Have you ever been in the hospital or the emergency department to treat urgent health problems?
I was hospitalized once - I was living and working somewhere remote and got some kind of virus from something I had eaten that just wiped me out. Ironically, the hospital I was taken to was one where I had worked previously, so it was an emergency visit but also a reunion with old friends! How about you?
I'm glad you're ok! Did you have to go to one of the trauma centres? Hopefully you weren't admitted to the psychiatric hospital!
I had a very atypical hospital experience, I think - I arrived on foot, just walked into the emergency room, and because they were busy I ended up showing myself to a room and beginning my own admission process. Luckily it was a physical stay - I think being admitted for psych would be more scary, since the problems and lengths of stay aren't always as discretely identifiable, and a patient might feel more out of control.
Political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union
There was systematic political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union, based on the interpretation of political opposition or dissent as a psychiatric problem. It was called "psychopathological mechanisms" of dissent.
During the leadership of General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, psychiatry was used to disable and remove from society political opponents ("dissidents") who openly expressed beliefs that contradicted the official dogma. The term "philosophical intoxication", for instance, was widely applied to the mental disorders diagnosed when
Because in those days, the advancement of medicine simply didn't apply to people with bad scalds, so you didn't have skin grafts, you didn't have things like that. But this was a particularly bad scald, and I think I had 20 minutes to live at some point. The incredible thing for me is that whole two years is wiped from my memory, the whole period of being in hospital. The idea of being burnt is in there somewhere, but I have no knowledge of it. I've