Different and the same

Last night I fumbled my way into a documentary.  I highly recommend it.  It is about psychiatric care at Bellevue.  It is dramatic.  While I'm sure that Bellevue has one or more units that are like the mood disorders unit I go to this depicts more traditional psych wards as well as drug and alcohol units and a unit that is for people with both drug/alcohol and significant mental illness.  I know less about what these units are like.  There are of course things all units share.  The depressing meal cart and icky food.  (Cleveland Clinic has good food but psych patients have a seriously restricted menu (2 choices per meal) and things repeat a lot. Some meals are ok, some are gross.  And all must be eaten with the world's flimsiest plastic utensils. 

There are similarities though.  Before I found this documentary I was watching other little videos of people in psych units.  (That's not what I started doing.  I was looking for information on the old, nearly empty psych hospital on the grounds of my graduate university and found someone had taped a short video there.  I was startled that this happened as it would be impossible (nearly) where I go and so I started looking at other videos and learning about how different various facilities are.  I was surprised that even the more relaxed unit I go to is more strict than a lot of places, yet in other ways they are much easier.  A lot of the difference was electronics. We can't have any, period, although we do have access to a computer.  

And then I found this.  It's interesting to see the perspective of the doctors and to see the things that are the same and different.  The noises are the same.  I've only been there once when there was a screamer on my unit but my unit is connected to gero-psych via swinging doors which are locked.  Gero-psych is very loud and we hear a lot of screaming.  Throughout the video there is constant background noise, often a blaring TV and that's true of my unit and in fact reminds me of it.

It is over an hour long and for all I know it's completely boring.  I was very interested but I have a lot to compare to.

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Please note that any bizarre grammatical or spelling errors are brought to you by the letter H for Hot Flashes.  (Guess what Anne likes to watch?)