I hate writing about this subject.
it used to involve expressions (by me) like
“fantastically multiplied irony”– like Pavlov’s dog feels after Pavlov keeps it chained to a pad that gives out electric shocks. After a period of time, the dog stops struggling and, when Pavlov unchains him he continues to just sit there taking the shocks. It’s similar to the lockdown, even on the first short stay on a psych ward, when you don’t have your car keys and your not going anywhere.
I speak for myself. THE WORST part of it is that many people walk out the door happy and healed; while the ones like me look on. And they use us. Oh yes they do.
also, I used to say, when I was living in my parents’ garage, that it was like I was living my life balancing on my left little finger. In other words, everything was eggshells and I wasn’t really welcome and I had to do a little dance to communicate anything to my mother.
this was well before the movie My Left Foot and obviously hugely different but I did feel crippled inside and my body was straining to work my mind to help me.
I am not going to explain about this further for privacy reasons.
Similarly, I used to say I felt like a bit part in someone else’s novel.
after desperately scrawling down, in my chair in the garage next to a window,
I AM TOO BROKEN TO WRITE
so at that point I quit trying.
after my son was born, two fantastic things happened, second to childbirth! that made me more confident as a mother: first, my hair went curly! My poor brown mousy -colored hair. And, I started writing again.
I scrawled out,
“CHILDBIRTH IS AN INCREDIBLE EXPERIENCE”
I don’t remember much else of what I wrote, other than a poem about my thoroughbred horse that was sad. Now I’m remembering it all and if I am very very lucky I know exactly where it is safe and sound.
my son used to love watching me sitting at the table in the living room in Maryland writing things over and over in pencil because I didn’t have a typewriter. It got pretty crazy.
so, the other time I scrawled things out on paper is when my parents left me at home alone when they went on a hiking trip in New England for several .weeks. My brother split and my sister was taken care of. I didn’t know anybody in that area any more. I left messages on notebook paper in large letters in the code I made up in grade school saying HELP in large letters that filled up the page. I must have left 5 or 6 of them. I took off the next morning before they got up,
anyway, that is a story oft told.
regarding MH World, it’s really a shame that my parents didn’t get me into carems99ner, before the horrible experience that I It 2asvcall
had at 21. The Disciplnary Board at school recommend a psychiatrist afte4v* afte4 I was ca7ght dr I nk8ng Junibut my English teacher got me out of it. Maybe that was unfortunate. Maybe I had a chance to be one of the happy and satisfied MH clients. I’m thinking, maybe that was the start of the animosity and negativity about the psych world.0)The Hospital at John’s Hokins University way back in ’93 should have put me back on track. Instead they tossed me onto a dump and things got a thousand times worse.
This
is the issue. Psychiatrists are given “carte blanche” for whatever they want to do. They are deemed privy to all kinds of insightight and understanding that is way high over everybody else’s head. Whatever happens is just the way it had to happen. “What else could we have done?”
It’s like the abortion industry. It has been the status quo. There are buildings full of employees who have been doing these horrible things for decades and we are just used to it. Unfortunately, so are they
Better news for the MH World.
I just had what seemed like about the worst experience anybody could have on a psych ward or anywhere; but it turned out to be the knitting together of all the horrible situations I have had in my life, so that I could see them AND TOSS THEM. It was a spartan environment that I liked, a really different psych ward. And I actually listened to all of the lessons taught in the groups, such as, of course, RADICAL ACCEPTANCE.
but it didn’t feel like a forever place for me. I didn’t really fit in with the other patients; I was a fish out of water. I was also ill.
here at home I dug into the work of cleaning this place up and I am healing. And happy!
I envsion that this new landscape in MH with the EAC Units instead of state hospitals IS WELL ON THE WAY TO moving beyond “Girl Interrupted” to an MH world that blends both governments and faith communities and “ordinary people” into a psych system that works FOR EVERBODY up and down the line.
Amen
one of the most important things here for me is that my stay and the care I got completely subsumed the “Ghoul Epiphany” experience and after 35 v years I am mostly back with the living; could finally let it go.
my son was with me in my mind through so much of this– I wouldn’t have survived otherwise. I always neglect to comment on the incredible devotion he has shown towards me now and at other times. He was an unbeatable kid and he is an extraordinary man.
you need some to be looking out for you in the system.
Un.Bon.Mot 