Laura López-Aybar: How would you describe your psychiatric hospitalizations?
Francisco: Well, it’s supposed to be a process of improvement, and in some ways, I can now see it as a process of growth within the same trauma. You arrive with some issues and leave with others. That’s the deal, looking for help, but at times you can feel like a prisoner, a criminal, a person who is a problem, a person who is a burden. Sometimes, they can childishly treat you or treat you as if you were part of the herd, so to speak. Like one of the sheep that has to be herded or something like that.
Laura: What do you mean?
Francisco: The disciplinary measures, and I understand the protocols in part, what I don’t understand are the methods. Well, there are specific hours and one cannot question it and one cannot refuse. There are expectations for the behavior of participants within the programs. If you don’t comply with them, they either yell at you, scold you, intimidate you, or threaten to put you in another area, or inject you or give you medication to calm you down, or take other measures.
Laura: Did that happen to you or did you see that at some point?
Francisco: Yes, and I have my blackouts too, from the events. I was overmedicated. One of the things that shocks me about my hospitalizations is how much of my consciousness disappears. Since I’m so delicate, I forget a lot of things. I lose track of time, space, and days. One of the days I was overmedicated, I remember going to bed early and couldn’t get up the next day. My body held back the urge to go to the bathroom so much that when I went, I was in pain. I reported to the infirmary that I felt too “druggy,” and they told me I had to wait for the psychiatrist to come in for an appointment. They basically underestimated the dosage. They lowered it and kept changing me, but I still had intrusive thoughts, and after leaving, I reported that I couldn’t walk. I haven’t been under psychiatric supervision for two years and I’m still taking medication. My primary care doctor prescribes them, who understands they’ve done me good, and he continues to give me the prescription automatically. During my most recent hospitalization, at one point I thought I was going to die. I had a hard time getting out of bed due to the effects of the medications. I don’t know what my vitals were like, but I felt incredibly weak, incredibly dizzy, I could even feel my heartbeat, and I was completely out of it and dysfunctional. I was like, “Wow, I’ve lost my mind.”
Once, I was cold because they didn’t give me my things. My relative had brought them to me, and it wasn’t until the next day or two days later that they gave me the things to keep me warm. I was hospitalized as a young adult and as an adult, but I’d been receiving treatment since I was a teenager, almost a psychiatric child. I had sleep problems, anxiety, and they kept changing my diagnoses. And they were never that assertive, I’d say. What the psychiatrists saw, what the teachers perceived, and what my family perceived was quite another. I didn’t have any autonomy; I had no way of expressing things, or I didn’t have the vocabulary, I didn’t have the tools.
Once, after a phone call that triggered anger on my part, I got frustrated, went to the bathroom, screamed, kicked against the bathroom door and the plastic trash can in the bathroom, and was crying my eyes out. When they intervened, they gave me an injection of medication, a tranquilizer, locked me in the nurses’ supervision area, tied me up, and gave me electroshock therapy without my consent. They also proposed this to me in the most recent one because I had mentioned that it had happened, and they told me, “Oh, but that’s not so bad,” and told me not to see it as something bad, negative, or traumatic.
(Francisco reports that he was not told about the side effects of electroshock therapy before receiving it and that he was already calm when it happened.)
Laura: What triggers of anger or frustration did you observe in other patients?
Francisco: Many times it was due to the lack of freedom regarding sleeping hours, food, people who wanted to smoke, the volume of the television, or what they were watching, or if they wanted something different. The television was controlled by patients or the administration. The impositions of having to do this or that, and the way they told you to do it.
Laura: What was the process of admission to the psychiatric hospital like?
Francisco: On those occasions, employers have been great. When they move you to another room deeper in the hospital where the psychiatrist intervenes, things change so much, the whole atmosphere of light, space, stratum, and form are transformed. It’s much more serious, much more somber, I would say. It’s an almost formal interview, like a job interview, but at the same time, it’s like you’re going to be admitted to a prison.
I’ve noticed with other people that there are some questions that, if you answer them a certain way, mean you’ll be hospitalized longer. There are many patients who learn to say, “I’m not going to answer, I’m going to answer what they want me to say, so I can have the freedom I need.” Also, the “you can’t wear this, you can’t do this, you can’t do that, you have to have no shoe cabinets, you can’t use electronic devices, you have to disconnect from the outside world.” I wanted to bring a notebook, but they didn’t let me. In the first ones, yes, but not in this one.
