Every day I wake up and every day I survive and thrive
content note: psych abuse
What I Want the World to Know:
Being institutionalized is agonizing on an unspeakable level. My experience left me with a deep shame for my pain and fooled me into thinking that my psychiatric imprisonment was my fault just because I needed a moment to cry. I consider it important to share about resistance within psychiatric institutions as a lot of people don’t even consider it possible.
My Experience Being Hospitalized:
I was forced on October 4, 2023 into a psychiatric ward without my consent by the cops which Public Safety at my college called on me just because I hit my head a few times, and it wasn't even that hard.
The reason I did this self-injurious behavior to myself was to punish myself for my stupidity because I couldn't remember the study material for my History quiz properly.
I just needed time to process my pain and cry for a moment when they took that as purposeful resistance just because I said that I didn't feel comfortable being immediately sent to an on-campus counselor because I felt like I couldn't trust her due to my fear of this exact scenario happening. I just needed a moment to cry, and Public Safety didn't even care to give me that.
I was dehumanized, stripped of all my clothes and belongings, and made to wear only my undergarments, a hospital gown, and those stupid grippy socks.
I was made to wait in complete isolation for seven hours when I was told that my visit there would only be fifteen minutes.
I was purposefully misgendered and deadnamed by almost everyone there (the name I currently go by is not my legal name, as I am currently questioning my gender and go by they/them as of writing this), and even those who bothered to try to get my name and pronouns right refused to treat me even remotely decently, invalidating all my previous traumas whenever I tried talking about them, creating conflict where there was none in the first place, talking amongst themselves about how much of an annoying obligation I was and that I didn't deserve anything good, and one of the psychiatric specialists even tried to accuse me of faking my ADHD while not just immediately accepting my Generalized Psychosis diagnosis, which was also diagnosed by my special ed high school just like my ADHD, but also trying to portray me as dangerous and unstable by continuously asking me about whether I was hearing any voices telling me to do anything dangerous even though all the staff knew that my answer would be no time and time again.
I was traumatized, dehumanized, lied to, stolen from, basically imprisoned, and told that it was all my fault just because I needed a moment to cry.
My Experience in Special Education:
As a kid, I had to go through the Special Education system, which etched my self-dehumanization deep into my skin by stripping me of my humanity far into my youth. In fact, it went as far back as the infamously ableist Superflex, which demonized autistic traits and taught autistic youth to be deeply ashamed of both themselves and their neurotype as well as to try to “fix” what was never broken in the first place and to try to “become neurotypical”. Despite getting an Autism diagnosis earlier on in my life than a lot of people (at about 8 years old in 2011 if I remember correctly), I wouldn’t get accommodations for my neurodivergence until high school (2016 at 13 years old) and even then, it was only test accommodations. Throughout my time in the Special Ed system, all the staff that worked at every special-ed school I went to specialized in the immensely harmful Applied Behavioral Analysis and, as to my memory, especially loved the technique of “planned ignoring” whenever I went into severe distress, victim-blaming me in this stressful and vulnerable moment by falsely accusing me of pretending to be distressed for attention and making sure that my neurotype’s needs were unmet and that I suffered in silence.
Fighting Back Against The Psych System:
It wasn’t until now that I realized that I was against the corrupt and discriminatory Psychiatric Industry, and I especially found it hard for me to speak up against it for the longest time because several people that I’ve known and befriended for the longest time stood firmly by this corrupt system and accused anti-psychiatric advocates of being irrational, dangerous, and against mental wellness, none of which is true for me. The whole point in my verbal advocacy here is to promote the recovery of the systemically disenfranchised, especially recovery from and advocacy against the pseudo-therapeutic Capitalist exploitation that countless Neurodivergent people, myself included, are faced with every day. This is why I aim to both become more vocal about my anti-psychiatric ideals and turn those ideals into real-world activism when I am no longer under the thumb of my controlling and emotionally abusive parents, which I am unfortunately currently completely dependent on for money, food, housing, insurance, and more basics.
Every day I wake up and every day I survive and thrive. Whenever I muster up the courage to leave my house, I pride myself on my survival, my journey to becoming more and more of a walking, living middle finger to the corrupt and violent Psychiatric Industry. If we keep at it with our activism, our collective rage, our efforts to fight back against these monstrous villains, I have faith that one day, the scenes from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest will become as antiquated as medieval torture devices and the demolished and unlocked psychiatric institutions just like the ruined royal middle-age dungeons within their crumbling castles.
What I Wish I Knew, My Advice, and Healing:
I wish I had known that I did not deserve the coercion and abuse that the psychiatrists and supposedly “therapeutic” exploitative figures both throughout my life and within my recent trauma tried to make me think was “treatment”, and I especially wish that I knew earlier that the betrayal I had to face, the fact that these exploitative figures in my life purposefully called the cops and falsely accused me of purposefully defying their orders when I was just in pain and needed to cry, the fact that it is actively mandated for the people that have fooled me into thinking that they would help me to send exploitative figures to incarcerate me without my knowledge or consent all because I was too slow to follow their demands just because I needed a moment to cry my pain away.
I would tell other psych survivors that they are the experts on their own body and mind, and that their anger is worth celebrating. To those who had to face similar pain to me: You know your mind more than anyone else. You know what is best for you. If you need a moment to cry your pain away, you have every right to do that, and no exploitative enforcer of systemic violence has any right to tell you otherwise. I hope that anyone who ends up reading this can at the very least find some sense of solace in these words.
As of right now, I find an immense sense of healing in channeling my rage through listening to some rock music that I’ve been getting back into recently, songs like School by Nirvana, Bullet with Butterfly Wings by Smashing Pumpkins, and more, as well as through sharing my anger with like-minded and at the very least sympathetic people. The last one, being able to share my perspective and aspire to a better, less corrupt system, has taken a huge boulder off of my shoulders and cleansed some of the dirt of the toxic influence that I’ve been exposed to for a lot of my life. Being able to share the rage I have towards this great injustice gives me a little hope and brings me joy in the fact that I am not alone in my suffering, that I am not alone in my trauma, and that we can make the world a better place if we all keep pushing towards the change that we so desperately need in our world.
