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 How outdated is that?!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!
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!
