June 5, 2015
The first month that I was there, I tried a few times to get staff to stop the coughing harassment that was inflicted by me by some of the other patients and by a few of the staff. That didn't work, so I just had to ignore it while I was at the unit. I published a lot of pages at that time about what it was like.
The second month that I was there, the snowstorms hit the Boston area. I don't know if the Department of Mental Health people at Quincy Mental Health Center would have forced me to leave if the snowstorms hadn't hit. Someone named Mona, during a meeting that was scheduled for me with her and with the assistant director of the unit, Kate, kept saying that the team support services that I was being offered after my first month there were voluntary. I said that I didn't want them. She said "I don't want to be a nag, but staying here is supposed to be temporary." I wasn't sure what she meant; did anyone who worked there ever think that I had hoped to move in and never leave? Did they think that it's easy for a 40-year-old woman to be living in an environment that is totally controlled by other people? That I loved living in a room that had a window in the door? That it takes no self-discipline to cheerfully agree to live that way because it's safer than living in a homeless shelter? It is disgusting how I was treated throughout almost my entire stay there as if I were taking the place and the people for granted, when really what happened was that they took my acceptance of their authority and my willingness to abide by the rules for granted all the time.
The day after the meeting with Mona and Kate, I was told by Kate that I had been given a discharge date of a week from then. That was the first time that anyone had said anything to me about the respite bed being something that was only available for a month, after which extensions had to be requested. It was subsequently made clear to me that extensions were usually only given to people who agreed to sign up for the "voluntary" team services. You have to ask what's voluntary about something if what you have to do if you don't take it is to hit the streets in the middle of winter.
Throughout my stay at the crisis unit, I had to depend on help from support people outside the unit for everything from keeping DMH off my case about insisting that I take the "voluntary" team services to just emotional support for how much I was harassed by patients and staff at the unit. I'm sure that few people who worked at the crisis unit or at Quincy Mental Health Center knew how much the behavior to which I was subjected negatively affected me, or how much effort it took for me just to get out of bed every day and try to be productive while living in an environment where I was harassed, ridiculed, lied to and lied about. Like almost everywhere else that I have been harassed, it was considered funny. There was not one day when I woke up while living there that suicide wasn't the first thing that I was thinking about.
The snowstorms incapacitated the trains and the Quincy area. The building of Quincy Mental Health Center was closed on numerous days; several times, delivery people couldn't even get to the building. There were no sidewalks in Quincy for several weeks. While the snowstorms probably deterred DMH from kicking me out of the unit during my second month there, the blizzard winter did not create conditions that were conducive to my being able to obtain nontransitional housing.
During my third month at the unit, I got so depressed that there were a few days when I found it difficult to eat. Realizing that my depression was proliferating from putting me in emotional torment during every conscious moment to affecting me physically, it seemed to me that I had two choices. One was to go to a hospital emergency room, tell them that I was suicidal and ask to be admitted to an inpatient hospital. The other was to take the chance of being honest about how I was feeling to those of the mental health staff at the unit who I thought might care about how I felt if I told them how serious it was. I was never dishonest with them, but, seeing how most of my concerns about being harassed weren't taken seriously from the time that I got to the unit, I had not tried to broach the more serious subjects in my life until then.
To their credit, the staff whom I told about how bad I was feeling listened and cared. They stopped harassing me. They began to tell patients who harassed me to stop. They provided emotional support. I was able to start talking to them about some of my most pressing concerns.
Unfortunately, the nurse manager for the unit is someone who should either be intensively re-educated or be asked to retire. Being in your sixties and working in mental health care doesn't necessarily mean that you are entirely guided by patriarchal ideas or that you think that staff at a mental health facility have the authority to decide what reality is and to expect that clients cease to argue for their perspectives and rights as soon as they are told which version of reality they are expected to accept, or that you resolve situations in which clients present opinions conflicting with yours by exerting your authority and making it clear that they have to stop talking or punishment will ensue. Not everyone who is that nurse manager's age is like that; she is. It was also my impression that the assistant director for the unit is chronically intimidated both by the nurse manager and by the DMH site director for Quincy Mental Health Center, a woman named Susanna, and by the generally oppressive culture of DMH at Quincy Mental Health Center.
To Be Continued.
Copyright L. Kochman, June 5, 2015 @ 12:51 p.m.
