Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic – 61st Street

All you hear about is how wonderful this hospital is and how many famous people have been here. The hospital emphasizes it s history as somehow forward thinking. I was there in 1984 at the age of 16 in an adult coed ward. The experience traumatized me. I hope it s better now.

I was admitted in 1979 by my sister and a good friend who has passed I was a very wild teenager and I had a bad arm that was cut and I couldn't move it up or down and when the doctors what should I say psychiatrist had me in the room they try to hold me down and I couldn't put my arm down and then they sent a neurologist to come see me and next door was New York Hospital and they did surgery and they restored the use of my arm 80% though so if I didn't go there with my craziness as a 17 year old I never would have had an arm even though it's not 100%. Thank you Maria

I entered an intensive outpatient program back in 2007. I am writing about it now in 2022 because the deleterious effects of it were not fully clear until last year. Payne Whitney needs to take responsibility for its bad practices.In 2007, I looked into a program that I suspected might have been right for me. I was given a fifteen minute evaluation over the phone. This is unacceptable. All psychological evaluations are at least an hour long, sometimes two. No diagnosis can be made with a few questions remotely. The fact that the program diagnosed in this way demonstrates an inability to grasp the complexity of mental illness. In the end, the program was wrong about my issues, and the clinicians probably weren t qualified to do their jobs.My therapist never explored my family background, which was very important to understand my psychology. I was emotionally abused. She actually wanted me to attend a family Thanksgiving, ignoring the family dynamics that created my issues in the first place.The program was sloppy in how it handled the psychiatric treatment of its patients. Payne Whitney is attached to Cornell residency. We patients had to give up our very experienced psychiatrists in order to participate in the program. Suddenly, I was working with people who were finishing up a four-year apprenticeship. The fourth year residents were clearly very green. The quality was uneven, and I knew when there were problems. My concerns were regularly dismissed despite my long-term experience with psychiatrists.Some of the techniques in the first year did put me in touch with and help me move past maladaptive behavior, but after a year, progress stalled. My therapist moved onto a technique with no known therapeutic basis that was extremely harmful. Whatever she was doing induced rage. I asked if she could find an alternate method. She said no. The rage scared my neighbors and had me extremely worried. Eventually I left a voicemail for the attending physician and my therapist that had them frightened. That should have been a wake-up call, but they continued to induce rage. I left the program shortly thereafter.Rage serves no clinical purpose. In fact, it is probably treated as a symptom. The motivations of the therapist and the attending physician were unclear, but their behavior was unprofessional. The attending s (Malley Occhiogrosso)coup de grace was telling me that the most I could expect from my work life was working a cash register and summarizing newspaper articles. Nothing this vicious ever belongs in a therapeutic setting.I left the program severely hampered in my ability to work. Tasks I could handle before the program became impossible after. Twenty years of successful work experience continued to slip away to the point of not being able to work at all.All physicians take the Hippocratic Oath: First, do no harm. The psychotherapeutic professions have created something similar. The staff at Payne Whitney violated these oaths.