Hospital

The facility is an adolescent unit.  It seems to be primarily servicing teenage girls likely with eating disorders.  My son is one of a couple of boys.  The patients are easily identifiable owing to their lack of shoes.  Two reasons for that - to prevent fleeing and because of shoelaces (get it?).

The presence of girls is irrelevant to my son as he is quite wrapped up in his own situation.  He has been hospitalized for about 5 days so far.  The first 3 were more or less uneventful.  He was pretty well-behaved.  He sounded a little over medicated as they were feeding him a lot of Haldol.  Much more than he was getting before.  They decided to switch to Navane and that seemed to go OK.

During one visit my wife off-handedly indicated that my son was likely to be home by the end of the week.  That appeared to give him ideas and he seemed to decide that if he really misbehaved he would get home even sooner.  Of course, that logic only makes sense to him.  But the net result was an 18 hour period during which he attempted to flee, attacked staff and other patients and acted out in many ways.  He was restrained and put in isolation.  They don't mess around there.  He was given more Navane, benadryl and Adavan all in an effort to calm him.

We spoke with him and made clear that he would be there as long as needed.  That we did not know when he would be released.  That it was all up to him and his behavior.  Maybe that helped, maybe not.

He was back to being somewhat calmer next time we visited.  Now they are thinking about trying Risperdol again.  I'm thinking if they want to experiment then that's the place to do it.  They are also looking into non-stimulant-based ADHD drugs.