When the Help Becomes Part of the Problem

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My first encounter with the psychiatric system in America was at the age of 18. I spent my days crying — if not crying, I was thinking about how my presence in space and time was inherently burdening others. Not to mention, I was failing all my classes, and my GPA for my first semester of college was a measly .5 on the 4.0 scale. I was a failure.

The breaking point was my 20th call to the national suicide hotline in three months; I had told the woman, while I sobbed, that I felt like a burden to everyone in my life and that I felt like I was not in my own body anymore.

“Where is the counseling office at your school? I think you should go there and speak to someone in person.” A voice as sweet as pure molasses lulled.

“They are not going to believe me; they are going to think I’m just faking.”

“I believe you; I don’t think you are faking. I’ll stay on the call with you as you walk there. I’m here, honey.”

I made my way to the counseling center, which was in an unremarkable beige building on the curb of a four-way intersection. The industrial architecture of the university building seemed even colder as I somberly entered. It was December, and it was the coldest December I had experienced. At that moment, I felt the weight of my existence crushing me; I felt trapped under it, like Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar. With each step I took into the building, the kilos of shame I had felt since the age of five built up upon my back. My knees began to buckle, and the tears I had convinced to stop pouring began to rise from the depths of my soul and pooled along the surface of my eyes.

“Okay, I’m here; I am at the counseling office; thank you for staying with me.”

“No problem, honey, anytime. Please don’t hesitate to call again. My name is Jane, and I’ll be on call for a few more hours. I wish you the best.”

“Thank you, Jane. Goodbye.”

I approached the wheat-colored wooden door, wrapped my hands around the cold silver handle, and pushed it open.

A Black woman with a warm Jamaican accent greeted me. Her name was Leslie, I later learned. She immediately noticed the tears cascading down my sunken cheeks.

“Hello, is there any way I can see someone right now?” I asked. She replied, “We are about to close, but one counselor is open now. Give me your student ID and I’ll sign you in.” I gave her my information and she went off.

As she retrieved the last counselor in office for the day, I sat in the brightly colored waiting area that was to the left of the entrance and adjacent to Leslie’s desk. I began deleting all of my photos from my silver iPhone. Pictures of me and the really smart guy in my logic class I’d been seeing for the past two months — gone. Family pictures — gone. I was, in essence, deleting my existence. I did not want to exist any longer — in any form.

As I approached the last row of pictures to be deleted, Leslie poked her head into the lobby and said, “Mr. Ramirez is –” She stopped before the end of her statement as she took a deeper look at me. I was huddled in the chair in the corner, trying to cover my face that was drowning in one-tenth of the weight of my pain in tears. “Hey Anne, Mr. Ramirez is ready to see you now. There are also tissues on the coffee table if you need.”

A shaky “Okay, thank you” exited my mouth as I stood up and picked up my items that I had sloppily placed on the floor. I grabbed three Puffs Plus Lotion tissues and placed them in my pocket. I didn’t wipe my face; I was too exhausted trying to hide my identity’s frayed and beaten parts. Leslie had made her way back to her desk and Mr. Ramirez approached me as I left the lobby and walked towards the offices. He stood midway between his office and the lobby and extended his right arm towards an amber-illuminated room at the far end of the hallway. That was the beginning of the beginning.

I was to be escorted to one of the hospitals surrounding the university by a young police officer. He was amicable, handsome, and seemed to be around the age of twenty-five. I’ll call him Carlos. Carlos picked me up from Mr. Ramirez’s office after I had confessed to being a harm to myself publicly — in front of a pair of human eyes and ears, which, to me, seemed to have been made by a deity that insisted on my degradation. I had confessed my sins aloud, and I felt better. By confessing to being ill in some way, some capacity of my shortcomings and failures were justified — because someone believed me.

Carlos walked me out of the building and onto a dingy parking lot that separated the counseling building from the soccer field. The lot was small and empty, the once black asphalt now a greyish color due to wear; it seemed like it hadn’t been maintained in a decade. Carlos unlocked and opened the door of the right rear seat and made his way to the driver’s seat. I slid into the car and sat down. Initially, I was a bit bemused. “Do all police cars not have cushions on the back seats?” I asked. (I suppose my childish proclivity for asking questions had not left me.) As he fastened himself in, I could see a smirk appearing from the right corner of his thick brownish-pink lips; he chuckled and said jokingly, “Criminals should be comforted on their way to jail now, eh?” A contorted smile appeared on my face, and we went off.

