Woman Endured 8 Days in Psych Ward Because Cops Didn't Believe BMW Was Hers | Hacker News Reader

Woman Endured 8 Days in Psych Ward Because Cops Didn't Believe BMW Was Hers

huffingtonpost.com

60 pointsevo_913 comments

> Medical records also show that over the course of her eight-day stay, personnel at the hospital repeatedly tried to get Brock to deny three things before she could be released: that she owned the BMW, that she was a professional banker, and that President Barack Obama followed her on Twitter.

What the hell? Anyone who did this to her should, at a minimum, be fired and blacklisted from the medical profession. How long would it take to verify these things? Sure as hell not eight days.

Plus, of course, they SHOULDN'T have assumed anything before verifying.

There are four lights!

This is a well-studied phenomenon of mental institutions: staff are acclimated to everyone in their presence being mentally ill and denying it. Consequently, they aren't exactly vigilant about finding exceptions. "The patient is lying and having delusions of grandeur" is probably an accurate assessment 99.999% of the time, so they are unlikely to doubt that assessment when the patient is in fact a researcher/journalist investigating the hospital.

This is the Rosenhan study (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment), called one of the most influential psycholocial studies of all time.

This is basically my nightmare. Nothing is as personally terrifying to me then being restrained and medicated.

I also worry about this kind of situation because my wife is black and we live in a very nice house and both enjoy nice vehicles. Neither of us (both tech people) enjoy dressing up-so were often poorly dressed. And we're both absent minded so we've both left our keys inside or had to fiddle with our cars in the driveway. I worry about how different an interaction with a passing police person could be for us-for me, an offer of assistance with a lost key, for her arrest and detainment.

This is crazy. It would have taken all of 30 seconds to run the plates and verify the owner. This must surely have been intentional.

If she bought it via a loan from a bank, making the bank a financier. If it was paid off, it might show the bank still owning the car (ie not her) even though it was the bank's responsibility to transfer back, per the finance agreement. This has happened to me. The takeaway is that it's not as cut and dry as you would expect.

And I hope she wins her million dollar verdict and lives happily ever after.

I'd suggest the fault is more with the police than the hospital... If police drop someone off and assert she claims to own a BMW but does not, claims to have a bank job and does not, then the hospital would have to assume she is delusional about those facts and make a diagnosis on that assumption.

Seriously? At a minimum, the hospital should have made an attempt to obtain her medical records if they are going to medicate her. That would have resulted in their getting her identity, and at least validating her employment. There is also no reason for any entity in New York to just blindly trust the NYPD.

Are those actual doctors or frauds?

If they can't tell a person that DOES have these things (bank job, BMW) from a dellusional person, then can they really treat dellusional people?

Its like a Terry Gilliam movie.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com