My hospital stay never happened

I was hospitalized for 7 days this past March – and it never happened.

Here is a little bit of background: I am 45 years old and I have schizophrenia. To be specific, I have schizoaffective disorder-bipolar type combined with clinical depression and generalized anxiety disorder. I work very hard to stay as stable as I can. I take my medications despite a paranoia about pills being poison. I keep my regular appointments with my psychiatrist, my therapist, and my general practitioner. On good days I can drive and go meet someone for coffee. On bad days it is an accomplishment just to get dressed and feed myself. If I am lucky, I have more good days than bad.

Sometimes, despite all my attempts to stay stable, I have very bad days. I was having a bad day and one of my stronger delusions started to take over. I was able to recognize that it was getting too bad for me to handle and my mom got me to the ER just in time for it to blow up into full psychosis. I was given emergency medications to calm me down and I was admitted to the Behavioral Medicine Department.

And this is where I disappear. You see, the so-called Behavior Medicine Department (B-Med for short) is really the short-stay psychiatric lockdown ward. And you are invisible to the outside world. No one – not even doctors – can call in or even know you are there unless they have a code. All records are kept separate from other medical records. It is an isolated bubble designed to keep the patients calm and get them the specific treatment they need. It really does work, and I left a week later with my medications tweaked and my mind back under my control.

A few weeks later I had a regular appointment with my general practitioner. They had no record of the change in my medications, which was strange. I got the records updated and then waited to see the doctor. We talked about a few things and then I mentioned that my anxiety was still up after the hospital stay, but I was working on it. And he had no idea what I was talking about. He checked my patient records and all it had was the ER visit. Then I mentioned that the stay had been in B-Med and he just nodded. Psychiatric hospital stays, he said, are never put in general patient records. They are kept separate and he had no access. And he was not allowed to add anything about it to the record, even though we were talking about it in our visit.

Let’s think about that for a moment. My general practitioner has no access to my psychiatric treatment records. The fear of someone finding out I have a mental illness and was treated for it in the hospital is so strong that my own doctor can’t know about it.

During Mental Health Month there is a lot of talk about breaking the stigma surrounding mental illness. Well, there is a long way to go. If they can’t even talk about it between doctors, how are we going to talk about it in public? How are we going to get integrated health care if my hospital visit essentially never happened?

I have schizophrenia. I want all of my health care providers to know that. And so should anyone else with a mental illness.