My First Hospitalization: Part Two
When the police came, the first thing they did was yell at me to calm down.
Before I get into all of this very private, very difficult to retell emotional trauma, there are a couple of points I want to make.
My experience is not atypical. Just because YOU had a positive experience with the psych industry, that does not mean your anecdotal evidence is more powerful than mine. You may notice, in my other posts, I’ve supplemented by anecdotal evidence by pointing out the many systemic issues in the psych field. But no…I get it. It worked for you, so my bad experiences should be minimized. I should be told, “That’s not usually what happens.” Funnily enough, this has never been said to me by another person who has psychosis symptoms (to my knowledge-but I’m aware people don’t always want to disclose that). It has never been said to me by someone else who has been in-patient. It has never said to me by someone who experienced the psych feild while living in a traumatic situation, such as homelessness or abuse. It’s the polished pretty little neat and tidy mentally ill who say this to me. And I’m sure you have good intentions, but I find that incredibly upsetting. You don’t know this side of the psych field. You haven’t experienced it. Yet, you want to defend the psych field because your 40 minutes a week sitting on a comfy sofa and talking about yourself made you feel warm and fuzzy.
So fuck my experiences of being treated like a criminal, being over-drugged until I couldn’t function and my symptoms were exacerbated, having my abuse ignored. Fuck my trauma. Right?
Would you ever walk into a Black Lives Matter protest and go, “But sometimes people are helped by cops.”
(I have my issues with how BLM operates, but obviously I’m in agreement that police brutality is a problem).
Would you walk into a class action lawsuit with female employees fighting systemic harassment and say, “But there are good men who work here. They help a lot of people.”
I feel like, you probably wouldn’t.
The fact that there are some good doctors and the fact that some people are helped by the mental health industry does not negate the fact that there are systemic issues. And frankly, I find it despicable that people are so defensive to having these systemic issues addressed. I can’t figure out the motivation to shut down the conversation.
If you are going to argue that my experience is atypical, you need some data. Or you’re talking out of your ass for reasons I can’t figure out.
I’m working on collecting some data right now. I’m starting with how many depressed people have committed suicide ON medication as opposed to off.
Even before I get that though, I’ve done a decent job of pointing out many of the issues in the psych field (see this post) and my argument is already a great deal stronger than “But MY experiences with the psych field were good!!”
And it’s an especially weak argument when you consider that it’s not the most severely mentally ill saying this. It’s not the lowest socioeconomic brackets. It’s not the unpolished, messy mentally ill with psychosis symptoms. It’s the little middle class white girls who cry about their parents divorce and then go home and write in a gratitude journal. Like…it’s fucking amazing to me with how much everybody screams about “lived experience” and “Own voices” that the one group it seems to be fine to talk over is the severely mentally ill. I’ll keep saying it until people get it: if you have not been in-patient, if you do not have psychosis symptoms, if you did not experience the psych field while homeless or while living in an abusive home situation, then you have not experienced the worst side of the psych field. Take a seat. For the love of God, take a seat.
I can not tell you how it feels to finally be opening up about this stuff, only to have people pipe up and tell me my perceptions are wrong. My experience was atypical. The psych field is good.
You read my story and think that;s the time to say “the psych field is good.”
You use me opening up about some of the most painful events in my life, and opening up about my single greatest insecurity-my mental health problems, and you use it to advocate FOR the very institution which harmed me.
Just…
Now that I’ve got that out of the way…I know people aren’t gonna stop.
Maybe when you’re done you could go find a black person to lecture someone who survived police brutality on how THEY had a good experience with cops.
(To be clear, what black people experience with the police is worse than anything I’ve experienced with the mental health industry. I’m not comparing the two, other than to say, you can’t negate systemic problems with anecdotes, and when dealing with a person who has been traumatized, it’s fucked up to use anecdotes to minimize or dismiss abuse at the hands of power structures.)
I guess, let’s keep going now.
I was a skinny middle-class white girl who was absolutely not threat to the police, and they came in yelling and hostile.
How do you think they treat a large black man having a mental health episode?
I’ll admit, being small and female and middle class and white, with everything I have seen, even I have not seen the very worst side of the mental health industry. I’ll never see it. But with things being as bad as they were, I can only imagine what it would be like for someone poorer, blacker, or crazier than me.
It was an emotionally-charged situation and the police came in yelling at me to calm down.
Well, they did get me to calm down.
They had me sit in the living room while we waited for the ambulance. I was in my pajamas. That was what I’d been in when the altercation with my grandfather happened. I had no bra or underwear on. I didn’t want to leave the house like that. I wanted to put clothes on. I asked if I could change my clothes. They wouldn’t let me go back to my bedroom.
Maybe that doesn’t sound like a big deal. It was though. I ended up in the emergency room in these pajamas, feeling incredibly conspicuous and uncomfortable. I was disheveled and gross looking. The whole process of a crisis intervention is a blow to your dignity. So going through it in pajamas without any bra or underwear on, it was an extra blow to my dignity. not to mention, I’d just had the crap beaten out of me and everybody was acting like I was wrong to be so upset about it.
I became agitated again after they wouldn’t let me change into jeans and a hoodie. So I was screaming and freaking out again by the time the ambulance came.
They didn’t have to restrain me in the ambulance, because I said I’d calm down if the cops weren’t riding with us.
The guy in the ambulance was actually nice. He talked to me like I was a person. He said things like “Having a rough one, huh?”
And I said, “I’m really having a rough one.”
He said, “They’ll help you feel a little better at the hospital. What grade are you in?”
And he just talked to me like I was a human being and had a conversation with me.
