be safe.

Still suffering from my crippling depression, I cried so long and so hard that I wondered whether it was actually possible to die from sadness.

When I tried to find a tissue in my handbag, my fingers brushed against something sharp stashed at the bottom. Emptying the contents, I found a pair of tweezers, some antidepressants and various generic painkillers.

I was supposed to be safe from myself here, yet I had everything I needed to inflict serious personal damage.

Curling up on the sofa, I closed my eyes and tried to forget about the bag’s contents.

I awoke hours later to a shirtless, barefoot man hovering beside me, unbuttoning his jeans.

Paralysed with fear, it took a few seconds for me to scream, which startled him and attracted the attention of a passing male nurse who pulled him away and ushered him out of the lounge.

‘Your room is ready now,’ was all he said to me. ‘I’ll show you where it is. It’s on a women-only corridor, you’ll be OK there.’

My heart was thudding as he led me to a room. At least it was clean; containing a single bed, wardrobe and a desk. I might be safer.

‘I’ll need to look through your things and take anything that might be dangerous.’ I emptied my bag allowing everything — pills and tweezers, too — to clatter on to the desk. ‘I’ve had these things for hours,’ I told him. ‘I could have hurt myself.’

'I am convinced that a mental health ward is not the best place to receive treatment for depression'

‘Did you?’ I shook my head and he shrugged before departing with anything that could be considered dangerous. ‘That’s all right then.’

Within seconds of him closing the door, male patients swamped the glass window to stare in at me. Clearly no one was bothered about enforcing the women-only rule.

Too afraid to sleep, I lay down and pulled a sheet over my head.

Sometime later, my door was flung open by a woman trailing a suitcase behind her. 

‘What’s this b**** doing in my room?’ she screamed, glaring at me. ‘I only left this morning and you’ve given my room away.’

No sooner had she left, a nurse came to tell me it was dinner time.

By now I was constantly shaking with nerves. She told me eating would make me feel better.

In the main lounge, other patients were already queuing for food. Listening to their chatter, I was shocked to discover that some had been living in the unit — a small space with no real outdoor access — for as long as nine months.

At the kitchen window, I received a huge mound of pasta covered with watered down cheese sauce and four green beans. A ball of instant mash potato was slapped on the side, and a wedge of cake so hard and flavourless that it was difficult to chew let alone swallow. It’s hard to see how anyone could start to feel better on this diet.

Plastic cutlery was thrown and people wailed at the dining tables.

We ate unsupervised, the staff gathered in their office — joking and eating their ordered-in pizzas, which had just been delivered.

The woman who claimed I had stolen her room glared at me with ferocious intensity. 

She and several others noisily berated my atrocious behaviour. I tried to avoid making eye contact with her.

Another woman, maybe in her early 30s, wore fashionable pyjamas and a dressing gown, warned me to eat everything and try to stay in the communal areas or ‘else the staff will think you’re in a bad way’.

A man who’d been living on the ward for six months and was allowed day release was regaling others with tales of the gun he had bought on a nearby council estate. When another patient alerted him to ‘the new girl’, he sneered: ‘She won’t say anything. It wouldn’t be worth her life.’

To say I was relieved to see my husband and best friend walk through the door for visiting hours is an understatement.

But the moment they arrived, a beaming nurse ushered me into a room to take my blood pressure and weight. ‘Everyone has to be assessed when they arrive,’ she smiled, despite my explaining I’d been there all day.

When I finally sat down with my visitors, another nurse bounded up with a welcome pack full of toiletries and information on ‘my stay’ making it sound more like a jolly hotel jaunt.

The staff had barely spoken to me throughout the day, let alone offered me any support, despite being on suicide watch. But now visiting hours had arrived it seemed everyone was on their best behaviour.

Shaking and tearful, I told Joe of what had happened in the past 12 hours. He made straight for the nurses’ station and demanded to see a doctor.

The doctor was sympathetic and apologised profusely, explaining the unit was for anyone in the local area who had some kind of mental illness; those suffering from depression were grouped with schizophrenics and others. 

She said I was not the kind of person — young, attractive and professional — that was usually admitted, so I was bound to generate curiosity among other patients.

That didn’t explain why my neighbour at dinner was on the ward. But, frankly, I wasn’t in a state to argue her case and gratefully accepted the offer of care from a home treatment team to help my anxiety.

The team would be on call 24 hours a day, would turn up at random intervals, offer counselling and change my medication if they saw fit.

The home treatment team were, in fact, fantastic, and I felt incredibly well cared for.

They visited me several times a day; they prescribed Lorazepam — a drug used to treat anxiety — and, after three or four months, I settled back into my old lifestyle, going back to work and socialising.

But I know I was one of the lucky ones. So many people isolate themselves when they feel depressed, and it would be very easy to find yourself completely alone on a mental health ward with no visitors and no outside help.

When I spoke to MIND — the mental health charity — about what happened, they told me it was not uncommon for people to report similar experiences.

How utterly terrifying — the awful things I went through could really happen to anyone.

But I had Joe to fight my corner. Without him, the staff might not have listened to me or believed what had happened.

A year on, I still can’t forget the fear of that experience. It certainly won’t stop me seeking help, but I am convinced that a mental health ward is not the best place to receive treatment for depression. (mail online. dailymail.co.uk)

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Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1317746/Depressed-womans-horrifying-psychiatric-ward-story.html#ixzz11TwZsbY8