My last post was a little bleak. I blame the hot weather in my city, and my ever changing internal moods for that.

I discussed the abuse at the hospitals with my therapist. Well, I didn't so much discuss things as I ranted and raved for a good hour about the injustices in the American mental health care system. Finally, he stitched me back together in about five minutes of behavioral modification (or cognitive behavioral therapy, whichever term you prefer), altered my perspective, and sent me home feeling like a little embarrassed for losing my patience.

I have this love hate relationship with the county mental health system. They were both the people who hurt me and the people who saved me and helped me to recover. Sometimes, the same person is in both categories.

I have been a ward of the county's mental health program since the age of 22-23 (previous to that I was enrolled in private insurance under my mother which warehoused me in the hospital that was actually pretty fancy back in the day, with lavish cakes for dessert and non-stop art therapy). For the bulk of the time I was with the county I felt ignored, belittled, maligned, and neglected. At one county center my doctor was a new person every three months, the previous doctor having quit or gotten fired, and it was a stressful relaying all the painful bits of my life to a new doctor every three months.

Then again, the county provided free medicine so long as I entered a rehabilitation program, but that was years later, in approximately 2008-2009. The county both provided for me and left me to my madness with no concern for my well being. It was a confusing time, my enemies were my carers and my carers weren't caring....but they could care at random and unexpected moments. If this sounds confusing, that is exactly what I felt. Confused. Alone. Tormented by internal voices and treated as a leper by the external world. But there were moments of refuge. I found refuge with other schizophrenics and bipolar people. I made unlikely friends: from different social classes, of different races, and different religions. The only thing that bonded us was our shared experience of forced hospitalization. Despite what we were (or had been) on the outside, once inside we became blank, generic mental patients; interchangeable cogs in a machine we had no control over.

I cannot relay just how startling it can be to have staff not speak to you when they approach you to take your blood pressure. It is a silent act between a nurse and whatever that person saw me as: a sick person, maybe, or maybe they saw me as a sick thing, a thing that was more like an animal than like them. It is when you have been dehumanized to this point that something kicks in: a final coping mechanism. A last ditch effort to find human decency where there is none. Every smile becomes a source of fuel, more powerful than the watered down decaf coffee they serve on the wards. A smile could make the boredom tolerable, could make the interactions with the volatile patients tolerable, make being in captivity while the world moves around without you---tolerable. The bonds I made with the other schizophrenics are deep. I still run into someone from the hospital from time to time (in the county behavioral center, on the bus, etc...) they have always cracked a wide grin, approached me, sometimes hugged me, always asked how I was and if I remembered this group or that hospital from the past. I will not lie, I both cringe and breathe a sigh of relief whenever I run into another former patient. I cringe because I am almost done with my Master's degree now (I am going to be in my final semester this fall), I  have been passably healthy and out of the hospital for 5-6 years now, I have new hobbies, new friends, a new life---I pretend like I was not that sick person banging on the bullet-proof window rambling about suicide and CIA agents; I cringe because it hurts to remember the damage. Yet, I breathe a sigh of relief because I can finally smile my real smile at somebody who knew the "real me." There is a kinship between us former mental patients based on the mutual experience of being dehumanized, marginalized, imprisoned, all for our own good.We are what society mocks, at least when they are not busy building up hysteria around us because of some sociopath who may or may not have also had the label of schizophrenic, bipolar, or autistic at some point in their pasts. I strongly disagree with the idea that schizophrenia, bipolar, or autism disorder is the root (or even tangential) cause of mass murders. I have known many great men and women who were totally insane. One of the kindest woman on the wards was a middle-aged African-American lady who said she heard non-stop golden oldies playing like a radio in her head to the point where she could hear and do nothing else (except sing along, which, to my great amusement, she did frequently). I must remember this woman and the others whenever I get angry about the hospitals. There was cruelty, yes, but there was also random acts of love and compassion that I have never found on the Outside.

I will always love those that I met on the inside: who found a way to keep their souls through everything. They are like me. I am like them. This reminds me of a book by Philip K. Dick called "Clans of the Alphane Moon," a science fiction tale about a future where the mentally ill were rocketed en mass into outer-space, to colonize their own planet without infringing on the realities of the Normals. It is a great book! I  highly recommend it due to its unique insight into the quirks of those with mental illnesses and its laugh out loud style humor. On this random note, I bid you adieu. 

