A question most people successfully avoid asking: can institutionalized patients ever have sex? The answer is ‘mostly no, unless they are very good at sneaking past nurses’. They also can’t kiss, hold hands, cuddle, or have any other form of romantic contact.
I worked in a mental hospital where two patients snuck past nurses and had sex once. It was treated as a public health crisis of approximately the same urgency as somebody throwing a bucket of Ebola-laced chimp blood all over the dining room. Both patients lost all their privileges, earned themselves 24-7 supervision by nurses, got restricted to their rooms, and had to go through a battery of tests for every STD in the book. We the doctors got remedial training with helpful tips like “If two patients seem to like each other too much, put them on opposite sides of the unit so they’re never in contact.” -SSC
This is true of other emotional connections too, by the way. You are heavily discouraged from making friends with other patients on the basis that you “may enable each other’s mental illnesses.” When I was hospitalized we were forbidden from trading contact information. Every conversation we had was heavily surveiled by staff so we didn’t really get to talk about personal topics or build genuine friendship because anything emotional could be seen as a risk and would get us punished.
It really is that bad.
One of the doctors when I was institutionalized was actually very caring and concerned about the patients she worked with. She would actually listen to us and as a result everyone she worked with ended up liking her a lot.
We weren’t allowed to give anyone as much as a handshake. Even if we had family visiting us, if a doctor or nurse came in during that time, and found as much as me (a teenager) hugging my sister, it got treated like I was holding her at gunpoint as a hostage in a bank robbery. My visitation was revoked, I was placed in solitary for a few days I can’t really remember well, and still got set with 24/7 constant monitoring even in the bathroom for a while afterwards.
This nurse was kind enough to just awkwardly and visibly turn away during this time. She always chose this because everyone was Infinitely more comfortable with her showing us she wasn’t watching than the people who would watch us like a hawk and would report if we tried to cover our chests or crotch.
She’d also recognize when someone with an eating disorder just actually couldn’t eat what was expected of us to eat. And she would have snacks and other things for us to eat instead, and wouldn’t punish us if we couldn’t finish our plate.
She got fired. She was accused of being a child predator because the small kids and the teenagers liked the one person who treated them like a human being. There was a criminal investigation that literally led to nowhere because SHE didn’t commit any crime. She was still barred from entering the profession ever again and had to fight to keep it off her permanent records.
The exact thing that got her pushed over the edge? A kid asked for her specifically after they had a bad panic attack
We weren’t allowed to keep in contact with anyone. we weren’t allowed to make friends. If we were too friendly we’d be taken away from each other, but anyone hostile was allowed to remain together. You’d be woken up at 6 am sharp by a nurse checking your vitals and you’d be expected to stay awake and active for 16 hours a day, through anything else going on. Going to your room was a privilege before nighttime. Going to the bathroom was a privilege. Choosing between eating lunch or drinking water was a privilege. Getting to fucking do homework was a privilege. They didn’t teach you anything for once you’d actually get out because they don’t expect you to be well enough for Out Patient.
In one of the acute units I went to, there was someone who wasn’t allowed to have a bedroom. They pulled a mattress out of a room (“room” since we could never close the doors, so they were more like two bed alcoves) and put it in the communal area where we were required to be (unless we were required to be somewhere else). This girl didn’t even have the privacy of a semi-enclosed room. All of the bathrooms were attached to the bedrooms and all of us had to ask to use the bathroom unless it was nighttime (because we locked out of our bedrooms until it was time to sleep). This girl didn’t have a room, so she had to ask the staff to use the bathroom and the staff would have her use someone else’s. She didn’t have anywhere to put any of her belongings. She wasn’t allowed to socialize with us; if we were in the communal area, she had to be sitting on her mattress.
Why? Because she had screaming nightmares and that meant she was “too dangerous” to ever be unmonitored, but they didn’t have the staff to watch her specifically, so she always had to be where the one staff watching all of us (about 20 kids) could see her. She was considered too much of a flight risk to go to the cafeteria or to any of the activities (one hour in a prison-like outside area and one hour in an art class). Some of us tried to talk to her just to introduce ourselves and the staff threatened to take away our privileges.
The privileges in question? Doing our laundry, visitation, not being in solitary, attending the one movie night per week, showering alone and “only” being checked on every 5 min, going outside, and being allowed to draw (the only thing to do outside of the two hours of activities).
I went to three different mental hospitals. In all of the ones I went to, these things were privileges. There was only one that allowed us to drink any water outside of meals or taking meds; they had a mandatory PE and we were given one cup of water after exercising and you only had a minute or two to drink it before they took it away. That was it.
In my second mental hospital, I got along too well with my roommate so they made us switch rooms to be roommates with people we didn’t get along with. We were specifically told the reason was because we were too friendly. There was another patient who had been dating someone since before she went to the mental hospital, and the person she was dating got admitted to a different ward while she was there. The nurses, therapists, and psychologists told her she would not be discharged unless she broke up with him.
In a mental hospital, you do not have any rights. You only have privileges and you only have them if they have the staff and inclination to give them to you.
