Saw a post earlier that’s like “psych wards aren’t evil and scary! fearmongering does more harm than good” and it’s like have you spoken to literally anyone with a negative experience with institutionalization, of which there are Many
I spent all of a WEEK in a modern and fairly chill psych ward and still wanted to die bc it was like a minimum security prison minus weight benches and the opportunity to go outside. I was only allowed to leave bc I agreed to start taking medication for a condition I didn’t have.
Many people have had much worse experiences than that, including actual straight-up abusive conditions. Mental healthcare is desperately in need of reform so maybe let’s not embrace our Shiny Constructive CBT-Approved Outlook to the point where we ignore that lol
people wanna believe that there are good and bad institutions and that the bad ones aren’t good because of abusive staff/whatever. no one wants to acknowledge that, regardless of the reason, removing someones personal freedoms literally causes trauma because it would mean a radical shift in how we treat everyone from criminals to children
Additionally, the reality of psychiatric institutions is that once you are admitted to inpatient you are not allowed to leave. Even if there were ‘good’ and ‘bad’ wards you won’t know which is which until the doors lock behind you.
… and that’s if you had a choice to go in the first place.
What sane people refuse to comprehend is that psychiatry is militarized. It is built around the fundamental assumption that there are certain people who must be controlled through the application of force, if necessary. If you are one of those people it is impossible to interact with the ‘help’ they seem to want us to get without being threatened, or worse.
This is institutionalized violence that we cannot get away from just because a particular therapist or doctor might be ‘nice.’
bongdanceking 