The response I got from one of the staff members was that I needed to take a break from the world. They wanted to make sure that whatever I was writing or reading didn’t trigger other kinds of emotions. “We can’t supervise every reading; we don’t know if something might make you cry or make you angry. For example, a newspaper or the news or things happening outside, like a murder or corruption, well, why should we find out about things happening outside?” I assimilated that, I accepted it, but on the other hand, there were times when all I did was stare at the walls, walk down the hallway, be completely silent, spend time with other colleagues, talk to other colleagues.
Laura: Going back, what made you feel like a prisoner while you were in the hospital?
Francisco: In addition to the fact that all the doors and windows are security-equipped, and all sections have to go through a security check, with specific codes, specific security keys, they’re always watching you, and you’re kind of afraid of, “Where are you going?” “Stay here,” or “Don’t go over there,” the supervised calls, the restrictions. I remember there were some specific rooms that we were warned had closer surveillance than others, and that if we behaved in a certain way, they’d move us to another room, depending on how we behaved.
Laura: Changing the subject a bit, you told me about medication you were prescribed. Can you tell me a little about the medications you’ve been prescribed?
Francisco: I’ve been taking medication since I was a teenager or pre-teen. Paxil,
Prozac, Wellbutrin, Lamictal, Zoloft, Effexor, Ambien, Klonopin, Abilify, and Lithium. Abilify started giving me manias and that’s when I started questioning my sanity and I was like, “What is this? I’m imagining violent scenes in my mind.” I was talking to you and suddenly I was imagining myself pulling your hair or some things that I was like, “What are these possessions that I have inside? Where do these intrusive thoughts come from?” I became afraid of it and also of Klonopin because they left me dysfunctional.
Laura: Did they tell you about the side effects of the medications?
Francisco: Never. They always give you the literature and all that. Also, when you read them, I said, “Look, this could cause such and such a thing,” and they told me, “Dude, if you’re going to be paying attention to everything the papers say, you’re going to be scared all the time and you won’t want to resort to treatment. All medications have side effects; it depends on the dosage, your body, how you take it; it depends on many things, and like everything in life, it has some.” They give you the pamphlets when you go to the pharmacy to buy the medication. It’s not the psychiatrist. In less than a month, or two weeks, or three weeks, I was already seeing effects. I remember one day I almost crashed and couldn’t drive. That frustrated me because I had to depend on a family member, and it was the family member I felt most uncomfortable with, and this made me feel like I couldn’t make progress. Seeing myself dependent on that person.
I wanted my freedom, independence, and autonomy, but the medications didn’t allow me to have those because I wasn’t functioning properly, I could cause an accident, or hurt someone else. I was between feeling sleepy, trembling, imagining things, persistent memory problems, having intrusive thoughts, etc. I’m someone who has an almost photographic memory of things and childhood traumas. I’ll tell you, but now as an adult, I forget a lot of things.
There are times when I try to justify it and figure out if it’s ADD that’s not being treated, or if I need some other medication, or if it’s because of the various traumas or the amount of medications I was given or the treatments I was given. So, many times, I question both my current mental health and it makes me anxious about how the future might develop. Sometimes, I see people who also have depression and they end up homeless, and I’ve seen myself there, like that could happen to me, and let’s hope it doesn’t.
Laura: How horrible, really. What did they tell you about the medications and how they will affect your life?
Francisco: Most people have told me I’ll be taking them for life; others have told me no. Some say I can take them for more or lower the dose. I’ve found myself in situations where I want to lower the dose, raise it, or lower it. The medications, rather than treating the trauma, rather than the problem I have, treat the physical manifestation of my emotions and what I haven’t been able to work on. And my appetite, sleep, and libido improve or worsen, depending on the medication. They take me off them, and for now, I’m experiencing these side effects: tremors, pain in my hands, and restless leg syndrome.
Laura: And finally, would you resort to psychiatric hospitalization again?
