Iam a healthy person, but the mental health system made me sick. From the age of 30 to 36—a time when one is still young but is maturing and developing as an adult—I fell prey to a network that seemed unconcerned with talking through human issues, but prescribed medications my body didn’t need, invented labels for me and left my true ailments unaddressed. These doctors instilled fear in me, didn’t listen to me, and seemed not to care about my well-being. The mental health system ended up stealing a significant part of my life.
It all began when I returned to Ecuador after struggling to complete a master’s degree in art therapy in Chicago. I needed a diagnosis to justify the termination of my studies. Soon I found myself entangled in a system that grew worse and more abusive over time. What began as a typical youthful stumble ended in a negligent diagnosis doomed to last forever.
Although I had been independent for years, I moved in with my parents and surrendered my entire will to them following this event. I don’t know if the fact that my dad was involved in a religious cult contributed in any way to this surrender on my part. I also used to attend ayahuasca ceremonies, where a culture of obedience toward the leader prevailed; I suppose I picked up a bit of that attitude. Around this time, a few people sent me messages inviting me to hang out; that would have been ideal for reconnecting with the community, and with my independent self. But I didn’t go out.
My parents suggested various solutions to help me recover from my crisis, including visiting the cult leader. I didn’t want to continue down that path. So my dad suggested seeing a psychiatrist. The idea made me uncomfortable, but he was pushing for it. I’d always preferred alternative and natural remedies. Although I didn’t agree with shamans, I also didn’t agree with psychiatry. I didn’t trust the medications; I knew they were very strong substances and I was afraid to take them. The way the psychiatrist conducted his consultation was strange. He didn’t analyze things deeply. He asked me only one thing during our fifteen-minute appointment: whether I had thoughts that were “out of touch with reality.” After that visit, there was no follow-up. He struck me as a very shallow and somewhat sexist doctor.
I regret having surrendered all my autonomy to my parents and not having connected with the community. They thought I had to choose a path—between psychiatry and shamanism. I think things are simpler and freer than that. I didn’t need treatment; I needed community.
Strangely, after that doctor visit, I began to feel constantly violated at home. My family would barge into my room at all hours and monitor my every move. I really felt uncomfortable there. They stopped letting me borrow the car. I could tell they were looking at me differently, and I felt like they were talking about me behind my back.
Family lunches were particularly painful. I picked up on subtle but demeaning gestures that made me feel uncomfortable, and I felt anything but safe in the kitchen. The nonverbal cues around the table were palpable and painful for me. I felt that my family weren’t respecting my boundaries. I began to notice behaviors from my father in the kitchen and elsewhere in the house that were abusive.
My mother, even though I didn’t live with her, also treated me with contempt. One day, I was trying to convince her that my problem in Chicago hadn’t been a crisis. She told me, “You were psychotic.” That comment hurt me deeply, because I felt it was a harsh judgment on my personality—a label that left me feeling incapacitated.
I gradually began to realize that my family were becoming too intrusive. At home, a subtle form of psychological abuse was being directed at me. I had no idea why, but I could sense it very clearly. With this in mind, I found a volunteer position in downtown Quito and decided to move out on my own with the little savings I had.
As I was leaving home (for the second time), I was experiencing an awakening to adulthood. I longed to become mentally independent from my parents’ ideas. I also wanted to find a partner and start a home of my own. I was curious about feminism. I felt that a lot was happening in Quito, and I was interested in getting involved. I had been ignoring certain gender issues in my own life, and I wanted to make up for that.
It was then that my parents told me the doctor had prescribed that they give me medication behind my back, mixed into my food. They told me it was my decision whether or not to continue with the treatment in this new stage of my life.
When I found out about the secret medication, I realized that something really had to change. It scared me to have reached that point, and something shifted inside me. I no longer wanted to be a patient; I wanted to be healthy and stop being perceived as psychotic. I was determined to move forward and extricate myself from that situation.
Once in the new apartment, I felt more at ease. In my studio, I began working on my art with great dedication. I continued seeing psychiatrist Cruz, who had arranged for my medication to be mixed into my food. He told me I had paranoia. I took his words pretty seriously. I began to analyze the past. I used my skills and training in Art Therapy to make sense of this diagnosis. I began to analyze myself intensely. Deep down I knew that the diagnosis he gave me was without any proof, and that it was a label for a problem that was surely larger, more complex, deeper, and had social reasons.
