I went there for an evaluation for ECT, and really wasn't all that impressed with the little bit of the place I saw. The psychiatrist who was interviewing me and I were actually kicked out of a private room and were forced to finish the evaluation in what was basically a full waiting room. Confidentiality? LOL.
The fact that the P-Doc hit the roof and started yelling at someone behind a glass window who looked like they didn't give a crap raised my confidence in him, but did very little to give me confidence in the institution as a whole.
His decision was that ECT was not the right path, though both the social worker and psychiatrist I was seeing thought it was. Which is just as well since there's no way I could have done it on an outpatient basis. And inpatient was (and is) off the table given my current insurance.
The other thing that was kind of creepy, and I'd personality consider a breach of confidentiality: I personally saw two people who had gotten the zapperoo treatment that morning wheeled out through the same waiting rooms you entered the place through, full of people, some seemingly with no idea what they were doing there, and nobody around offering any guidance. But as to the two patients: suppose somebody who knew them saw them? It just didn't seem to be the sort of place that cared about confidentiality.
Since I can't say what these two were like going in, I can't offer any comparison to what I saw when they came out. But from what I saw they both looked like they'd had their eggs scrambled, if you know what I mean, and both came out in wheelchairs pushed by an aide that it very much looked like they needed. Maybe they'd been like that due to some condition and not to the ECT, I honestly have no idea. But it wasn't exactly a confidence raiser, either.
That was the kind of creepy part...and how the fuck I'd have been able to do something like that on an outpatient basis I have no clue. Even if I'd had someone willing to drive me in and take me home several times a week (at least during the initial phase, the number of treatments per week got reduced as time went on.) ... but it never happened so that never became an issue.
Anyway, my final impression of the place was that it was sloppily run, didn't give a hoot about the spirit of HIPAA (maybe they were technically okay, but I can't see how) and that confidentiality was something you could forget if admitted.
I was going to ask the psychiatrist if they had autographed pictures of
James Taylor,
Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton (same link as Plath) somewhere but didn't have the balls. And I"m glad I didn't, since he actually seemed like a good guy. Just one working at a rather poorly run institution.