Who works at Mental Hospitals?

A criminology professor once told a class I was taking that people who have power complexes and want to dominate and control other human beings tended to flock towards jobs in mental hospitals. There, they could exert their power over an unwilling person with the justification that "they're just not like us." What do I mean by "exerting power"? One of the times (this is only ONE of the many times) that I was sexually abused in the mental hospital, the staff saw ---watched---an older male patient enter my room (I was not used to door locks in psych wards because many do not allow for even a moment's privacy, this will be pertinent later). They were not even five feet away at the desk, with my door practically facing them. The man came in and he was already stripped down to his boxer shorts. He pulled out his genitals and began to masturbate. Nobody stopped him, everybody saw him. I had to get aggressive by yelling at him to "get the f out" while kicking the air around him. Even though I was yelling, nobody came, nobody helped, nobody even feigned concern. I chased him away and went back to sleep (I can sleep through anything because I have been abused in the hospitals enough where it is not anything to lose my sleep over anymore).

The next day my doctor came into my room (everyone, EVERYONE can go into your room. This is supposed to be just for staff to check we're not dead, but in reality this means other mental patients, ex-felons, whoever happens to be detained at the moment).

"Why didn't you go to group?" the doctor asked. Silly question. Once my psychosis stops, I realize that my major psychological issue is being cooped up in a psych ward with a bunch of predators (be they the rare, hostile mental patient or the more common sociopathic employees that do the checks). How exactly will group treat the fact that I hate the mental health care system and see it as an archaic throw-back to lobotomy days? I can just imagine being told to go back to my room because my ideas were "disturbing to the other patients' well being".

I muttered something to my doctor about hating group and then I blurted out that I was boycotting everything outside my bed to protest that old male who trespassed and was probably about to rape me.

"WHO?" Yelled the doctor. See, doctors really are not in charge. They think they are and they should be, but they are not on the ward nearly long enough to understand the dynamics that exists behind locked doors.

"That f^$ right there," I yelled, pointing my finger at the offender, who had been moved to a room directly visible from my own bed. The doctor fumed, but again, doctors don't have nearly as much power over my day-to-day life as the mental health technicians. He chased the offender, who went inside the bathroom. I went back to sleep, knowing KNOWING I would wake up and the offender would be on the same ward as myself, STILL. He did not get moved to another room, they just "had a talk with him." "We'll handle it," they said. One of these days someone is going to lift that rug off the floor and see the dirty horrors that you swept under the rug for decades.

Nobody came. Nobody saved me. That is what it is like inside the mental hospital. Here is a link to a video that is pretty close to what I have personally seen going on. Staff do tend to magnetically gravitate towards one patient in particular (someone who they see is easy to control). They can get verbally abusive. They are clever predators though: they are guilty of neglect and cover-ups but they keep their hands "clean" by not physically leaving marks on the patients. They have other ways to make a person suffer. At this hospital where a reporter went undercover as a mental health technician, it was revealed that there had been physical and psychological abuse of autistic, suicidal, and other marginalized groups.

In some country (name forgotten), the recovered mental health patients are hired to treat their own kind--so that a schizophrenic who is medicated and recovered, can work in the hospital alongside those like him who are still very, very sick. This model is beautiful because Normals have no idea what it is like to hear voices, or to feel hysterical fear for days on end. Other schizophrenics know what that is like, and we can feel a tremendous amount of empathy and compassion for those of our ilk who are still in their psychotic states. I would really much prefer to have a medicated schizophrenic looking after my well-being and protecting me than these Normals. They keep forgetting we are humans who feel pain when they hurt us.

BELOW: LINK to a 15 minute youtube video showing the inside of a locked ward (BBC took down the entire episode, but it might be floating out there in cyber-space). The title is "Undercover care: Abuse Exposed" by BBC panorama.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqg_UjWhmOM

Off the Grid for a Semester

I started this blog with the intention to share my personal experiences with what I thought was paranoid schizophrenia (now it is either schizo-affective or bipolar with psychosis, depending on which doctor you ask). Since then, I  have graduated from a CSU as a returning adult student, had a couple of menial jobs, entered graduate school for a Master's degree, volunteered at fundraisers, taken my medication almost every day, kept my doctor's appointment, and started working on my Master's thesis. At the age of 23 I was given a life sentence of chronic insanity: paranoid schizophrenia. I was told to go on disability and avoid stress and driving at all costs. I guess you can count me as one of those mental patients who did not listen to their doctor's advice. My doctor was actually pretty adamant that I stop driving because he thought I would think that other cars were following me. How outdated is that?! I am a modern, contemporary paranoid and we new paranoids know (yes, we know) that if any agency or shadowy figure really, truly wanted to follow us, they would do it via satellites. One cannot outrun the satellite. Why my former psychiatrist could not wrap his head around that logic is beyond me. But the point is now moot---I am neither on disability or taking the bus to get around.

