From Mad in Puerto Rico: My story of psychiatric incarceration isn’t easy to tell; it’s complicated, and it’s not unique. It has many layers and is directly intertwined with my personal family history. The first time I was incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital, I was 14 years old. I had already been seeing psychologists for some time because of my self-harm. At the time of that first hospitalization, I made the decision to say I wanted to hurt myself to protect myself and leave my mother’s house, and also to get away from my father. I was surviving abuse from most of the men in my immediate family, except for my maternal grandfather.
Read the full article here and the English translation here.