Upon reaching the hospital, I was greeted by two desk clerks. They wore white and navy uniforms, gleaming with as much pride as the individuals wearing them had. Not a single wrinkle nor oil stain from lunch was in sight. I was asked for my ID, insurance, and other things that hospital staff typically ask of a patient. One of the clerks was a short, heavyset man with a head as shiny as armor and a mustache so thick it seemed to be alive — ready to jump off of his face at a moment’s notice. The other, a woman about four heads taller than the man. In retrospect, it was a comical sight. But at that moment, all I could think about was what future awaited me beyond the white swinging traffic doors of the ER lobby. Carlos was with me for the entire duration of the check-in. He left shortly after.

It is escaping me whether I encountered an emergency doctor or nurse, but the man was dressed in scrubs and almost frantically moving around the perimeter of where I was. He finally addressed me as I waited near the front of the emergency room. “She’s claiming to be suicidal. Can you take her vitals and then take her down to Crisis for an eval,” he ordered a subordinate. My vitals were taken, and everything came back okay.

After that interaction, my backpack, electronics, cell phone, and everything else were confiscated. I only had the clothing on my body, a folder, and a book. I was then given a final moment to talk to my parents on the hospital phone before I was placed in the Crisis ward.

The subordinate was a tall man, resembling Shaquille O’Neal in stature. As we exited the emergency room and entered a corridor, we approached a set of doors. He leaned over me, pushed the door forward, and told me to go to the desk that was straight ahead. The unit resembled a detention center. All ten cells that outlined the U-shaped corridor were constructed out of white-painted cinder block, plexiglass, and bolts. The beds within the rooms were fused to the floor; a thin mat served as a mattress, and paper served as bedding. As I made my way into the view of the four people in a cubicle that seemed to be a CCTV control room, I noticed at least ten monitors displaying scenes from inside patients’ cells. I felt institutionalized from the beginning.

After making my presence known to the staff, I was placed into an empty cell.

During the evaluation, a nurse with a piercing gaze approached me. She was wearing royal blue scrubs and a white silicon wedding band. She came into my unit and began to ask me questions. “So, what’s wrong? Are you sure you aren’t just having a bad day? You know, sometimes I have bad days where I feel like nothing is working out.” I was dismayed by her comment. I’ll never forget it.

In the wake of proving myself to be a legitimate risk to my person, I asked to use the bathroom. The first ‘normal’ thing I did in over 24 hours. On my short walk to the lavatory, I finally peered into the rooms of my neighbors and saw bodies that resembled corpses. They lay perfectly straight in the cinder block cells. A few hours earlier, one fellow had caused a disturbance and was subsequently put in a straitjacket. I remember him the most. During my four-day stay, there was a woman who came in accompanied by multiple police officers. While being detained, she yelled the slur, “NI****,” to the officer directly in front of her. This was before spitting at her. Thankfully, a bed in Inpatient became available that night, and I finally left Crisis.

My stay was a prolonged one. During my first night in Crisis, I was given pills to fall asleep and pills to stabilize my mood. This continued throughout my stay. I saw a psychiatrist once every day. I knew after seeing her, it would be another 24 hours until I’d see her again. I remember our meetings being short and curt. She would enter my cell with a few papers stacked on a clipboard. Our conversations began with the typical small talk. “How are you?” “The cafeteria has fresh oranges today. Would you like any?” During those moments I felt the most human. Unfortunately, those moments were short-lived; she would swiftly and awkwardly begin inquiring about the psychotropics I had been given.

“Are you having trouble falling asleep? Is the medication working?”

She asked about when I first began having suicidal thoughts. I told her that they would sometimes flit through my head during stressful periods between the ages of eleven to sixteen. It wasn’t until COVID that they became longstanding. She ended the conversation by telling me that I could ask the staff for more sleeping medication if I needed it and that she’d see me the following day. I was not introduced to any form of counseling during my stay.

They put me in a wheelchair, although the only damaged part of me at the moment couldn’t be physically touched. I was then sent upstairs to the inpatient unit.

