In-hospital care
If you go into hospital for an overnight stay, you’re an inpatient. Your stay might last one night, or you might be in hospital for several weeks. The length of your hospital stay will depend on the treatment you need and the extent to which your doctors wish to observe your recovery.
Like medical care, mental health care is a continuum designed to move you through it, not a sorting system that assigns care based on what kind of person you are. Anyone can experience a severe mental health episode, regardless of their history or current circumstances. And inpatient care is simply what you need when your mental health symptoms become too severe to safely manage on your own. Common reasons for getting inpatient mental health treatment include:
- Being para-suicidal (following an attempted suicide);
- Suffering a stroke;
- Suffering a heart-attack;
- Having a new baby and possibly feeling depressed (baby blues);
- Trauma related symptoms (like after an accident, head injury, rape, injury, etc);
- Anxiety prior an operation or medical procedure;
- Anxiety even after an operation or procedure;
- Substance abuse;
- Adverse effects of the prescribed medication;
- Extreme stress.
In-patient care can also refer to admission to a psychiatric facility, whether that be the State Psychiatric Hospital or a private facility.
Sadly, inpatient mental health care can be hard to get, especially if you’re seeking it voluntarily. Since there aren’t enough inpatient beds to meet the need, inpatient facilities often have to limit care to the people with the most severe symptoms. And because many psychiatric hospitals have these restrictive admissions policies, people who qualify for voluntary admission often also meet the standard to be committed involuntarily. Admission might be linked to a patient’s being:
- In danger of harming yourself because of mental illness;
- In danger of harming other people because of mental illness; or
- In danger of harm from being unable to care for yourself due to mental illness.
You can meet these criteria if you have a suicide plan, have stopped caring for yourself in a way that puts you in danger, or have physically attacked or threatened to attack someone. (Note that just being belligerent is not enough; your behaviour has to be due to a mental health condition.)
It’s important to understand that what determines if you need psychological care is your symptoms, not your diagnosis or condition.
“Take care of the patient and everything else will follow”