My friend from high school recently came back into my life. At the moment, she is the only person alive who knows my secret (I'm a former mental patient) and who is not a member of my family. She finds it a little unusual that I "went off the grid" for about a decade, to return at the age of 27, newly rehabilitated from an outpatient center, to enter college, finish, continue with post-post secondary schooling, and ultimately, exhibit totally normal behaviors all the while proclaiming that I was a charlatan who was a mental hospital escapee and nothing else.

Mental wards are not day spas. They are co-ed deprivation tanks (when you are lucky, when you are unlucky they are torture chambers). The damage inflicted by other mental patients, mental health technicians, and fishy nurses has been done and, sadly, it looks permanent.

I would give my left pinky finger to ensure that the sexual assaults that happened to me in the psychiatric hospitals never happen to anybody else. But what can I do? I am on the outside, which technically makes me a success story. Some success story! I hide in my little room inside my family's house and type these private secrets to anybody with an internet connection. I still have all consuming anger at the way my sexual assaults were handled by administration (namely: ignore it, let it happen, pretend it didn't happen, minimize it, shuffle it under the rug, refuse to press charges, etc...etc...etc...).

The mental health care system in this country sucks. No other word explains it as succinctly. Imagine this: you get yanked out of bed, strapped to a gurney, restrained with leather cuffs on your wrists and ankles, silent people poke you (they don't talk because they don't see you as quite human) with various medical instruments, needles, blood pressure cuffs. Everything is supposed to be for your own good. Enter the triage center and all the police officers who think it is their job to interrogate people whose brains are already haywire. They just want to make sure you are not the next Sandy Hook killer, or the next James Holmes, or whichever sociopath you choose that may or may not have a dual diagnosis with a mental health issue. They leave you a little more screwed up then when you came in. Spend anywhere from 2 days to months in a "hospital" which is more like a detention center with designated arts and crafts time. Navigate around sociopaths who were dropped off by police who decided they were just nuts when they threatened to shoot up everybody (note: every other mental patient on the ward will not have this death-threat issue because we are NOT VIOLENT, except for the sociopaths who masquerade as one of us). Spend entire time avoiding certain mental patients with anger management issues. Spend entire time avoiding mental health technicians with anger management issues and power complexes. Take pills that have massive side-effects. Hand over civil rights, or rather, have them violently taken away for a period of time under the banner of "mental health treatment."

What should be done? What must be done? I cannot just go back into my day-to-day life and ignore the plight of my kin; those bipolar, schizophrenic, anxiety-riddled, depressive nutcases who are tormented not only by internal stress, but are also victimized in a detention camp with no human rights (aka the mental ward). I will continue to blog about all my experiences and when I have none left I will just ask other mental patients about their experiences and blog about that as well. It is time that the world knew how much contempt and neglect mental patients face in America.

This is the next civil rights movement. The right to equality for those of us who have had our rights taken away without committing a crime. Say no to unfair detention of mental patients! Say yes to transparency in how the mental health system runs in terms of administration! Say no to police murders of mental patients when it is avoidable!

 Our kind is neglected everywhere. However, with new medicines, those of us who are well want to treat our own kind with the respect and empathy they deserve and we don't want predators abusing our vulnerable population; be they sociopaths or mental health workers. Soon, we will rise, globally, in unison, in hospitals and in our places of employment or schooling---we will not be silent anymore. There may come a time when I have to be outed to the world in order to stand for what I believe in (equality and justice) and that scares me but I deal with it. I don't want to be treated like an animal, like a monster by people who don't understand mental health issues. I have two choices: fake normalcy and hide my condition, or drag my condition out into the open and demand reparations for the grave atrocities that occur daily to mental patients.  This blog is my attempt at the latter, in my own, modest way. Thank you for reading! If you are (or know anyone who is) a person with a mental health issue, spread this message: There is hope. People tried to steal our hope. Sometimes all our hope got stolen. But hope is like a plant that grows wherever you plant it. My hope is that our kind will be treated equally and with empathy. In fact, I demand that my hope get realized. I think you should demand that as well!

