I Admitted My Four Year Old to a Psychiatric Hospital

The elevator up to the 7th floor was slower than expected. I squeezed my son’s favorite stuffed dinosaur tightly against my chest, it’s bright blue cloth reflecting off the shiny grey elevator walls. He had just been admitted to the hospital the night before, and my head was pounding from the 13 hours in the ER.

Technically, this place was a hospital. It was called a hospital, but it’s grey exterior was reminiscent of former Soviet office buildings. The view inside was no different. Inside lacked the bright painted walls I had experienced in other hospitals. Void of hallways named after exotic animals cleverly used to disguise the pain and suffering that possibly existed behind every door.

In this building, the pain and suffering just lived on every surface. I cried a shower of tears whenever outside of the hospital. Inside, I just felt ashamed, guilty, and so incredibly sad.

My thoughts began to shift to the stranger in the elevator with me. A man, probably in his 40’s, carried a pink and yellow tie dyed comforter and a small tote bag that appeared empty except for perhaps one small item.

We both looked down, ashamed at our status here, in this elevator. Instead of exchanging looks of compassion and dual understanding, we both looked down at the floor afraid to engage in each other’s sad stories. I thought, he’s not just a man, he’s someone’s father. Quite possibly a really good father stuck in the mutual stories of parents with sick children.

My son, Dominic was only 4, and still in diapers. He did not speak except for a few barely recognizable words. He was just admitted to a psychiatric hospital 3 hours from our home. The only psychiatric hospital in the state willing to admit him because of his ongoing seizures.

The website for the hospital said this was a premier and innovative psychiatric inpatient hospital. The lobby and waiting areas were a petri dish of every conceivable repercussion of the terrible mental health system in America. Underfunded and understaffed, patients came from all over the state either holding the hands of their anxious caregivers, or handcuffed to beds. A month after my son was discharged there was a shooting in the lobby.

Thoughts from well meaning people, never having been in my situation, may consider this a failure of my parenting abilities. If I had just tried time out, or tried the right medication, the right education, the right doctor, the right diet, the RIGHT way to handle a child like my son, I could have avoided this entire tragedy.

This is my failure to bear. You can’t judge me more than I have already judged myself. Swimming in negative notions of how my greatest personal tragedy is my inability to meet the needs of my children. Their own tragedies are only a handicap in the race of life easily to overcome, or so I once believed.

My son, Dominic, was born in 2006 with microdeletions on his 15th chromosome. When he was 3 weeks old he was violently shaken up to 4 different times over the course of 2 weeks. One night he stopped breathing and his life changed forever.

When admitted to the hospital he had multiple broken ribs, two broken legs, one broken arm, and his brain was bleeding into his spine from 4 different places. I wouldn’t meet Dominic until my partner and I became his third foster home when he was 15 months old. We eventually adopted him the following year.

Dominic is diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder of his 15th chromosome, a traumatic brain injury, and an attachment disorder from early trauma. A mix of chronic medical and mental health illnesses.

Explaining Dominic takes time, something I seem to have very little of- or too much of-depending on the circumstance.

When I finally got off the elevator at the hospital, a collection of strangers were already assembled in a loose queue to enter the children’s behavioral unit for the 1 hour a day they permitted me to see my sick child. I narrowly scanned the room. All of us, different ages and skin colors, battle scarred and perpetually shamed by the medical profession and the community.

The fluorescent light bulbs and uniform plastic black chairs remind me I am in some sort of legitimate place, but the exchange felt like a back alley abortion. I know I had a right to be there, but every aspect of being there felt wrong. Everyone made awkward small talk amongst themselves, but never did we catch each other in the eye.

At exactly one o’clock the door opened and two security guards stepped out into the tiny waiting space with two more employees, perhaps nurses, but I couldn’t see their badges and they did not make any effort to introduce themselves. They reminded visitors about the coin operated lockers for all personal belongings. Nothing can be brought onto the unit. My son’s stuffed animal was not permitted. I put it into a locker with my purse, cell phone, keys, and other nefarious items.

It began to feel like a prison. Although common sense safety measures, I can’t help angrily think to myself that the brain is an organ of the body, much like the heart and the kidneys, and my son is sick with a chronic illness. I wondered if the prison feel of this institution is an unintended reminder of where children like my son end up in America after their communities, doctors, and social workers fail them. I filter this anger through every unspoken pore of my body. I looked down and rolled my eyes, and crossed my arms emphatically. It was all I could do to protest these conditions and still see my son.

I waited patiently to go through the metal detecting process, each minute cutting into the hour, the only hour, I have with my son today. After being cleared for entry, I sprinted down the hallway with my partner. I eventually found my son amongst the milieu of other children.

He smiled when he saw me. He was wearing a blue t-shirt and a diaper. His diaper was heavily soiled. I asked one of the many available staff of mental health support “counselors” for a clean diaper. I picked him up and threw him briskly on my hip. The pee from his overloaded diaper leaked onto my jeans. My anger reached a boiling point.

I don’t want him here, in this...place. I held back the instinct to run with him to the elevator and straight out of the hospital with his tiny arms wrapped around me. I could take both of us away from this place, forever. I could buy a Volkswagen VW van and drive through the forests of Canada, stopping only to eat vegan on deserted campgrounds.

