THIS PLACE PERMITS SA AND HARASSMENT OF FEMALE PATIENTS (among many other issues). Do not under any circumstances go here if you are a woman.
No separation of men and women, so female teenage patients are in open proximity at all times to predatory violent men. The SA/harassment I (18f) and other girls experienced during the 6 DAYS (!!!) I spent at Mayhill included groping, being followed, and trying to get us alone, leered at constantly, passed obscene notes and threatening unwelcome advances and comments. This was carried out against the youngest female patients by the late-middle aged male patients in the mental health ward upstairs. One of the men involved beat a staff member and bloodied his face (I witnessed this.)
This place puts the burden on girls to "stay away from" the men in question, and ignored the issues.
Instead of bothering to tell a man to leave me alone, the nurses encouraged me to miss group therapy and stay in my room all day if I wanted to be away from him. (btw they don't have nearly as many group sessions as they advertise.) Essentially you can't get mental health treatment and need to isolate yourself as a woman or it's your fault for attracting attention.
Non consensual or any romantic patient interactions are supposedly entirely banned but this isn't enforced at all. The nurses actively refused to punish any perpetrator or ban them from group/common spaces in any way, or even to tell them "stop." They used the excuse that the men wouldn't listen if told to stop/leave us alone so why even try? The signs everywhere about 0 tolerance for sexual harassment at their facility are like some kind of sick joke.
Upstairs nurses who couldn't care less about harassment were approached about each incident (I brought up 3 separate concerns to 3 or 4 nurses), and all failed to report it upwards to the doctor who heard about nothing that was happening until my family advocated for me.
Mayhill STILL decided that the solution was not to try to stop this behavior but moved me downstairs to the geriatric care unit to "avoid harassment." (spoiler alert: didn't work.) They did this to others who complained as well. In the dementia ward, we had people wandering into our rooms, and I was unable to sleep with elderly dementia patients screaming all night in the other rooms.
I lost all access to the meager amount of therapeutic groups and mental health support upstairs and had to sit doing nothing/watching TV with dementia patients instead. Getting no mental health support essentially for my last several days inside. The geriatric care nurses were extremely hostile and mean, always on their phones, and despite me giving them many reminders that I need it at the same time every day, medications were given at unreliable times and hours late. They managed to lose my prescription meds that I brought. Again they refused to acknowledge or try to prevent the extreme harassment endured by the patients for whose wellbeing they were responsible.
There was annoyance and constant snarky comments from the nurses downstairs, who seemed upset that mental health patients were there and expecting them to do their jobs. The poor dementia patients just sit vegetatively while being verbally abused by the nurses and screamed at to shut up, lol
And the kicker is that downstairs there was an old man making l3wd comments and worse, who they again did nothing about with the excuse "he's confused," (while the man made jokes and verbally harassed us about our discomfort-- CLEARLY he was lucid to realize us girls hated his behavior.) He targeted another girl heavily and it got very very bad for her. Moved us to avoid SA and we got... more SA, and everything else worse than before.
I went to Mayhill following a mental breakdown as the result of a SA. Words can't express how much these experiences retraumatized me and set back my recovery. I checked out on Monday 7/4, so this literally just happened, I'm still in shock and deciding what to do next.
This was my first time in a psych ward, and I am horrified by the very low standard of care and absolute lack of protection, respect, and safety extended to me when I was the most mentally fragile. read more