joefloodSenior Contributor
BPD diagnosis being used by hospital to deny treatment.
Our 21 year old daughter is under normal circumstances a beautiful, kindly, intelligent and popular girl with no obvious problems. However since the age of 17 she has been subject to shortish psychotic episodes of the most extreme kind, the kind which in less enlightened days might have been called "demonic possession". In the USA several hospitals have diagnosed her as bipolar with episodic psychosis, taken into hospital, treated for about a month and put back into the community where she has functioned normally for nine months or so.
However after coming to Australia over two months ago she almost immediately fell ill, and was diagnosed with BPD. Her care plan, for which we were not consulted or given a copy, says she is "not to be admitted to hospital in emergency situations". So she has systematically been denied treatment and grudgingly admitted only after extended forceful arguments by us, the police and the community sector. They usually take her into Emergency and throw her back on the streets in an hour, completely out of her mind. Frequently they call the police to remove her. Typical statements "hospital is for mentally ill people and she has BPD", "if she was going to k*ll or seriously injure herself she would have done it by now, she knows exactly what she is doing" "laymen might well think she is insane but we are doctors and we know".
This is to a girl who cannot recognise her own mother except sporadically, is completely dissociated and mostly unable to respond to commands, is having auditory and visual hallucinations, throws off her clothes and walks down the middle of the busy road. The police have picked her up about ten times now, and she has had five ambulance trips to hospital; where of course they just release her. We have been evicted because she broke five windows trying to escape, and attacked me biting and spitting. We have been threatened with much worse by the landlord if the police should be called here yet again.
Under the Australian system she is not allowed to go to any hospital except this one, her regional centre.
Has anyone else had a situation where hospitals have systematically denied treatment because of a BPD diagnosis and deliberately allowed psychotic patients to wander the streets in grave danger, despite the vociferous opposition of parents, the police and public?