I roomed with a Portuguese woman who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The staff believed she was going through a manic episode. I just assumed she was extra chipper despite the circumstances. From what I gathered from her limited English, she had a dog and a son. She spoke of them fondly; she provided sunshine to my days. Life seemed to rush through her veins.

I wrote of the life I wanted to create for myself and reflected on my past between the pages of Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. I underlined a paragraph I would mediate on religiously for the entirety of my inpatient stay:

“Nobody’s going to win all the time. On the highway of life you can’t always be in the fast lane… Best to learn from my mistakes and put that into practice the next time around. While I still have the ability to do so.”

I did not take a shower during my nearly two-week stay out of fear of being sexually assaulted in the communal space. This fear became even more real after a female patient accused a male nurse who oversaw the showering space of being a Peeping Tom.

Later on, I met with another psychiatrist who officially gave me my label: Major Depressive Disorder. I was deeply relieved to receive a diagnosis. The thought that something, beyond myself, was interfering with my ability to bear the weight of my own existence was liberating. I could let myself off the hook for at least some of my shortcomings.

After receiving my diagnosis, I was put on Sertraline (Zoloft), which made me extremely nauseous. My doctor then switched me to Escitalopram (Lexapro). I felt like an institutionalized guinea pig instead of an individual in need of humanistic and holistic help.

I was discharged on December 14, 2021, but remnants of myself are still lingering around the hospital. My experience saved my life, but it wasn’t the medications that did it. In retrospect, I can acknowledge that the experience exposed me to the beauty that dwelled within human beings; most of whom I did not know yet they devoted their time to ensure that my life was lengthened due to its innate value.

Despite this, the feeling of being institutionalized and medicated over minor ailments is difficult to shake. I have been to countless therapy sessions attempting to deconstruct the feelings of dehumanization into digestible morsels. What I went through was anomalous in that it could have been so much worse. I’ve spent many nights talking to individuals on online forums who have had worse experiences in psychiatric wards than I. Tales of individuals forcibly isolated during panic attacks, being sexually assaulted in multiple-occupancy rooms, having to be at the mercy of lengthy waitlists, and being restrained for being ‘non-compliant’ to treatment.

To be human is to go through challenges. Sometimes maladaptive thinking and/or behavior thwarts our ability to function at the level that we are called to. The role of the psychiatrist should be to assess an individual’s mental state and to determine as the last option that they need medication. Medication should never be endorsed as the only and primary choice of treatment for mental disorders.

A few months after first taking Lexapro I quit and was better for it. This was after battling my way through spells of fatigue during my lectures. Although I was not suicidal anymore, I could not function at a standard I was happy with due to mental fuzziness. After quitting medication and simply receiving counseling I came to enjoy life without feeling mentally barren or subdued. I was able to utilize the coping skills I had learned during therapy to sustain myself through perceived failures and inadequacies. What has helped me the most did not reside within a pill bottle. It was finding radical self-acceptance.

***

Mad in America hosts blogs by a diverse group of writers. These posts are designed to serve as a public forum for a discussion—broadly speaking—of psychiatry and its treatments. The opinions expressed are the writers’ own.

19 COMMENTS

  1. “[R]adical self-acceptance” for all distressed individuals is needed … NOT stigmatization with the “invalid” DSM disorders.

    https://psychrights.org/2013/130429NIMHTransformingDiagnosis.htm

    Oh, all distress caused by the world wide distressing event of 9.11.2001, was blamed upon a “chemical imbalance” in my brain alone … when I was picking up my and my family’s medical records in 2005, including from my child abuse covering up psychologist, and according to my innocent child’s medical records.

    The current “mental health system” does the opposite of actually “helping” people, too often, sadly.

    Thank you for sharing your story, Anne.

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      • Thank you so much for sharing your story Anne. Your are a gifted writer and your mention of radical self acceptance, I feel, is helping already. I became acquainted with the approach of radical acceptance of dealing with challenging situations that I seem to have little control of, but your story highlighting the use of radical self acceptance came at a difficult time for me. Thank you again as I will try to adopt it a a guiding principle now and in the future.

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  2. I just had a similar experience. I feel so violated and defeated by the experience. Is the stigma of institutions really a stigma if it’s the reality of nearly everyone who goes to one? I felt like I was being treated like someone who did something really terrible for the fun of it. Not like someone who needs help. It made me regress, and very weary of talking about my feelings.

