When I was 21, I was involuntarily committed, in handcuffs, to the most hostile floor of a hospital. The floor you’re taken to when no one knows what else to do with you.
I was in the depths of a psychotic episode. Psychiatrists tried to limit my experience to tidy appointment notes and a neat diagnostic box, without care to understand the complexities and nuances that put me, and people like me, in crisis.
I told them with clarity and conviction that the medications they were forcing me to take were actively harming me, but they wouldn’t listen. I felt helpless as they reduced the most traumatic experience of my life to a diagnosis and a pill.
The gap in the perception of reality between us was a chasm that couldn’t be bridged. This is because the enormity of a psychotic episode calls for extensive care the system isn’t built for, and many psychiatrists add to the problem by being condescending, dismissive and even hostile toward their patients.
The patterns of poor mental health care deteriorate even further when looking at psychiatric treatment in prison systems. If there is hope for reform of psychiatric facilities, it must go hand in hand with prison reform.
Instead of emphasizing the separation of society –unstable or well-adjusted– the idea should be to rehabilitate “sick” individuals back into the community with a system that is restorative and patient.
The current systems are harsh. They create a loop of continuous hostile solutions, such as involuntary hospitalizations and incarceration, due to repetitive issues that were left untreated and even worsened.
A re-imagining of how we care for mentally ill individuals would require critical thinking about why psychiatry disproportionately harms people instead of healing them.
I was forced to confront the impact of the flawed system when I became a victim of it. I was left deeply traumatized, and those responsible for it didn’t seem to care.
I’m willing to listen to how much psychiatry has benefited society if you’ve also been given emergency intramuscular injections against your will.
I won’t get into all the gory details of my psychotic episode, but whatever you’re imagining it to be, it was 10 times worse. A lot of that can be attributed to being locked up forcefully, with no regard for privacy or autonomy.
When I was taken away, it was so I could get the help I needed. That help included prohibiting my parents from visiting me, making me sign legal documents without explanation and forcing me to be medicated in ways I didn’t consent to.
I wasn’t treated the way I should’ve been in my state. Everyone there deserved better.
If I could rewrite how my situation played out, I would subtract aggressive cops, constant surveillance and non-consensual medication.I would add patient autonomy, a restful environment and actual attempts to understand what individuals were going through.
The people locked in the hospital with me were the only threads holding me together. I want to work toward creating a world where their experience is healing instead of painful.
We need to take a hard look at the systems that continuously harm us and prioritize their reform through the elimination of force, separation and oppression.
