"On Assignment" News Report On Mental Health Treatment In Montreal
Backs Up What I Write In My Blog
Sunday evening proved to be interesting when watching television, the
On Assignment program after the news did a special on mental health
consumers and the system we deal with in Montreal. The result of
watching the program has left me driven even more with desire to
reveal my story to make the mental health system a better place for
future people that need help in this capacity. The news report that I
watched dealt with the sad ending of the lives of persons coping with
schizophrenia because of suicide. Two of the cases mentioned really
affected me, due to having "served time" in the Montreal General
Hospital's psychiatric ward with them in the passed. It left me
thinking, one out of three schizophrenics survive the Montreal General
Hospital! It is not very good odds for justification of treatment in
the manner in which the Psychiatrists insist on treating persons with
schizophrenia. Grant you, one of the persons mentioned in the news
cast died from suicide during care at another Montreal Hospital, I am
positive I know this person in particular from a hitch together at the
Montreal General Psych ward, we can get around different hospitals
looking for answers. Here I am left writing my beefs about the
treatment plan always administered to me, at times of excessive
medication levels, I too thought and consinplated suicide as a way
out. No one ever talked to me about the issues at hand, it is a one
way conversation in psychiatry, patient talks, then gets the
appropriate medication administered for treatment. If you do not
voluntary take the medication you will be strapped to a bed and have
it injected into you. Then left alone pumped full of drugs and
strapped to a bed with no one to talk to about the issues at hand. The
only time you will really get to see any one is when it is meal time
and you are brought a meal. The straps will be loosened a bit so you
can eat, after the meal staff will come to tighten the straps again
when you are done eating. This way you can not get out of the straps.
I learned to slowly work the re-tightening of the straps so each time
I got a bit more play so I could worm my way out of the bed straps.
Then I would go ask the staff for a cigarette and they would be
wondering who let me out of the bed strapping. This can be a typical
situation in the Hospital emergency psychiatry, I went through it many
a time. No one would talk to you about your schizophrenic issues that
got family members to put you in Hospital for treatment, soon you
would be moved up to the ward for your Psychiatric Hotel room for
observation by camera for example, still nobody would talk to you
about the issues that got you in hospital again in the first place.
Being a happy go lucky type of guy by natural character, I was always
patients thinking and as it was put to me, I talk too much according
to a Head Nurse. I responded, "well if you do not like what you see in
me, pump me full of drugs to shut me up then". So they did, I was made
more of a zombie for being a disturbance on the ward. All I was doing
was having fun communicating with other patients and got them
thinking. Still, no Nurse talked to me about why I was in Hospital
other than,me going off my medication or self medicating as not to be
one of their walking zombies. To this day, no one in psychiatry has
discussed my apparitions/hallucinations with me, I figured out how to
handle them on my own over twenty years. Perhaps you now have an
answer for why persons with schizophrenia turn to suicide, I have
thought about it my self but always reasoned my self away from it when
the system made me a walking zombie with treatment. Talk to me, talk
to me is the cry from the "schizophrenic", talk me through these
issues!! You get drug therapy instead, left lonely, isolated,
frustrated, too medicated to think clearly and only other patients to
talk to, then you are are discharged into some care givers hands who
puts a roof over your head. This is where you sit around a house
medicated, chain smoking, drinking coffee or tea all day, having no
money for anything, one thing leads to another and you start looking
for a way out, as in suicide. This is the basic type of treatment I
have been exposed to for twenty years, I beat the odds, reflecting
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