Bryck123:Basicaly it boils down to this
1. Patient goes into crisis and is taken to hospital
2. Patient is held for up to a month and diagnosed
3. Patient is placed on meds and back in the community on a plan
4. Patient goes off meds
5. Go back to step one
Ah, so a slight improvement...as it is now in Cincinnati:
1. Go into crisis, wait 8 hours in the psychiatric emergency services waiting room for a doctor to see you five minutes and say "you don't look suicidal, here's a $300 prescription, follow up with your regular doctor" (at this point you don't have a regular doctor yet), go home with a large bill that has potential to cycle into a derogatory public record on your credit report.
2. Community health clinic FINALLY calls you back two weeks later with an appointment for a wholly incompetent therapist (two weeks later) who is in charge of making you an appointment with a psychiatrist, but forgets to until your fourth appointment.
3. More crisis waiting for med evaluation, think about hospital, but why bother?
4. Finally get into doctor, who is completely inattentive to your medication history and insists that you take useless drugs with terrible side effects, many of which you have already tried. The really good ones that would do the job are too expensive and/or (at completely useful doses) require regular medical testing that you can't afford.
5. Go off the trial meds because side effects are completely intolerable, get lectured by doctor and therapist. Do this for a year and be completely unemployable the whole time as part of a combination of med side effects and issues not even beginning to be addressed.
It wasn't quite this bad when I lived in a small town north of Dayton, Ohio, but I can't say much for the psychiatric admission up there either. My own situation is going to be the same until some kind of insurance comes along. One of my drugs is lithium. It sort-of works and my doctor says it should work better at a higher dose, but to get a higher dose, I would need regular lithium levels and they aren't cheap. Meanwhile, I'm basically unemployable and to get on my husband's policy would quadruple his yearly cost.
The monument was in the shape of a seahorse and the plaque read we got hot and died. (RB)