#10—Assertive community treatment
Creation Date: 2022/12/07
Prep Talk—
The experiences of being inpatient, to this day, were traumatic experiences to me and I felt at times like I had little faith in myself to endure the hardships I was going through. I still want to believe that if I even find myself inpatient when I need a safe place with academic professionals trained to help cope with trauma that I can confide in these academic professionals my experiences so that my soul can lay to rest my past.
I understand now that the professionals have a job to do, that is to say "earn income". The hospitals have their perrogatives and goals and need to protect themselves from client whilst at the same time caring for them.
As for my mentality when or if I find myself inpatient, or outpatient, or in group programs, I feel that I need to adhere to maintaining singularity in multiplicity as if I am an academic paying for an eduation, because I am paying for mental healthcare whether I want to not; I don't exactly have a choice if I am stay living in my hometown. Now, mind you, this predicament I find myself in when it comes to paying for treatment now, at the time of this blog article, in an outpatient treatment program all started when I walked into an Emergency Room at the local General Hospital to find someone I spoke to on the phone before I walked in. I needed help dealing with emotions that took over my body because of visual and auditory cues causing me to relive physical, verbal, and emotional abuses.
After making the best of the situation in "the center" for the last two months of my inpatient stay, prompting the hospital to release me because of inpatient stay insurance justifications no longer applying, I felt so strongly that I had endured such feelings as doubt, hunger, singularity that I wasn't ready for. Overcoming to a certain degree the these feelings made me believe and have faith in that much more in the life of Christ, Jesus. But, when I returned home and started working while battling the effects and side-effects of the drugs I was consuming to remain in the community made me feel like I wasn't even living in the present, nor for future joy in experiences.
I ended the last blog article - Article #9 - with the end of my inpatient stay. The assertive community treatment team I had starting working with was directly affiliated with the inpatient long-term stay psychiatric hospital. They would come to my family's home and check on me, administer pharma-drugs when needed as it was apart of the treatment plan so I was being forced to stay on the injection regardless of my need for something else, and they let me know I was still in all practicallity "property" of the psychiatric hospital until I met my teams goals they laid out for me as terms of "discharge" home. They retained the power to hospitalize me if I was not compliant.
I had also returned to America's workforce.
"The team"—
Now, the primary function of assertive community treatment teams, as my experience tells me, is to maintain clientel compliance with drug treatments. Other functions of the psychiatric center affiliate is mainly social work and simple talk therapy. They want their clients who were released from their parent facility to enter an outpatient service before discharge. It all depends on the clients willingness to cooperate with drug consumption as prescibed by the team's psychiatrist.
After my first stay, I was under obligations against my wishes to allow an injectable form of one of the medications I was "asked" to remain on. The other drug of the two I was to stay on in the years after my first inpatient psychiatric center stay was the one that made me eat whereby I had no control over urges and I consumed food and drinks constantly. I instructed the team on how the drugs were interacting with me physically, emotionally, and psychosocially, yet to little relief. They seemed to be either overtly cautious or willfully disenfranchizing to me in my desire to participate in my treatment rather than be dictated to.
Over-medicated—
I wanted to participate in treatment and not be dictated to when it came to pharmacology drug administration. The drugs had profound interactions with my body. I was drained of my life essence while on those drugs. I had no ambition, it was hard to believe, and I wanted to eat profusely leading me to being overweight.
As I started life back in the workforce, I had impaired cognitive functioning, I was out-of-shape physically, and I had little interest in making social connections with anybody. I still hadn't come to terms with trauma and the stress from the experience in a General Hospital's behavioral unit combined with an extended stay in a psychiatric hospital that lasted roughly 6 months total was another traumatic burden I had to bare; and I didn't know for how long.
In order to do my work for my employers over the next 78 months or so, I could not do work that required much psychoanalytical analysis in determining a course of action. I did my best work when I had clear objectives and simple actions because I couldn't critically think for the life of me.
Because of how powerful the anti-psychotic dosages were, if I ever had to critically think, by the end of 2 hours tops of requiring psychoanalytics as if I was the boss, I lost completely my cognitive functioning abilities. I became detached from my environment, I had no thought process, I just went through the motions. And when I returned home, I could only sit or lie down and stare at walls as my legs spazzed uncontrollably.
I would tell not only "the team" but the outpatient clinic I began working with of my pharmacology drug side-effect symptoms. Nobody wanted to lower dosages or try different pharmacology for that matter.
Because I wasn't allowed control of pharma-drug dosages or selection entirely, I suffered for nearly 3 years from side-effects making my life hell.
Outpatient Clinic
I was finally discharged from the assertive community treatment team when I shut up about "the medicine" and the side-effects. They were with me until I was accepted into an outpatient clinic they said was located in the area. The outpatient clinic was affiliated with the general hospital that sent me to extended-stay inpatient psychiatric center, and I accepted the idea of getting to this out-patient facility because I felt I could let them know what were the reasons I had for walking into the emergency room seeking the woman I spoke to on the phone who told me I could find her there which the hospital called a delusion. Oh, I wanted to talk to them alright.
I get to that out-patient clinic program I was accepted into in a future blog article, but first I am going to need a 'pep talk'.