Tag: psych ward

Disposable toothbrushes and sporks. Crayons instead of pens. Little pills in little paper cups. Someone would come. Someone would go. The days turned into nights and back again.

A psych hospital is like any other institution of total control. You have locked doors around you, there are guard-like mental health workers, and you only have so many ways to get by. Some people choose to sleep all the time. Some people choose to pace. And some people choose, given the right time and the right opportunity, to learn to steal or to get by in other ways.

Being in a psychiatric prison is about power, and it should be treated that way. There are a number of strategies for how to get through life in a psych ward. Over the course of a couple of extended admissions I ended up developing my own personal strategy, which one would simply call Unceasing Persistence.

Every time that I have been confined in a psych hospital, I have collected as many trophies as possible. Sometimes I go out of my way to steal the silverware, or the sheets, or the blankets from the beds, or even the signs off the walls. But it’s the really forbidden stuff that attracts me.

I was so anxious about having to raise three boys alone that I felt I was going insane. So I thought of going to see a psychiatrist. I was looking for Carl Jung. Instead I found a system where they give you pills, whether you need them or not.

The Dallas Morning News features an investigation into the safety issues that are plaguing mental-health hospitals in Texas and across the US -- all...