He is a Criminal First, Mentally Ill a Distant Second

I am a little bit in shock. The local community  newspaper decided to do a spread on "Mentally ill treatment in jails." Lo and behold, the man who sexually battered me while I was trying to sleep in my psychiatric room was being interviewed during his jail stay for a second sexually battery on a psychiatric patient. He was being pitied by the interviewer, who felt bad for him because he was in Atascadero Jail, a place for the criminally insane, and not receiving his lithium.

Let's get our facts straight, yellow journalists, he's a criminal first, a mental patient second.

Where in the DSM V manual does it say that "rape" and "sexual battery" are symptoms of bipolar disorder? I did not receive that memo. Why? Because nobody in psychiatry believes that bipolar = rapist. Unless you look in the section for "sociopaths" where lack of empathy, pleasure in others' pain, and violence are all symptoms of NOT PSYCHOSIS but of a SOCIOPATH!!! Triple exclamation point!!!

So, I had to endure reading 2 pages of embellished, pitying, second rate writing by college students and their yellow journalist professor who had all set out to make the world feel sorry for the criminals because they happened to also have bipolar disorder. This infuriates me deeply.

I did not get medication for a long period of years. I never sexually assaulted or physically harmed or threatened to hurt any human, despite my florid delusions. I coped with my fear, agitation, and anger through writing and drawing. The mental facilities turned me away, the outpatient centers said I was not sick enough, and all this until I literally slashed my wrist in the little psych admitting room. They were all busy treating raping, marauding sociopaths blaming their mental illness for their crimes to get out of jail.

I told you readers several times before, sociopaths blame "mental illness" because they prefer coed living situations with Seroquel zombie-fied catatonic depressive females who they can assault and get away with it over the all-male jail cells where they righteously belong.

Screw the criminally insane and their yellow journalist followers. If a law-abiding citizen has no access to medicine, why the hell should they get medicine?!?! I say, if they want to blame their mental illness for the crime, let them suffer their mental illness. Once they stop saying "it was because I have an illness" and start admitting it is really because they are raping perverts who have anger management issues and no empathy for their victims--- then they can have their medicine.

Growl. I am so mad right now. To make things worse, I volunteer for a group that is supposed to promote equality for the mentally ill, yet they are toting this article as a "godsend" which will help the mentally ill. *gasp. Apparently, they are not thinking about myself or the other woman who he apparently managed to rape completely (I managed to escape by kicking a lot, but with bruises).

Growl. What about the millions of people who are mentally ill but who OBEY the law? Now WE cannot come out of the closet because all anybody hears about is how the criminals don't get their psych meds and commit monstrous crimes because of it! I am sickened. Totally sickened.

Sickened. Thank God I am free from that evil mental hospital and I don't have to  put up with any rapists sneaking into my room and attacking me while I am asleep. I have to remind myself that I am safe now. I am sane now. I am a law-abiding citizen with free will who respects other law-abiding citizens. I am safe...I just have to keep saying that...I am safe...I am safe...that criminal is in a jail cell somewhere...and I am safe.

Psychiatric Facilities

I have never instigated any sort of violence. One time, a woman who looked high on hard drugs came up to me on the street and hit me in the chest as I was walking to Starbucks. I had to push her away several times as she continued to attempt to attack me. Eventually, she ran away. I reported her to the police, like a good citizen is supposed to. Other than that, I have never been in any kind of altercation.

I am a former mental patient, but I assure you that I have not and will not use any violence or weapons against a person in my life. In my times at the psychiatric facilities, I have been sexually victimized by other patients, mistreated by the staff who allowed male patients to roam into my room while I was sleeping, received numerous death threats from men, and I  had to resort to making phone calls to my patient's rights advocates and administration to report the ridiculous negligent attitudes of staff. Since I last was hospitalized about 3-4 years ago, the psychiatric facility has since been taken over by a private company, and many of the staff were replaced. Regardless, I have horrible memories of abuse and restraints, and I have no desire to ever be confined to a space where my safety rests in the hands of underpaid, unsympathetic staff.

The hospitals are a breeding ground for neglect. Unlike elderly homes, mental asylums are possibly more vulnerable to hidden abuse because it is expected that patients are delirious and imagining things that are not happening.

