Boston Medical Center Emergency Room

I went to the check-in desk and said "I'd like to talk to a psychiatrist for about 10 or 15 minutes."

The person at the check-in desk went out of her way to be dismissive and unhelpful.  She sat there shaking her head and saying "I have no way of finding out if a psychiatrist can talk to you.  All I do is register people.  I can register you and you can sit down and wait, but that's all I can do," and while I said nothing and stood there wondering what she thought I had asked her to do other than what she was saying her job was, someone else approached and stood several feet behind me.  This was the only time that the person at registration interrupted her quiet tirade about being unable to help me, to tell the woman who was standing several feet behind me "You have to go sit down and wait."  The woman said "You don't even know what I was going to ask." The BMC worker repeated that she had to sit down and wait, and the woman left the ER.

Someone who might have been a nurse walked over and was invited into the quiet tirade of unhelpfulness, while I said nothing.  I was described to the nurse-like person as "This lady wants me to find out if someone from psych can talk to her," which wasn't what I had said.  At no time had I indicated a lack of understanding about what registration at an ER does.

Upon hearing this mischaracterization of me, the nurse shook her head and sneered at me; her lip curled, and she said to me "That's not how our process works." I walked out, angry but knowing that I had done everything that I could tonight to obtain psychological support for having witnessed an attempted rape the night before last.

What about someone who doesn't have the experience with the mental health care system that I have and who doesn't know that you don't have to take unhelpful idiots to heart, even and especially when they seem to all be working during the same shift, throughout a metropolitan area world-famous for its healthcare?  What if they had treated someone who wasn't showing outward signs of agitation but who was suicidal, or homicidal, the way that they treated me?

Are the social services in Massachusetts more complacent, lazy, self-satisfied, condescending, punitive and worse than worthless than those in the rest of the country? Is it this bad everywhere, or is it even worse than this everywhere else?

It's not only in Massachusetts that people who have had good lives and who haven't really needed counseling or other types of psychological or emotional support don't tend to know how bad social services are, or to believe it when they are told.  That, I already know.