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fter I was discharged, I obtained my hospital records. I asked for (and was told that I had received) my entire psychiatric record, but it included no daily records of my time spent on the ward.

Based on our interaction in the foyer prior to my entry into the psych ER, the nurse completed a “Psychiatric Emergency Room Nursing Triage & Assessment Form” on me.

In the interview the nurse asked if I heard voices. I replied, “Just my own.” She asked no further questions on the topic and checked the “Yes” box under hallucinations. Later in the record she noted: “Alteration in sensory perception as evidenced by hearing voices.”

Under suicidal attempts she also checked “Yes” accompanied by a misquote: “I tried to jump over running car couple of crazy things.” What I actually said in response to her question about whether I had ever tried to hurt myself was: What do you mean hurt myself? I’ve done some crazy things, like when I was a teenager I climbed onto the roof of a speeding car, things like that, is that the kind of thing you mean?

I told her I smoked one to two packs of cigarettes a month. It made it onto the record as one to two packs a day.

Once I was in the psych ER, a nurse noted: “Health education initiated. Encouraged to ventilate feelings. Encouraged for effective coping skill.” An entry written three hours later reads: “Will continue to encourage verbalization of thoughts and feelings + will support pt. [patient] emotionally.”

No staff member had ever offered anything approaching encouragement or support, much less “education.”

I’m also repeatedly described as isolative, withdrawn, “not interacting with anyone.” In actuality, I was in reporter mode with several patients and used the pay phone frequently. Out of utter boredom, I used all the social skills I could muster to charm a clerk to leave the door to the nurses’ station open for a few minutes of conversation. Staff members wouldn’t even acknowledge me when I stood in front of the nurses’ station window to ask a question, let alone interact with me.

The session with the admitting psychiatrist in the psych ER was the first and only time I sat down with a psychiatrist for an interview during my entire hospital stay. Yet the four page Initial Evaluation Sheet that the psychiatrist completed--the documentation that lets staff on the ward know what problems brought me into the hospital and what condition I was in--is in large parts illegible. It took two of my editors poring over each word, comparing separate letters, to interpret some of what it said. If anyone at the hospital had sought this information during my stay, they would have had a difficult time deciphering it.

The records also reflect a tendency to define me and my problem based on an assumption of who I was, rather than what I said or how I acted. (On the ward I spent my time taking daily notes and reading copies of the New Yorker that a visitor had brought me. Yet a psychiatric evaluation described my concentration as “impaired”.) I told the psychiatrist that I’d attended two drug rehabilitation programs when I was 16 years old (I’m now 32)--less for drug abuse than for parent-teenage conflict--and that I drink only casually now and don’t use drugs. It was the truth, what I would have said if I was there genuinely seeking treatment. She wrote: “Has been through many alcohol-drug rehabilitation centers.”

This later showed up on my Psychiatric Evaluation as an Axis I diagnosis: “Alcohol Abuse Disorder partial remission.” My supposed substance abuse problem is mentioned throughout my records and was constantly brought up during my stay, even though I took pains to tell everyone who interviewed me that I had no problem with drugs or alcohol. After that first night on the ER, hospital staff stopped giving me sedatives to help me sleep--which I could have used, it’s not an environment conducive to sleep--because of my “history of drug abuse,” as the ward psychiatrist explained. No matter what I said, they wouldn’t believe that I was anything other than a drug addict or an alcoholic. I was diagnosed with Depressive Disorder and Antisocial Personality Disorder--although the only deviant behavior I exhibited other than my suicidal comments was unemployment and housing problems.

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