The psychological wounds I received from my schizo-affective disorder are nowhere near the sort of emotional injuries I received from the treatment of this illness. These are not hospitals but asylums and the patients are not patients so much as captives.

I usually get told my doctors that I am pretending to be better when in fact I am still too sick to leave the hospital. Of course I am!! Anywhere, ANYWHERE, is better than the hospital. One would expect constant monitoring of patient activity, but that is usually not the case except at medication dispensing time. Staff is fully aware that a 280 pound guy who wants into my room might be resistant to being told no, so they ignore him.

The safest I felt in the psychiatric hospital, to be totally frank, is when the murderers and rapists from the nearby prison were on our ward. Why?? Because the police came with them to make sure they didn't escape. There would be two guards sitting near their beds (which were always in the middle of the main TV room) at all times. During their stays, everybody else behaved, including the visiting criminals. Ironic, right?

A lot of times, some of the patients would be in the hospital because they made murder threats and were put on a "threat to others" hold. Between jail and the mental hospital, the volatile people feigned mental illness to avoid a cell. Other times, the patients would be in the hospital after mixing alcohol with meth or cocaine. These drugs can look like violent psychosis and the cops were just as likely to stick them in the wards with genuine mentally ill people than put them in jail or into rehab.

You know those stories about how prisons are the new mental hospital? I am not sure I believe that. Personality disordered people are quick to figure out who gets cool mind-altering drugs, time in co-ed hospitals versus jail cells, and a quick release. They fake illness. I know there are criminals who are genuinely mentally ill, but trust me, 90% of homeless people are genuinely mentally ill and at least 50% of criminally insane people are faking their insanity. If you really want to see a cluster of mentally ill people go to your local homeless shelter. That's where they are. Not in jail cells. People like John Hinkley are exceptions, not the rule. 

"Hidden America" : Abuse of Mental Patients by Hospitals

Today, Diane Sawyer did a report in her series, "Hidden America" on the plight of mental patients in America. The newest trend in patient abuse is "patient dumping" where the hospital buys a one-way ticket to another state, drives the patient to the Greyhound bus terminal, and sends them to an unknown place so that the hospital and the state won't have to pay for the patients' treatment. If that sounds totally outlandish and fictitious, please click on the link below to watch the video. The reporters did an excellent job of finding documentation that proved at least one hospital repeatedly "patient dumped."

I am a paranoid schizo-affective so I am prone to paranoia and persecution delusions. Yet, sadly, sometimes people really do persecute the mentally ill. We are not chattel. We should not be dehumanized this way. If someone put 80 year old elderly people on a one-way trip to nowhere because they all need dozens of heart, blood pressure, arthritis, kidney, liver, and diabetes medicine, everybody would be in an UPROAR. This would be a major issue, not a tiny side-story whose title says it all "Hidden America."

The abuse of mental patients has a long and gory history in the United States. Lobotomies, barbiturate poisoning, repeated and prolonged restraint use, cases of sexual assault, violent assault, and other negligent treatment leading to death (i.e. heart attacks after prolonged periods of being forced to lie prone in restraints), are all examples of the history of the culturally accepted and widespread abuse of mental patients.

This is sickening. Perfectly innocent victims of a degenerative illness are now victimized by people who appear to be spurred on by some modern day version of the eugenics movement. We are categorically abused because of our brain chemistry, labeled wastes of life, and treated as cockroaches.


If you take this widespread abuse and apply it to another group, like Latinos, Asians, gays, or cancer patients, you would have riots, rebellions, and general anarchy. Nobody deserves to have be treated this way, certainly not mental invalids who are already in a state of fear and panic.

The System has greatly injured my brethren. If you think for one moment that high-functioning mental patients, the families of mental patients, and ethical mental health employees will continue to ignore the abuse and neglect of the poorest, most vulnerable adults among us, you are fooling yourself. The pain of one mental patient is my pain as well. I am high-functioning and I have a long memory. I will not forget. I vow to volunteer for mental health rights organizations, to donate money to the cause, to vote for supportive legislation, and to promote civil rights for mental patients.

For those of you with a mental illness ::: remember, the U.S constitution applies to us! We have civil rights and those who violate our civil rights are traitors to the U.S. constitution.

Here is the link, please watch!

http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/accusations-patient-dumping-19096538