I thought about this fantasy. I imagine myself in a loose fitting cocoon maxi dress coughed up in the summer breeze as I delicately, exquisitely even, handle homeschooling and doing laundry by hand. It was a pathetic fantasy whereas I can magically handle all of my heavy emotions and trauma enough to handle the heavy emotions of my traumatized child. The fantasy isn’t about running away as much as it is about escaping reality and envisioning a life without the barriers of anxiety, poverty, failure and sadness.

Instead, I tried to change his diaper on his bed. His backside is dirty from dried poop that had traveled up his back stuck in tiny dried spots on his shoulder blades. I said, unapologetically, how could this happen? I asked one of the random available counselors to point me to the shower.

My partner and I spent our only hour with Dominic wrangling his tiny body in the small shower stall. After his shower I loudly inquired to every passerby why he hadn’t been assigned a 1:1 caregiver as I requested. One of the counselors told me he doesn’t know, and runs to ask a nurse, while another counselor is quick to say, “None of us know why he is even here.”

I wanted to tell them about the crappy two hours of sleep he gets a day, or the hours of rages where he won’t look you in the eye, how everything he touches gets thrown at my forehead, or aimed at a light fixture. Is it normal to have a wall in your home covered in food? Mostly, I wanted them to explain how to survive all of it. I cry everyday because I am so unprepared to handle it, and how I am so alone and broke and utterly broken inside. His comment solidifies my failure. I can’t even find words to say anything in response.

The nurse finally appeared from some sort of walled area. The doors behind her slam closed loudly and the locks behind them even louder. She says the doctor wanted to speak to me, and that administration will not authorize a 1:1 because of the cost. Although, she said, they were having great difficulty because he wanders around all night and is quite destructive and disruptive to their routine.

So, you’re having trouble controlling a developly disabled four year old? In this locked down Soviet interrogation room currently using the cover of a behavioral health treatment facility, Dominic was no match. He weighed thirty five pounds, but was too much for this premier facility. I felt smuggly validated.

The nurse suggested I take some well earned time to take care of myself while Dominic is in their care, and to think of this hospital stay as a kind of respite for me. She couldn’t really believe those words. I wondered if it was the same advice given to parents whose children were in a real children’s hospital. As if the idea of your child in surgery should ever be a relaxing break for a parent.

This was not the last time a psychiatric inpatient hospital stay would be suggested as a respite for me. Years later, in an ER across the country, it was a reason for admission. It was an expensive respite, a tremendous cost to taxpayers. Surely, there was a better option.

The psychiatrist was a small framed man in his fifties. He wore a salmon colored polo shirt and loose pleated khakis. Before we could share any pleasantries he immediately told us he doesn’t believe my son has a seizure disorder. I remained silent, even though I knew it was not his medical specialty, and none of his business.

He wanted to take him off all his medication. This was a common reaction by new to us psychiatrists, and became an annoying trend. We agreed. He would like to change his Zyprexa to Seroquel, take him off his stimulant for ADHD, and remove his seizure medication. Then, as quick as we were introduced, he walked away. It would be the last time we would ever see him.

When I walked out of the hospital, tears poured down my cheeks. I walked to the hotel that would become my second home for the next 10 days. Away from my older son, away from my dog, and away from work. I had $215 in my checking account.

The experiment taking him off his medication would last only three hours. I received a hurried call the next morning that Dominic was leaping from tables, screaming, pulling off his diaper and urinating over furniture, and was generally not acting human. They could not keep him safe. The children around him weren’t safe. It’s hard to imagine my 35 pound 4 year old was any match for the teenagers on the unit. Still, I was told, he was too dangerous. Dangerous, but still ok to be returned to my care at the end of the week.

For the next 10 days, I arrived for that one hour without fail, gave my son a shower, cleaned up his mess, took his poop filled clothing to be washed, and heard staff tell me how they could not keep him asleep, or safe for the other children.

Everyday I cried into my sweatshirt sleeve going down that dirty elevator back outside into the beautiful September weather. Day after day nothing changed as they adjusted medication. A social worker called on day three and encouraged me to find resources to help Dominic back in my county of residence, as if I hadn’t already thought of it.

Eventually, the psychiatrist decided to discharge Dominic back to my care. They did manage to change his Zyprexa to Seroquel, but neither medicine would turn out to be effective for treating Dominic’s violent outbursts. Dominic started sleeping more at night, which improved our family’s lives exponentially.

All of this at a cost for Dominic, who continued to be the person who caused the most chaos in my life, but who had the biggest burden in life to bear. I didn’t know he had attachment trauma from his early life, and these separations were incredibly traumatizing because of his intellectual disability. There was so much I didn’t know yet.

I have been seriously asked to give up on him eight times. The only solution left, I am told, is to just voluntarily place him outside of our home. I’ve been told every time in the same breath to not feel guilty. I am just trying to survive.

I wondered where he would go, if the nation’s premier locked down behavioral health unit couldn’t handle him. As if there were any options for Dominic. At his adoption, his case worker testified my partner and I were not just the best home for Dominic, but the only home.

If my son had cancer, would the only options for survival be the same? There must be different treatment options for the mentally ill choosing care and compassion over individual failure and punitive action. Survival for any parent should never mean giving up your child to be institutionalized as an option for getting a good night’s sleep.