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  3. Hi Itame,
    Thank you for sharing your experience with me. I’m sorry you had to go through that. To answer your question – I’m unsure if it’s rhetorical or not, but here goes my response: I have confidentially spoken to individuals with wonderful experiences. I have heard of many more negative experiences than positive ones. A plausible reason may be that individuals could be timid to reveal they’ve received inpatient treatment for mental health. Folks could not feel comfortable disclosing – unless to raise awareness about a not-so-good experience. Your question is a good one and beckons research into the experience of those who have been committed. Thanks again for sharing.

    With warmth,
    Anne

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  4. My husband was diagnosed of Parkinson’s Disease at age 66. He had severe calf pain, muscle pain, tremors, slurred speech, frequent falls, loss of balance, difficulty in getting up from sitting position. He was put on Senemet for 6 months and then Siferol was introduced and replaced the Senemet. During this time span he was also diagnosed with dementia. He started having hallucinations, lost touch with reality. We took him off the Siferol (with the doctor’s knowledge) and decided to try PD-5 programme offered by Natural Herbs Centre which we researched prior. 3 months into treatment he has improved dramatically. the disease is totally under control. No case of constant twitching, hallucination, weakness, muscle pain or tremors. We got the PD-5 Protocol from natural herbs centre my husband is getting active again, I’m sharing my husband experience perhaps it might help, but you still need to decide what works best for you. Sending prayers

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  5. I don’t understand how any woman is supposed to cope in a racist, misogynistic, harsh society. Of course you’re depressed, anxious, hyper-alert, and broken hearted.
    You–we–need a lot of love and kindness. It’s not easy to find if you don’t already have it.
    Sending you all love and kindness today.

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  6. I had a forced hospitalization during law school; was threatened w/being removed from campus by police & committed unless I went voluntarily, so of course I went voluntarily. Claimed I was suicidal when I never said anything about wanting to harm myself. Felt like a prisoner, treated like a child, continually threatened “I could send you to a lower level hospital where bad things happen… I could be asked to decide if it’s safe for you to remain on campus-don’t keep pissing me off.” I have never recovered from it & will never see a counselor or psychiatrist again.

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  7. I have been admittted to psychiatric ICU inpatient treatment several times. I was never sure why. It was not discussed with me. After all, I was only the patient. I was given multiple medications. I was never sure why. It was not discussed with me, the patient in the room. I was put in a “rubber room” with only a mattress on the floor so doped I couldn’t walk for days. A morbidly obese hairy-faced nurse sat at a table in the dayroom. She made up the rules according to her mood for the day, which was always bad. The other patients’ stories made me feel better. Not the nurse, the doctors, the medications, the ECT, the therapy. I was “processed” through the system like pork sausage stuffed into its casing by a machine. Then sent home to an empty house. To survive. Alone. I had lost my job so my house was foreclosed. At 39 I had to go back and live with my parents. Oh joy. Then back to the hospital where it all began again. Familiarity breeds contempt, they say. I agree.

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  8. Such a mature understanding of what you experienced and how it ultimately saved your life. Beautifully written as well!

    I’ve had more hospitalizations than I care to recall. It wasn’t until worked I worked in inpatient psych as a tech that I learned to appreciate medicine. It is the quick fix and sometimes we need a quick fix. If you’re dying from something we have medicine to help, we should use the medicine. It’s too late at that point to fix injustice or resolve the burden of past trauma. We don’t have perfect medicine but we might have the best medicines now that we ever have had.

    I personally spent too many years angry at the system and troubled by the interventions. But whatever, they worked, thankfully without waiting for my approval.

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    • Psychiatric “medication” may “work” in the short term, but the real question is how long will it take before they backfire on people iatrogencically?

      Knee-jerk presribing soothes the professionsals as much (if not more) than the “patients”.

      Psychiatric drugs ought to be avoided as much as possible as they are toxic and potentially addictive.

