Review of Daymark Recovery Center in Monroe

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. 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. 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 they 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 he was released him with a prescription for meds and numbers to call if he needed help. They went with the outpatient route so they could collect more money, when 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 across the street in CMC Union 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 CMC Union. 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 him and Dr. Salizu 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 in, 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. He was only ordered to go see another doctor at Daymark every few weeks to discuss medications and how/if they were working, and to change them if needed. 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. They are petty drug peddlers that are only concerned about their paychecks.

 

Sorry to hear about the lose of your family member.

Due to my job, I have dealt with Daymark a lot. The problem is that there are so many people waiting to go to Broughton. There are only 2 maybe 3 places in NC that take mental health patients. I am a police officer and last weekend alone they took 5 people to the hospital due to involuntary commitments. A lot fo society has learned if you want to get rid of someone you go to teh Magistrates office and say the person is crazy and having suicidal thoughts and they will issue the papers to have them committed.

I know of one individual that sat in the hospital for over two weeks waiting to get a bed in Broughton. I think Daymark cares but you must realize they are constantly getting patients daily and are also running out of beds. They can only do so much and only have so many resources to work with before there is nothing they can do but provide medicines and counseling.