You Can Check Out Any Time You Like, But You Can Never Leave!'*

This Is Something Out Of A Horror Movie… can you imagine you voluntarily check yourself in to a psychiatric hospital and you want to leave but the hospital starts initiate involuntary-commitment proceedings against you. Not because you are  threat to yourself or others but because you have insurance and they will pay for more days of treatment.

Free to check in, but not to leavePatients seeking mental-health treatment in Washington have been held against their will or threatened with involuntary commitmentSeattle TimesBy Daniel GilbertOctober 6, 2019

Carol Jason had been a patient of BHC Fairfax Hospital for just minutes when she began rethinking the decision to check herself in to the psychiatric hospital.[…]For Jason and other patients who check in voluntarily, the revelation that they can’t leave when they want to has shaken their faith in a system they turned to for help. The reasons for holding such patients vary, but the practice of doing so — sometimes for days — is a regular occurrence at some of Washington state’s private psychiatric hospitals, an investigation by The Seattle Times has found.[…]To do so, a hospital physician or nurse has to conclude that the patient poses an immediate danger and then initiate involuntary-commitment proceedings. In Washington state, this begins with a call to county government, which then sends a mental-health professional to evaluate the patient. The county evaluator can involuntarily commit patients for up to 72 hours before patients can make their case to a judge.

Fairfax, the state’s largest private psychiatric hospital, with 157 beds, routinely has held patients by claiming they wouldn’t be safe if released, only to be contradicted by government evaluators who find no grounds for committing them. At Smokey Point Behavioral Hospital in Snohomish County, nurses were told to notify the hospital’s chief executive any time a patient asked to leave early, internal records show, and several patients have complained that staff delayed their release or tried to intimidate them into staying.

Now suppose you are trans and you check yourself in to the psychiatric hospital…

One of them, a young transgender man, said he overheard nurses refer to him as “it” when he arrived last September and was later pushed to attend women-only group therapy. When the patient told hospital staff his mother was coming to get him, they told him it wouldn’t be that easy.

“I felt intimidated by one of the nurses as he threatened that my insurance wouldn’t pay for anything” if he left against medical advice, the patient wrote in a complaint to the Department of Health.

The patient’s mother, a nurse manager, called Smokey Point 47 times over a couple days but never received a call back, she told The Times. She made the four-hour drive from their home in Southwest Washington and spent hours waiting in the hospital’s lobby.

Inside, a counselor told the patient that there was no record of his request to leave and that “she had no idea how to file an AMA discharge,” he wrote in the complaint. A nurse practitioner informed him that the hospital would start the process to involuntarily commit him if he insisted on leaving. Two crisis counselors tried persuading him to stay another day. Finally, to his bafflement, a nurse told him he could go.

“That whole experience was everything I feared about going to inpatient,” he said in an interview.

I know that would be a frighting experience, being forced to be in a ward of your birth gender and being constantly misgendered, it I something nightmares are made of! And it is all because of an insurance scam. 

*The Eagles: Hotel California