I realized that yes, there were some things I needed to work through psychologically. Ever since I moved from Ecuador to the United States in my late teens, I had always felt uncomfortable in family situations—both on my mother’s and father’s sides. But I couldn’t delve deeper into that feeling or make any progress. I think there was a rift with my cousins and brother when this happened. The way I related to myself disconnected me from people my own age. At these gatherings, I felt on edge the whole time. I didn’t give myself enough time to feel at ease and experience my emotions. I felt a kind of violence in the speed at which things unfolded when we interacted, and I couldn’t find myself. I felt as though I had lost my way.
I also realized that my time at university as an undergrad had been far from ideal. I felt rootless. I had my first relationship, but we didn’t always communicate well. To make matters worse, after I graduated, I suffered from burnout. My mom kicked me out of the house, and I had to take a job on the Mexico-U.S. border. So when I returned to Ecuador, I was burned out and disconnected. Every year after my graduation was marked by this. I made a lot of mistakes. These factors made it difficult for me to complete my master’s degree. Some shortcomings and burdens I’d been carrying prevented me from finishing it.
Doctor Cruz would never ask me counseling-type questions. Not once did he ask me how I was feeling, nor did he pay attention to my problems. I worked with him anyway to reduce and eventually discontinue my antipsychotic medication.
Sometimes, because I had no one to talk to, I’d get in my own way, and out of fear that my mom and dad would say more things to me, I’d fall into the stereotype of an unstable ‘mentally ill’ person. It was a cycle. I wanted to show them that I was okay, but because I was nervous, I acted strangely and that shocked them. I was scared that they wouldn’t trust that I could live without medications, and since I depended on them financially, I felt like I had to act perfectly normal all the time, and this was a great pressure on me.
The pandemic caught me by surprise at my dad’s house. During those days of quarantine, he declared that I was unwell, locked the front door, and wouldn’t let me leave. He forced me to take my medication in front of him. My mom cut off my financial support, and I had to leave my apartment. I assured them that the doctor had lowered my dose and that we were on our way to weaning me off the psychiatric drugs, but they insisted that the reduced dose was making me worse. The only thing I was was persistent, because I didn’t want to be locked up, and I didn’t want to be forced to take medication at age 32. I wasn’t going to accept psychiatry as punishment for my past behavior. I wanted therapy, not medication to mask the problems.
I feel like I worked so hard to improve and better myself, and I really took my own mental health seriously. But my dad kept telling me that I had to take responsibility for my problems, because I had a serious condition; that I should take medication, because it was the only solution; that I was irresponsible.
This contradiction—my deep self-analysis compared to the portrait he painted of me as an irresponsible person—is evidence of how little women are taken seriously. My dad didn’t want to see what I was telling him, and he never acknowledged how seriously I took my own healing. Getting better was what I wanted most in the world. But I didn’t want others to label my problems, nor did I want my will to be in the hands of others. I didn’t want to be a child trapped in an adult’s body. I was aware that other people my age had rights in their own homes; I wanted to be like them.
One night, when I refused to take my medication, my mom and her partner burst into the house and stormed into my room. My mom’s husband had his cell phone camera in his hand. Holding a dropper, my mom approached me menacingly and started talking to me as if I were dysfunctional, telling me to take my medication. I told her no. Literally choking me, she forced excessive doses down my throat, all the while making vulgar gestures of satisfaction. I can’t describe the fear I felt. This was an act of intimidation. It confirmed my suspicions that something was wrong at home—something akin to domestic violence. They didn’t have my best interests at heart. They just wanted me to obey their wishes.
I decided to rent an apartment with money I’d received from the U.S. government’s unemployment assistance program. Once in this new apartment, I tried to heal and make it a safe space. But my mom would come by frequently and try to stay. Given what she had done to me weeks earlier, I wouldn’t let her in and didn’t want to talk to her. The truth is, I was afraid of her. One day, she was trying to come in, and she told me I looked “bad,” that I was “hunched over and strange.” What was wrong with me was that I resented her, but she used psychiatric language to describe the problem. She called Clínica Guadalupe, and some men came who cornered me, grabbed me by force, and took me away.
They restrained me, sedated me, told me, “We’re going to run some tests on your brain,” and left me restrained without water for three days in a room. When I got up from the stretcher, I fainted and subsequently hit my head. I was hospitalized for a month. The diagnosis they gave me—without bothering to establish any kind of trust with me first—was schizoaffective disorder.
The trauma they inflicted on me at that clinic was so severe that when I was discharged, I would wet my pants at any moment, and I walked with a limp. After this hospitalization, it became almost impossible for me to leave the mental health system. The psychiatric treatments I received at that clinic were hurting me. So I didn’t share my true feelings with the doctors. I had so many things I wanted to talk about with someone—important things—but these people weren’t interested in how I was really doing.
