"Ty Llidiard"

I was recently an in-patient at Ty Llidiard, the CAMHS mental health unit in Bridgend, Princess of Wales hospital. I was admitted prior to being in a general hospital to get treated for my depression and anxiety. My experience here was absolutely awful. To get to Ty Llidiard from the general hospital, I was forced into a van with two nurses gripping onto my arms and restraining me, despite being completely calm.

My parents were instructed to leave me with the nurses, crying and shaking, whilst they followed behind us. Once I'd arrived, I was greeted by more stern-looking nurses, one of which informed me about their unpopular mobile phone policy, which limited phone usage to one hour a day. However, they failed to mention that there wasn't any signal, so I was unable to contact anyone during that hour. My experience was that this is a place where you lose all of your rights.

They took basically everything away from me, from towels and clothes and books to even small things like lip balm. They also stripped me of necessities such as soap, toothbrushes and shampoo. I was not allowed any devices in my room. Admittedly, they allowed me to have my laptop HOWEVER they made it clear that it had to be kept in the kitchen, not my room, and I was only allowed to use it during school hours whilst being closely monitored. I would cry almost every night and the nurses would usually laugh at me / make fun of me whilst I cried.

They also really enjoyed shouting at me whenever I was worked up, only causing me to feel even worse. They often talked about sectioning me / calling the police while I was crying, it felt like this was just to make me feel worse. Because, in reality, all I was doing was crying and instead of Helping me, their best efforts to made me even more mentally ill than I was before I came in. As I was there for self-harm, staff also seemed to me to encourage me to harm myself telling me just to go on and do it and that noone cared.

This made me feel awful inside, and I actually did self-harm whilst being in their care as I was being encouraged. From my experience, if you are struggling with mental health then I would not recommend going there. Instead, focus on getting better and healing yourself without support from Ty Llid.