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  9. This is very strange to me.
    You describe in beautiful but horrendous detail the pain you felt in merely existing, but later describe your suicidality as a “minor ailment”.
    Medications have been proven over and over again to be lifesaving in these situations. Of course therapy is also necessary and I have no doubt an inpatient stay can be terrifying. There are many ways to improve upon psychiatric care, but what a disservice to your own history and anyone else who might be reading this and struggling to dismiss medications. Why should mental illness be prolonged for the sake of medications being “the last option”? In truth, all humans could likely benefit from therapy, but it’s also likely that medications allowed the therapy to work better (as has been shown in many studies on depression). Indeed, I would hope that you would not advocate for holding off on disease-altering medications for patients with other medical needs such as heart disease or diabetes, and your opposition to psychiatric meds is not well-explained in this piece.

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    • My own psychotropic medication experience began outside the hospital. I was competent, had been working for 10 years in a renown medical teaching hospital, and had a relationship crisis. When I sought help within the system where I worked, from a psychiatrist, she listened for 5 minutes before making a diagnosis, and prescribed an antipsychotic with no explanation and no discussion of how it might affect me. The first dose paralyzed my face in a gargoyle-like mask. This doctor immediately passed me on to another one who put me on two mood stabilizers. Before long a series of medicinal “treatments” resulted in tremendously bad physical side effects and lingering cognitive distortions. I lost my job, my my marriage, my house, and my financial independence. Over the next few years I was prescribed 27 various psychotropic medications, plus additional treatments. The medications dramatically worsened my mental and physical condition. I was hospitalized at 7 different mental health facilities and I would grade only one of them “satisfactory.” It was not until 18 years later when I found a doctor willing to help me get off the medications that I was able to be restored to a normal and stable state of existence. I blame the initial quick and dirty drugging and subsequent horror-movie progression through various treatment centers and vials of medication for loss of relationships, loss of connection with myself, and eventual severe disability that left me unable to work. My family and I have decided together that it would be the worst of ideas to ever consent to such medications again. I have been scarred for life.

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      • Right, to say suicidal and failing at thriving is to say that what is going on is an emergency. If the help becomes the problem, in hindsight, that is called healing. It weirds me out that I used to run out of breath walking up steps due to obesity. I couldn’t run a quarter mile. Now I’m relatively fit, work out 3 hours a week or more at high intensity and 2 hours at lower intensity. I’m somewhat disgusted by how I used to be. I would be offended if my doctor were to harp on it or bring it up every appointment, as I should. What makes sense in one season of our life but makes us feel awful in hindsight is healthy. It’s not the emergent part of mental health that needs to change as much as the maintenance part of it. If you’re seriously suicidal, it could take a lot of therapy and time to get out of that without chemical adjustment. It’s possible, but we don’t risk that as we have far more reliable methods. It’s ignorant to be “anti” any tool in a tool kit when you don’t even pretend to offer a better one. There is a difference between psychiatric emergency and long term psychiatric experiences. I’m anti a lot of the drugs because they are touted as long term solutions and projections are thrown at us, but my experience is that when someone is dying, we give them drugs to help. It becomes up to the individual what to do after they stop feeling that they need the help. Psych drug injuries are real but not as bad as being dead.

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  10. I searched for “Do psychiatric drugs work? in Mad in America and I’ve attached one of the results, which might be of interest here. While it may be that drugs can be useful for biologically based conditions, such as, Parkinson’s disease, there is little evidence that psychiatric labels (e.g., adhd, depression, bipolar) actually describe biological conditions and there can be very serious consequences for those taking them, including death. When I worked in “mental health” in Australia as a psychologist, one of the frequent justifications used by staff during rounds for prescribing psychiatric meds was, “It’s worth the risk” (but not to them, of course).
    https://www.madinamerica.com/2024/04/prescription-drugs-are-the-leading-cause-of-death/

    I also searched MIM for “DSM” (one of the “bibles” for prescribing psychiatric drugs) to check how reliable and valid its categories are and have attached just one critical article.

    https://www.madinamerica.com/2019/07/dsm-scientifically-meaningless-diagnoses/

    While many people may benefit from psychotropic drugs, many don’t and run serious health risks when they take them: voluntarily on advice from a doctor, or involuntarily because of a court order/Community Treatment Order. And many people (Google search) do report that they benefit from psychic healing, and good for them if it helps, but I have reservations about forcing people to receive such “healing”.

    https://www.madinamerica.com/2019/07/dsm-scientifically-meaningless-diagnoses/

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