"Awful experience"

I echo the comment about this hospital leaving me with more problems than I had when I went in. It was a horrific experience for me.

My consultant would bully me at ward round meetings with snide comments & the nursing staff & ward doctor either stayed quiet or laughed at the remarks. Some of the support workers were kind & decent people but others joined in the bullying culture & made it clear which patients they liked & which ones despised.

I was not kept informed of the reasons why I had to remain in hospital, nor why I could be discharged. My notes included decisions that were never discussed with me, eg not able to leave the premises because I was apparently a flight risk. When I asked why my notes said that, I was told it was because I seemed unhappy at the hospital. I was unhappy but I had no intention of leaving without my doctor's consent. Had I known that being unhappy (hard to avoid when you're depressed) meant I was not allowed to leave the premises for 4 weeks I would have pretended to have been fine which was part of the reason why my condition got so bad in the first place.

Staff used the threat of sections & referral to NHS wards to try to control patients they did not like. They were derogatory about the NHS although my experience with NHS' mental health services has been miles better than it was with the Priory.

My discharge was poorly managed. My consultant & the ward doctor claimed that they didn't know how to refer me back to my GP & I had to find a new consultant myself when I was discharged because I only had 5 days' medication.

I made repeated requests for my records (for insurance & employment reasons). They have all been ignored, despite the law requiring them to provide the information (or if they have a reason for withholding it, to give that reason). They didn't even send my GP a discharge letter.

The therapy team was disorganized & therapy sessions were perfunctory. I was told I would see a psychologist one-on-one for 2 hours per week; when she did show up, she stayed 10-15 minutes at best. The group therapy sessions merely comprised a junior psychologist reciting basic health information that we already knew. Although the group sessions were meant to be led by different therapists, they were mostly left to the junior psychologist who was well-meaning but very new & she could not do much more than repeat general knowledge information. Another member of the therapy team, not trained in anything, repeated the same presentation each week in which he told us that there is no medical evidence to support the notion of depression, medication makes no difference, it's all about mindset and self-discipline etc. Hard to square that with doctors prescribing medication & the body of scientific evidence that undermines his claims.

Even small things like getting medication took far longer than it should have, people would often be waiting in line for up to 30 minutes to get pills in the even