The "Help me I am crazy." Award for 5 FEB 2010...

[dutch508]

lightningandsnow  (1000+ posts)        Fri Feb-05-10 01:14 PM
Original message http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=105x9239896
Has anyone been in residential treatment for a mental illness?
 As in, not a psych ward, but a treatment program similar to those for addictions and eating disorders?

I've been looking at this program. It's about an hour and a half away from my home in Toronto. http://homewood.org/healthcentre/main.php?tID=1&lID=3

I'm kind of grappling with it. I think my insurance would cover most of it, but am I "crazy" enough to spend 6-8 weeks in treatment? I don't think my mom would take well to it - she's in a bit of denial.

I want to do everything I can to get better, though, so this is looking pretty hopeful. I don't know.

without being sarcastic, which is hard for me, go get help, God bless and hope you find what you need.

NOW---- only to teh other loonies.

Tobin S.  (1000+ posts)      Fri Feb-05-10 01:21 PM
Response to Original message
1. I don't see how it could hurt.
 I was considering doing something like that a while back when I was first diagnosed, but my insurance wouldn't cover it and the program was a month long at $300 a day- just a tad out of range on a trucker's salary.

Call them about it if you think it might benefit you. It sounds to me like you need some kind of extra care if you are considering something like this. But if it doesn't work out remember what I told you the other day: Stay in treatment. Got it?

Good advice, damn this booosh ecomomy and evil rethuglican controlled healthcare.

Bertha Venation  (1000+ posts)        Fri Feb-05-10 02:48 PM
Response to Original message
4. I haven't been in the kind of treatment you describe, but
 I'll tell you this:

I was in a psych ward for two months, and it is absolutely the very best thing I've ever done or ever hope to do for myself.

Good luck with your decision.

 
Glad to hear you are feeling better.

elocs (1000+ posts)        Fri Feb-05-10 03:35 PM
Response to Original message
5. My 18 year old goddaughter is in residential treatment for mental illness.
 Last year she was diagnosed with schizophrenia after she had a psychotic breakdown just after Christmas '08. Last year she was hospitalized in the psych ward 13 times at 7 different hospitals. A year of her life was lost.

Now she is in a residential halfway house for girls with her problems. She has recognized and accepted that she has a mental illness and knows the importance of staying on her medications. She is trying to finish her high school education and they are supposed to help her on her path to living on her own. Her school district is paying for this and she can be in the program until she turns 22. Last year she was under her mother's insurance, but by June they cut her loose, telling her mother by registered letter that the mental health benefits for the year had been used up.

(it runs in families) again, damned evil healthcare system

lightningandsnow  (1000+ posts)        Fri Feb-05-10 03:47 PM
Response to Original message
6. Aaaannnd....cue my mom bitching about how she'd rather I work full-time all summer.
 And continue to see different doctors and get only a minimal response from treatment.

She still *may* allow it, but I'll have to convince her. Sigh.

I think I see one of her issues...

Depression/Anxiety
Integrated Mood and Anxiety Program
The Integrated Mood and Anxiety Program (IMAP) is a group-based program that treats men and women suffering from the symptoms of depression and anxiety.

Depression and anxiety are among the most common forms of mental illness. Although it often seems to sufferers as if there is no end in sight, these mood disorders are treatable.

IMAP offers therapeutic assistance to men and women, ages 18 and older*, who are suffering from the symptoms of depression and anxiety. This approximate eight week program consists of a comprehensive orientation/assessment period followed by an intensive treatment program.

[The Village Idiot]

Maybe they can consult James Ray, when an if he is ever out of prison. Oprah and Dr Phil recommended! His book The Secret is a great resource.

People pay big money for him to end their suffering.

http://www.tcdailyplanet.net/blog/rich-broderick/death-ray-law-fatal-attraction

Death Ray: The law of fatal attraction
By Rich Broderick, Ground Zero
February 05, 2010
James Ray, self-help guru, bestselling author of The Secret, and close personal friend of Oprah and Dr. Phil,(whose on-air shilling contributed mightily to  the success of his book), has finally been arrested for manslaughter in connection with the killings he caused last October at a resort in Arizona.

The case involved participants who'd paid over $9,000 each to be led by Ray in a four-day-long retreat that would supposedly turn them into "spiritual warriors."

At the end of several days in which people fasted and tramped around in the desert, Ray, a disciple of a New Age doctrine called The Law of Attraction, marched his would-be warriors into a makeshift sweat lodge. There, within a shockingly ill-designed structure constructed from plastic sheeting held in place by old tires and offering only one small escape route for  the 60 people roasting inside in pitch-black darkness, two people died on the spot while another, a 49-year old woman from Bloomington, died a few days later.

Ray's actions immediately following the first of the deaths were indicative both of his priorities and of his pathological narcissism; he ordered his staff - who'd earlier in the retreat dressed up as minions of Death while Ray donned a costume  in which he literally played  God - to dismantle the sweat lodge before investigators arrived on the scene. Then Ray hit the road, showing up at seminars for which he earns (or earned) as much as $100,000 a day. Not only did he protest his total lack of responsibility for an accident that he claimed was unforeseen (despite near-fatal hyperthermia experienced by people participating in earlier Spiritual Warrior retreats), but even blogged about how the victims had chosen to die rather than leave a site where they'd experienced such an exhilarating sense of liberation.

[The Village Idiot]

Oh and the idiot blogger I posted that from believes this happens because of money and he was just like a televangelist.

I responded:

This had nothing to do with money. This man had appointed himself as God and he thinks he gave these people a choice of life or death. He obviously thought the world revolved around himself, being pumped up by Oprah and Dr. Phil only made that worse.

He has an inflated sense of self and of self-entitlement the kinds of which you hear about among Hollywood actors who believe their own hype or from politicians who thinks they alone can "make a difference". Its an out of control ego, he probably thinks he was underpaid for "saving" them.

Think about Nancy Pelosi who is rich and apparently owns a winery getting free trips on military jets, not just for herself but her entire family and running up liquor tabs that taxpayers have to pay for. Its an entitlement mentality that has grown up in this culture to the nth degree. Even the poor get "entitlements", but what happens when the money runs out?

[Texacon]

What part of the United States is Toronto in?  They must have suck insurance in this Toronto place if it won't help a mentally ill person.  Shit .... what is wrong with Massachusetts when they won't take care of their own?!  No wonder they voted in Scott Brown.

I don't wanna live in no Toronto, Massachusetts.

 

KC

[The Village Idiot]

What part of the United States is Toronto in?  They must have suck insurance in this Toronto place if it won't help a mentally ill person.  Shit .... what is wrong with Massachusetts when they won't take care of their own?!  No wonder they voted in Scott Brown.

I don't wanna live in no Toronto, Massachusetts.

 

KC

They need single-payer in this Toronto place.

[ColonialMarine0431]

I tend to skip around a few conservative forums. Just to see what people are saying. But I can't ever recall hearing a conservative say, "Has anyone been in residential treatment for a mental illness?" 

[The Village Idiot]

I tend to skip around a few conservative forums. Just to see what people are saying. But I can't ever recall hearing a conservative say, "Has anyone been in residential treatment for a mental illness?" 

I get the sense that this all a hobby to them. Like they have a social connection to others who admit it. They seem to thrive on it.