I’m so sorry you suffered so much.

I hope you are happy and healthy now and far far away from anyone who can tell you what you should be thinking/feeling.

Sadly, I can identify with much of your story, and the brutality of the mental health system.

I became acutely psychotic about 15 years ago, much aggravated by narcotics.

In the space of a few months, I managed to be forcibly detained for psychiatric “treatment” in three separate countries – Canada, Ireland and England. What an accolade!

I gained an unenviable insight of those three mental health systems, and how they contrast.

The Canadian system was perhaps the most frightening of all, maybe partly because it was my first involuntary admission.

I was never in any way violent, but nevertheless found myself detained against my will, albeit in a remarkably plush university hospital.

In a prolonged argument with some God-awful shrink, I made it clear that I wasn’t going to take her drugs. As I saw it, I didn’t need them. I was in an emotional crisis, my problems were spiritual in nature.

The psychiatrist begged to differ, and with her patience worn thin, she gestured to her colleagues.

Within seconds, I found myself knocked to the ground, my face physically rammed into the floor as I was sat on by her team of heavyweight psychiatric staffers.

Then I was literally strait-jacketed for refusing to take their Haldol!

I awoke after what could have been days later in an locked isolation room. My head in a thick fog and my face badly swollen and sore from the grazes and bruising of the manhandling.

Eight days later, they triumphantly declared me fit to leave. Yet I had never felt so ill!

I staggered out, uncontrollably pissing myself as I left the building. My incontinence, I later realised, was due to an extra hefty dose of Haldol they gave me to help me on my way.

Some system!

The psych techs get rabid, don’t they?

I got woken up and dragged down the hall by my legs to a seclusion room and put in restraints and shot with haldol and ativan at another hospital when they saw old blood on a blanket I was sleeping with. They thought I had injured myself again.

Yes, TAC really needs to work to remove the barriers to timely and effective treatment. They can begin by working to stop the force, coercion and violence in the mental health system.

BULLSHIT. Not only is it done in place of treatment [read: paying attention to, talking with, trying to understand a person] and for the convenience of staff (who have so many papers to fill out and jokes to tell each other, hanging around the nurses station), there are staff in every hospital who are *keen and excited* to get physical and bind someone to a stationary object.

And cops? Cops are worse then cons when it comes to getting nasty and abusive if they think you aren’t obeying them quickly enough or “respecting their authoritay.” They shouldn’t be allowed within twenty feet of people with mental illnesses. Another schizophrenic man was killed by my city’s finest a few weeks ago. Why did they have to stomp him so badly he DIED from it? He wouldn’t do what they said. You know: get on the ground, hands on your head, blah blah. He didn’t make any effort to hurt anyone, or even to escape. He just wasn’t where they were, and didn’t fall to and obey.

Wow, I need to shut up now, I’m burning up.

I do need to say this. We, Rose, have been lucky when it comes to punitive measures in psych settings. I don’t know why, but it plainly was luck. For the amount of time we’ve spent hospitalized, we have very few episodes like the one you’ve described here on our tally sheet. I’m grateful.

Zoe

Thanks.

I’m trying to develop another way…check out my blog and let me know what you think.

I’m sorry you went through that, but glad you know what it did to you. I agree with your response, compassionate de-escalation can be effective probably in the majority of cases, and should be considered first practice in curing psychotic breaks. What was happening in your scenario reminds me of something Bruno Bettleheim described in The Art of the Obvious; the cops and orderlies tying you down and screaming in your face, what is that, if not psychosis? It’s such a hall of mirrors, and the identities merge and shimmy, the providers so self-unaware and twisted up in their repressed envy and projection. If only they could identify as human beings with the mad people they see as horrifying Other maybe they wouldn’t take on the identity themselves and act it out on patients with relish. What they thought you “were” is all in their sick psychology, it’s amazing they don’t see themselves become this thing they hate, and do it to vulnerable unthreatening people, who are not their twisted phantasms.

I personally have never experienced coercive treatment, but I have significant relationships with people who have, and do, and I came real close when I ended up in the regular hospital ER during what I thought was a stroke or heart attack. I couldn’t form words, it was all garbled, so I got the “altered mental state” diagnosis, treated like garbage, no restraints, but they arrested me when I tried to leave. Over the course of 6 hours I was gradually treated with more respect as my cognitive functions came back and I was able to argue for release. Seeing that terrified me, the conditional positive regard, based on nothing more than my emerging ability to talk rationally. That people, doctors and nurses could make that justifiable cause for treating someone with dignity (or not) was so terrifying to see play out. I wonder what will happen to them when they get Alzheimer’s. What goes around….

Take care, my heart breaks reading so many stories.

I have your “99.9% of agitated psychosis can be quelled with love” comment in my ‘copy and paste’ too as I read it!! But you all beat me to it – so I will say also – I know and believe it too.

In the hospitals where I stayed, I saw skillful de-escalation techniques being used by patients, never staff. I was helped and helped others who were teetering close to forced treatment… just by listening, just by being ‘kind’…

Great post Gianna!
keener