Quote:
Originally Posted by AGDee
This is the main reason I left the mental health field. All that anybody wants to pay for is to medicate people (adults and children) and ship them out of the hospital with little to no real therapy. It's ludicrous.
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I wanted to touch on this, too. We (my co-workers and I back when I had a full case load) are trained "therapists" who offer "therapeutic dialogue" (i.e., talk to our patients using some of our skills) but it's hospital policy that we don't provide "therapy." While I agree that therapy would be a much better help then meds in like 90% percent of cases (if not more), providing it in a hospital setting really isn't feasible. Being in a hospital is meant to be short-term stabilization for about 3-7 days, at least here. That's not a fast rule, just an average. I can do some brief, crisis-centered therapy with that but that leaves very little time for any real work. Therapy is a process that pulls out a lot of hurtful stuff then gives tools to heal it back up again. I keep trying to explain to patients' families (who are livid that we don't provide therapy), "Would you want to be responsible for ripping off a person's mask and exposing all the hurtful things inside of them then ship them back into the world before teaching them how to pull it back together?" The thing that would be most helpful is something that needs to be done outside the hospital which is why we will give a referral for an outpatient therapist to anyone who says they want to go. I hope that makes sense--I wish we could do more than that but that could lead to some dangerous situations.