‘The unit seemed like a correctional facility’: How my girl was broken by a health service meant to support her
The understanding came to me with blunt clarity that the treatment center treating my teenager mirrored a penal facility.
She had trusted unquestioningly in the medical staff. We had mirrored that trust. Everything changed radically when she was moved from our local medical center to the locked ward at the mental health center.
As we got ready to depart, she stepped quietly toward the patient transport alongside me and her support worker, who held her close before saying farewell.
The moment the transport entrance gave access at the destination facility, the grim building appeared formidable. We were received by staff who guided us up stairs through air-locked portals, with each door locking completely behind us as the staff member waited for secure engagement before accessing the following.
The facility was completely enclosed and without windows, with my eyes quickly straining from the blinding overhead lights. We were brought to a glass-enclosed space that staff nicknamed the “monitoring station”.
The Heartbreaking Separation
Her delicate fingers tightened in mine as they told me that I needed to depart. When I objected that I hadn’t met the staff, they responded that “parents are not permitted on the unit.”
I asked once more, and they relented I could see her room, just once, but then I had to leave right away. It was facility rules.
Even now, I rise in the night with my heart racing as I recall walking through the communal zone to Ruth’s assigned room. The sparse furnishings included a single bed and basic furniture, with unopenable windows.
Their voices grew distant as they detailed how a changing caregivers would observe Ruth every hour. I placed her belongings on the ground. Ruth remained positioned on the bed, visibly frightened, before I was led away.
In an instant, I was locked beyond the air-locked entrances, holding a form that specified my visitation with my daughter to only a single hour, two times per week.
How could I have consented to this?
A Tragic Loss
{Our daughter, Ruth Szymankiewicz, succumbed on Valentine’s Day 2022 at 6:29 PM on the children’s ICU at John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford. She was transferred urgently from the mental health facility, an NHS commissioned but privately run child and adolescent mental health unit, where she had been left to fatally self-harm previously.|Our beloved daughter lost her life on February 14, 2022 at evening in the {pediatric intensive care unit|