I had asked my mom countless times to look into other diagnoses. But she wouldn’t listen to me. One day, I decided I wasn’t going back to Clínica Guadalupe anymore. I was being mistreated too much there. Besides, the medications they gave me weren’t helping me. I decided to ask my dad for help. But far from helping me, he cut off my financial support, and I had to move back in with him. Then they suggested transferring me to a doctor at Hospital Metropolitano.
Even though I begged them over and over again to let me choose a different doctor, they wouldn’t listen to me. It was like I had no right to refuse.
One day, my dad locked himself in my room and spent two hours on the phone with the psychiatrist, telling her his version of my life story and all the problems that needed to be fixed. In my short time as an art therapy student, I had learned that the best expert on a patient is the patient themselves, but this doctor clearly didn’t share that view. She accepted the version of me that my father had given her.
Not one of the doctors ever asked how I was feeling or doing. They were never willing to have conversations or sort through problems with me, even though they said I was ill. And the fact that I had no one to talk to made things worse. I worsened instead of getting better as the treatment progressed, but ironically those in charge said I was getting better.
Time passed, and I landed an internship at a company owned by a friend of my dad’s. I worked hard at this internship, while feeling all the horrible side effects of the medications. I stopped exercising and looking for natural alternatives because I was so depressed.
My salary gradually went up, but it was barely enough to live on. With the doctor at the Metropolitano, we reached the end of the “treatment” and the doses were gradually reduced until they were completely stopped. Then I began to experience some side effects from the reduced dosage. These effects are very common when anyone is weaned off medication, but the doctor never warned me about them. My parents interpreted this as a sign that I wasn’t responding well to the end of treatment. They forced me to see the psychiatrist again, and she increased my medication once more.
A few months later, I was accepted into a master’s program in Expressive Arts Therapy in San Francisco. I thought this acceptance would make my parents see things differently. But they weren’t willing to let me go to school without continuing psychiatric treatment with antipsychotics.
I decided that this cycle—in which I begged them to let me see alternative doctors of my choice, they refused, and I gave in to their will out of fear of violence—had to end. So I turned to community resources, such as a former classmate who is a lawyer and whom I had fond memories of. He informed me of my options.
I filed a report against my parents with the district attorney’s office for domestic violence and posted a complaint on social media. My boss, who is a friend of my father’s, saw the post on social media and immediately told my father. I decided to quit my job and was left without an income or any way to pay my college tuition. My parents didn’t want to support me; they were only willing to spend money on psychiatric treatment.
Then, as if by a miracle, I found some money I had saved years ago in an insurance policy. It was just enough to buy a ticket to California, where I knew there were laws to protect me as a citizen and where I would be able to pursue the master’s degree program I’d been accepted into. I left the country without telling anyone. I arrived at the home of an uncle who is a lawyer, whom I thought could help me. But he was upset that I had arrived without warning and called the police to have my legal capacity suspended for 72 hours so they could evaluate my situation at a hospital. At this hospital in Solano, California, they placed me on a stretcher in the middle of the room, and I began to have flashbacks. I remembered everything I had gone through during my first hospitalization at Guadalupe, and it was too much to bear.
After 72 hours, they transferred me to a psychiatric hospital. They wanted to give me more antipsychotics, but I refused. So they called the guards, and they forced me to take the medication. After a month, heavily medicated, they released me.
Once out of the hospital, I was lucky enough to find some resources that helped me: social organizations, and a social worker who made me feel heard. Little by little, I was able to stand up for my own health and my own body, and resist forced treatment. I couldn’t enroll in the master’s program due to financial difficulties and because my parents didn’t support me, but I was able to defend my rights and put a stop to that situation. I suspect my uncle also put in a good word for me about ending the treatment.
If a healthcare professional doesn’t listen to you, make sure your opinion is heard. You are the best expert on yourself. Psychiatric violence must be reported. The pharmaceutical industry simply shouldn’t play any role in the health of a vulnerable person. One characteristic of Latin cultures is making room for differences, for expressions of the soul, for what is normally considered strange. I believe we should honor our culture and our roots with more compassionate ways of viewing people. I hope this story helps other survivors of psychiatric violence to claim their rights and say no to the things they don’t want.
Now that I’m back in Ecuador, I’ve been looking for alternatives to psychiatry—for example, yoga, exercise, meditation, and working with a collective that’s dedicated to protecting the river. I try to connect with the earth and with other people… things that make sense to me. The medical model is dangerous.
Admire your courage, lead on
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