3 minute read

When anyone seeks medical help with mental health, the person is exposed to various questions. Actually questions after questions, trying gauge where they are mentally, whether they are at risk of harming themselves and/or others. Depending on the answers, there will be a determination of next steps. Simply put: if the person should be locked up or not.

That would make sense. Except that the system which is in place to manage this process is severely broken in my opinion.

Let me rephrase: if the system that is in place to handle mental health situations would be a person, that person should be locked up as well. That is how bad things are.

Every story has at least two sides. Here is our side.

Imagine on the advise of the therapist, taking your child to the ER late in the evening asking for help. Leaving her there for the night, only to find her locked up in a cell like room in the morning. Then spending the whole day with her in that room only to be told that she will be transported to the mental health facility. From a parent point of view at this point you have questions.

I started asking who is the doctor responsible for her in the ER? Who contributed to this decision? Where are taking her? I wanted a copy of her file, a written conclusion of a diagnoses that drove the decision of sending her away to a mental health facility. I received the followings, all just short verbal answers by the way:

  • what is the name of the doctor currently responsible for her? => I received nothing
  • who contributed to the decision of sending her away? => I received only titles: her therapist (that we know of course), some other title (we had no name) and maybe one or two more titles without names. Completely useless information.
  • so what was discussed and what led to this decision? => I received nothing
  • I have to go through medical records to get something in writing => I was standing in the middle of the ER, why would I have to go through an unknown (for me) process to get some files, when I could get it all printed out. Makes perfectly zero sense…
  • where are they taking her? => I received the name of the facility and a phone number to the facility to call later in the day. Would you let your child taken to a facility you never heard of with the hope that you can call some random phone number later in the day? Maybe she’ll be there, maybe she won’t… FYI, I looked up the facility online, bad reviews all over the internet.
  • who will be responsible for her there? => I received a last name. A last name so common, when you want to make up a random person, this is one of the common, random last names you use. I looked up the staff directory on the website of the facility. Nobody with that name was listed there.

If you ever watched a thriller movie before, all those weird scenarios were going through my head and the nurse and that social worker type person were doing nothing to provide me comfort.

Correction: with the above list, I actually lied. Not everything was verbal. I received the name of the facility and the phone number on a Post-It. That is it. They sent my child away with an ambulance to a place somewhere and me home with a fucking Post-It.

Now tell me: if how mental health was handled would be a person. Wouldn’t you want to lock it up because the answers given to you were incoherent and you thought there was a risk for harming others?