https://time.com/7206080/long-covid-psychiatric-wards/
"In late 2022, Erin, a 43-year-old from Pennsylvania, agreed to spend six weeks
in a psychiatric ward, getting intensive treatment for an illness she knew she
didn’t have.
That decision was a last resort for Erin, who asked to be identified only by
her first name for privacy. Her health had deteriorated after she caught
COVID-19 nearly a year earlier; the virus left her with pain, fatigue, rapid
weight loss, digestive problems, and vertigo. After another bout with a virus
months later, Erin only got sicker, developing heart palpitations, muscle
spasms, hoarseness, and pain in her neck, throat, and chest.
Erin was no stranger to chronic illness, having coped with a connective-tissue
disorder her whole life. This was different. She became unable to work and
rarely left her home. Her usual doctors were stumped; others said her litany of
symptoms could be manifestations of anxiety.
When it became too painful to eat and swallow, Erin grew severely malnourished
and was hospitalized at a large academic medical center. “I felt at the time
like this was my last hope,” says Erin, who has since been diagnosed with Long
COVID. “If I didn’t get any answers there, I didn’t know where to go
afterward.”
Once again, however, she was disappointed. The only physical diagnosis her
doctors landed on was vocal-cord dysfunction, which Erin felt did not explain
her wide range of symptoms. When her doctors began to discuss discharging her,
Erin panicked and said she could not manage her excruciating symptoms at home—a
sentiment that she says contributed to concerns of self-harm among her doctors
and kicked off conversations about a stay in the psychiatric ward. Eventually,
seeing no other way forward, Erin agreed to go. “I just got increasingly
defeated over time,” she says. “I didn’t know what to do.”
She was admitted for a six-week stay and given diagnoses she knew were wrong:
an eating disorder and anxiety.
The vast majority of Long COVID patients will not land in psychiatric wards,
but Erin is far from the only one who has. “Emergency rooms are dangerous
places for people with Long COVID,” says David Putrino, who studies and treats
the condition as director of rehabilitation innovation for the Mount Sinai
Health System in New York.
Numerous patients, he says, are told that inpatient mental-health care is their
best or only option. He has worked with at least five patients who were
ultimately admitted—and says some of his patients’ stories sound a lot like
Erin’s. “Imagine you go to an emergency department, you wait 13 or 14 hours,
your condition actually deteriorates, and then you’re told, ‘Hey, good news,
everything is normal and we’re sending you home,’” Putrino says. “Going home
doesn’t sound like a survivable outcome. So at that point you might break
down...and often that gets reinterpreted as ‘Let’s put this person on a psych
hold.’”
Such experiences fit into a long, troubling tradition in medicine. Because
there often aren’t conclusive tests for these types of complex chronic
conditions, and because many patients do not outwardly appear unwell, they’re
frequently told that they aren’t physically sick at all—that symptoms are all
in their heads. “Mainstream medicine really isn’t geared toward treating
conditions and diseases that it cannot see under a microscope,” says Larry Au,
an assistant professor of sociology at the City College of New York who has
studied one of the consequences of that disconnect: medical gaslighting of Long
COVID patients."
Via Violet Blue’s
Covid News: January 16, 2025
https://www.patreon.com/posts/threat-model-16-120104985
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
