Comment on BBC Asylum documentary

youtube link for bbc documentary on the history of the asylum

Things were much worse for us skitzes. Not that things right now are peachy. I know a lot of people likely hold on to misconceptions, stereotypes, and irrational fears of schizophrenics and the mentally ill. That's okay, I do not hold this against them too much, it could be worse...they could lobby to re-institutionalize us, or to take away our constitutional rights. They have not done that, most likely, and I am infinitely grateful.

The thing I hated the most, aside from the strange power dynamic between patients and omnipresent staff, or the one sociopath faking symptoms and trying to mess with the women, or the horrible suffocation that comes with imprisonment, yes, the thing I hated the most was the decaf coffee. I am not belittling the horrible things that go on in psychiatric facilities....but it was the littlest, most trivial form of punishment that hurt the most. Even incarcerated felons get real coffee. I, with a clean record, am denied the one thing that made me want to get out of bed in the morning: real coffee. Instead I get a tiny little dixie cup filled with weakened decaffeinated coffee. The cup of decaf coffee was like a symbol of some larger injustice.

Another way to look at asylums is this way: it is an internment camp, a detention center, a coed jail of innocents (mostly innocents). 2.2 million American schizophrenics must all suffer for the crimes of a lone gunman, and that does not even include the number of bipolar mental patients, or others.

The end of this BBC documentary made me hopeful at first, until the last 3 minutes where the narrator stated that a random act of violence resulted in people condemning the lack of asylums and condemning all mentally ill people and demanding their anti-constitutional captivity. Up until that point it was all looking so peachy.

I do not want to go back into the hospital. This hospital does not come with kind nurses and little get well cards or teddy bear presents. I want my coffee. I want my freedom.

I am now going to walk along the canal bank listening to pop music and feeling grateful that I can walk more than 8 feet without hitting a locked door.

I will have my bachelor's degree from University by next August. I am just this semester and 2 summer classes away from my goal of achieving a higher degree, something my illness and poverty made me think I could never accomplish. I am graduating thanks to the free rent my family provides, kindly donated scholarship and grant money, federal pell grant financing, the acceptance of my fumbling, nervous manners by my professors, and the County, who provided me with medicine and a counselor, or my handler, as I think of him, as though I were some kind of asset! ;)

Anyways, I am not bragging, I just wanted to end this entry on a positive note!