If you or one of your loved ones are considering checking into Daymark Recovery for help with a mental illness, I strongly urge you to consider other options. The system there is broken. I feel as if they do not care about the patients that they are supposedly trying to help. My brother had a mental break in February 2011 and was involuntarily committed to Daymark. In retrospect, it appears that they did absolutely nothing for him. He received no one-on-one therapy during his first involuntary commitment, which he desperately needed. He received no positive reassurance that he would be able to manage his mental illness along with the aid of their facility. All Daymark did was hold him for 5 short days and try to hand him a small cup of anti-psychotic medicines. Based on mine and my family's experience, the doctors there are cold, rude, and only care about collecting their paycheck at the end of the week. After the 5 days of holding him there the first time, he was released with a prescription for meds and numbers to call if he needed help. He desperately needed to be transferred somewhere for intenstive inpatient treatment. Eight hours after being released by Daymark the first time he had to be involuntarily committed again the same day, because he wrote a note after his release and disappeared from home. During his second experience with Daymark, my brother was stuck in a room in the hospital across the street for 12 days supposedly waiting on a bed at Broughton. The doctors were shown the note that my brother wrote, and knew full well of his unstable mental state. My brother spent 12 days trapped in a room with no windows, not being able to see the sun. He also received no psychological attention from a doctor this time either, aside from asking him how the meds were working and changing dosages, which was mostly done by the nurses at the hospital. Then one day we received a call from Daymark saying that Dr. Salizu wanted to meet with someone from our family, so he could get to know the situation on a deeper level. So my other brother took off work and sat with my brother in that room all day. He sat there for 7 hours waiting on Dr. Salizu and he never showed up. He even had the nurses call and let him know that he was there and waiting to talk with him about 4-5 hours after arriving, and still the doctor never showed up. The bed at Broughton never materialized at the end of the 12 days, despite them telling us for the last 6 or 7 days of his second involuntary commitment that he was slowly moving up the waiting list and getting closer to receiving a bed at Broughton. Finally, at the end of the 12 days he was sent home a second time with a pocket full of anti-psychotic meds and nothing else, again. Later, it was moved to only a monthly visit for the same purpose to adjust/alter and discuss medication, and NOT to discuss his state of mind. Through their actions, I honestly believe Daymark is only concerned about filling perscriptions for drugs, and not about the well-being of their patients. Daymark even misdiagnosed him as Bipolar 1, so we brought him to get a second opinion at a facility in Mecklenburg County and he was diagnosed with Schizoaffective Disorder, which was a more thorough diagnosis. Daymark didn't take the time or make the effort to come up with a thorough diagnosis, they just shuffled him through the system, didn't help him while he was in their care and just let him go, TWICE. Now it's August and my brother has been dead for 3 weeks from suicide. At the end of all this it's easy for my family and I to see that they did nothing to help his mental state, and we honestly believe they made things worse for him. They stripped him of his dignity, his sense of self worth, and his intellectual prowess. All of which he prided himself on. Please, anyone thinking Daymark is the answer, please reconsider, because they truthfully don't care about anyone they treat.
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