University of New Mexico

Everyone there was great with the exception of an extremely rude woman by the name of Angela working at patient check in at urgent care who behaved extremely rude and unprofessional causing my brother's fragile mental condition to become agitated and caused him to become very nervous and shaky and uncomfortable. This woman continued to feel the need to repeatedly say that she "knew how to do her job" because she has "worked there 20 years", but this person has no business working with people who suffer from mental disorders. She made myself and my brother extremely uncomfortable. My brother was already experiencing mental and emotional distress about coming to a new place and she made it worse. He became hesitant to complete his sign in paperwork and became very shaky. My brother struggles to communicate due to his condition and this person loudly and openly put him on the spot making the entire check in very uncomfortable. Another patient in the waiting area commended me for not losing my cool with this extremely poorly trained woman.

I went to the psychiatric emergency department in an absolute mental health crisis. The resident, Dr. Penrose, tried his best to understand the situation. He was ok, I guess. Then, he and Dr. Ferre the attending came in and told me they were just going to refer me to therapy. Dr. Ferre had an attitude that made me feel like I was wasting her time. When I pointed out that it would take me like 6 months to get into therapy at UNM, Dr. Ferre said "you're much better off than most of our other patients." In other words, she completely invalidated my crisis situation and my feelings. No doctor should do such a thing, let alone a psychiatrist. What if it were a medical situation - "I am so upset I have liver cancer" and then a doctor says something like "well people with colon cancer have it worse than you." Dr. Ferre has the therapeutic communication skills of a teenage DMV employee, if that. I went home feeling so hopeless that I became suicidal.

This place isn't the worst place to go for mental health, but it's also not the worst. I will say this though, I had very unconventional interests professional demolitions and I voiced as much to my stupidity, they heard that and twisted my words during the court date. This is why we have a mental health crisis, because places like this are usually playing some type of games with people's mental health or are like Hell on Earth.

Absolutely awful. Stay away from the START clinic. Kathryn Fraser is the medical director and shouldn't have a job much less be medical director. She's rude, argues with patients and tell them that they are lying to cover for her lying psychiatrists. She blames the patients for her own shortcomings and those of her psychiatrists. She is hostile, cuts you off, is verbally abusive and rude. Unprofessional.

I took a family member who is a minor to the Psychiatric Emergency Room yesterday. My family member should have have been admitted due to suicidal ideation, however they told us half of their children’s inpatient facility was closed due to remodeling and there were no beds. They told us the other psychiatric hospital in town didn’t have beds either. They sent us home. There was another underage patient in the waiting room who was distressed and should have been admitted, but she was sent home too. I know this because the doctors were speaking to patients in the waiting room instead of in private rooms. They did ask permission to speak with patients there, but I don’t understand why they weren’t using the rooms. It was like they just wanted everyone out of there ASAP. I hope whoever decided that remodeling without a back up plan about where patients could go will be able to live with themselves if patients seeking help are sent home and hurt themselves or die. I would also like to point out that in December of 2021 the Surgeon General announced that there is a mental health crisis among youth. It seems like more resources should be added instead of being taken away.

The process to get into this place in impossible. At the time I had my referral sent into this place they had space for a new patient, but it took them 2 months to deny my referral because they no longer had space for a new patient. To add this beyond frustrating process the woman who answers the phone is void of any kindness, knowledge, professionalism, or care. If this is the place where most people can get their care, then I pray for everyone's mental health!

I was concerned about my lymphocytes being above normal range 53% while normal is objectively verifyibly %20-%40 but was told that "our labs" have a normal range of 30-60 so I obviously can't trust your information if it contradicts most of the medical community. So you don't care about figuring out the truth, you just say "this is all the information we have". So basically instead of getting objective and true information I just got "that's what the thing says". How can you be a doctor if you just follow the orders of your system and not care about contradicting data? I want to be actually healthy, I don't want your system to just say I'm healthy. Won't be coming back if there's that level of obliviousness to overwhelming objective data.

They did their best to help me and scheduled a follow up appointment. They had empathy for me and made me feel heard and cared for.

They are a good place it's just quite a waiting list to get in there. I think there are better places you could go to sooner.