Francisco: I don’t rule it out because finding a psychiatrist, finding a psychologist, has been so difficult and uphill that it leads to resorting to hospitalization because it’s my last resort. It doesn’t address the problem that was around me, but there comes a time when one sees it as a refuge, but also a prison; it’s constant. I would have liked to spend more time outside, working with the plants, listening to the animals, the birds, in the fresh air, reading, painting, or sculpting, learning something new, struggling with cooking, struggling with practical and useful things, having more therapy.
I can so relate to much of the author’s experience. Francisco writes so very well and appears to be doing his best to see the positives in what is described as harrowing and potentially traumatic experiences.
I will never understand why institutions treat people so badly. Some of what Francisco reports sounds like a scene from Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest.
When will we ever learn to treat people asking for help with compassion and dignity? The overuse of medications and shock therapy must be called out for what it is. Institutional traumatization for benefit of staff, and not the people who have been given psychiatric labels.
I visit PR frequently and have become enchanted by the beauty of the island, and the consistent kindness of the people. Thank you Mr. Francisco for sharing part of your story. It was informative and inspiring to me.
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As soon as it becomes acceptable to look on someone as “less than,” humans will start abusing them. It’s 100% inevitable.
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Precisely. Dehumanization is a ubiquitous factor in all forms of social and physical violence, and by dehumanization I mean desubjectification, or reification, seeing them as a thing, with a corresponding negative emotional vibration. How does this come about? In characterizing the other through language and judgement, we construct them into an image. The poor person is happless, greedy, stupid. The Jew is dangerous, avericious, suspicious. The ‘black person’, and the ‘gay person’, i.e. human being who was only ever defined by their skin colour or sexual behaviour in the first place because ‘white heterosexual people’ invented the idea to define people according to their deviance from themselves, thus separating them from themselves, and the social discourses of power then thicken and extend the meanings of these socially constructed identity creating ever deeper separation but also confusion and ultimately, a rejection of the whole field, as those of us who reject both the prejudice holder and the defenders of identity. We are human beings – all identities have their roots in judgement and in the false, and gravely distort and ruin our perception of each other. And in answer to the original question I feel this is the only thing that has destroyed that human connection and affection for each other as a species.
So we construct a completely false and fraudulent reality through our judgements, and this is what we have done not just to those WE construct as ‘mentally ill’ but also addicts, the homeless, the incarcerated, the poor, and every kind of deviation from white heterosexual normativity. And even white heterosexuality is a mere conceptual construction, but in constructing all concepts within the global Western mind it constructs itself as the right and the good and everything else as wanting. But the Western mind today has gone insane with it’s reckless judgements and has now lost all footing in actuality whatsoever. We are writing of actuality though here, keeping it alive, when we point out the ugly truth of all this and it is noteworthy how all the comments on this website tend to be by people devoted to the understanding or exposing of the actual, the factual, not the ideological. Naturally theory etc slips in but their concern tends to be much more about the actual truth of things. The authors of the articles on the whole are, as would be expected, more prone to lose themselves in ideologies but thankfully not so in this article. Young male writers tend to be the worst when it comes to the immature practice of theoretical construction and excessive and rash theoretical judgements – this because young men tend to have worse egos and more ignorance, obviously. You don’t tend to see this so much in female writers. I think you have to eject those young intellectual trouble makers and replace them with older versions, and then bring more women writers in and encourage them to kick some backside. Definitely women are much better at kicking butt then men, because if I kick yours you’ll kick mine. But if she kicks mine then I’m told.
There is much more hope in a psychotic discovering actuality then there is a brain destroyed by heavy academic conditioning or else by American conspiracy theories and the wildly distorted worldviews that abound across America in every walk of life. But being displaced in any way from the madness, including by being characterised as other by white heterosexual male normativity, gives a blessed distance from the pathological developments within the Western intellect and social structures and so to be characerized as other contains secret gifts and opportunities as well as innumerable burdens and injustices and dangers that nobody can see from the outside, just like the suffering we call ‘mental health’. If someone diagnosed mentally ill speaks about the truth of what we call mental illnes, they are unreliable narrators. If someone black speaks about the truth of racism, they are playing the race card. If an addict talks about their powerlessness in the face of addiction, they are making excuses. And when the young kid is incarcerated and speaks of injustice, they are trying to escape their crime, or make excuses for it, or solicit pity. And all this because of that one thing – judgement, and a thing judged is no longer seen. Only the judgement is seen and the ugly feelings that this judgement generates. And that is the actual burden of the judged, and the true heart of all social violence.
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Is a healthy response to psychiatric trauma the endless description of the traumatising systems? This sounds like trauma proper, as a religious ritual, not your liberation from it. You’ve been liberated from some of the illusions of psychiatry but to paraphrase some old Marxist (may have been Marx himself), now you have to liberate yourself from the liberation and find yourself this big messy thing called the process of human civilization which is existing outside of psychiatry and contains psychiatry, the psychiatrists and the whole of humanity as in it’s prison of offices, factories and shopping malls. That thing called civilization is the chief psychiatrist and the process imprisoning us all. Let’s destroy it with our bare hands before it destroys the whole Earth. Got any better ideas? Then please flesh them out in realistic and realizable step. My method has only one step that even a child, nay even a dog might understand: DESTROY!
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Some of the most searing, emotional prose ever written was with writers who wrote to deal with their pain and emotion, who wrote therapeutically because they didn’t have an easier set of emotional escapes like wine or sex or violence or drugs within their armoury of habits, so they write, and what comes out goes beyond all intellectual endeavour. Examples I can think of include Theodore Adorno who wrote Minima Moralia, and as he himself said, “writing is a place to live for the people who no longer have a home”, and so why not move out of the psychiatric ward now and write about everything, and let the pain of the psychiatric trauma become the fire in your future prose. Another who had this enviable habit is Emile Coran, and just to give you a flavour of what came out him, here’s some quotes taken at random from google:
“It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.”
“Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?”
“A book is a suicide postponed.”
“What do you do from morning to night? I endure myself.”
“Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, Chaos is being yourself.”
“Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.”
“As far as I am concerned, I resign from humanity. I no longer want to be, nor can still be, a man.”
“The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live –moreover, the only one.”
“Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?”
“The same feeling of not belonging, of futility, wherever I go: I pretend interest in what matters nothing to me, I bestir myself mechanically or out of charity, without ever being caught up, without ever being somewhere.”
The above is both pure human honesty, which is not in the least philosophical but the conveyance of real perception and feeling, yet his writings are taken as great social critique, so we see how true philosophy is really the use of language to convey the actual pain and beauty of life as it is perceived, although now what we call ‘philosophy’ has degenerated into intellectual pretence, posturing and egoistic construction of theories in order to attract attention, which is most people writing in the field today. So real writing comes from writing as a therapy, and the fire in it comes from real feeling that has no other easy outlet.
And these above quotes by Coran are reminiscent of Nietzsche, another who wrote in solitude enduring the isolation of being a 19th century German intellectual, and endured many illnesses and traumas especially with regards abandonment, and there is this same fire and human insight in his prose. Another is Tristan Dada, who because of sheer boredom, anomie and frustration was writing and saw his writing suddenly explode with life and colour, as he unconsciously created the ‘social genre’ we call Dada (obviously a creative explosion in a person can never be a ‘social genre’ so the social genre is always the grave stone for the real thing). And so too we can think of many of the great philosophers in the West since ancient Greece and many of the saints and sages in the East. What am I saying here? That your feelings and emotions demand expression, but you don’t have to express them at the systems and processes you blame. Rather you can just write and write, or speak and speak, about everything, and let that pain be the animating fire and passion in what you say. If you direct that fire and passion only at the process that violated you then they have won a victory over your mind, heart and energy which is still devoted to them. We need freedom from all violators and violating processes, and perhaps we can find that inwardly and perhaps that inwardness will come out of us in our writing and speaking if we can first set them free.
I think there are important lessons here for both healing and for the critique of psychiatry, and there is a book by Anthony Store called Solitude that discusses the relationship between solitude and radical breakthrough philosophy and literature, and if we also consider the relationship between this, solitude and suffering, we may begin to understand that process of turning pain into dynamic poetry, philosophy and prose. Understanding this could only innervate the critic of psychiatry or society as well as removing their conceptual imprisonment, their socially conditioned limitations.
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