There is a part of me that is absolutely furious all the time about what happened to me in January, 2018… a part of me that is essentially screaming at the top of my lungs, all day and all night, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It often makes everything else I do in my life feel insignificant in comparison to what I feel needs to be done and to be changed with the system that caused my injustice, and it makes me sick to my stomach when I really let it sink in and affect me all the way through.
I think that the main reason I get so sick about it is that what happened to me is by no means an isolated incident in mental healthcare (as witnessed by many accounts I’ve found and read online and even stories from people I met while I was in the hospital), and it is in all likelihood happening on a regular basis throughout our country in some form or another, and possibly and probably throughout the world as well, and that thing is this:
People in mental institutions are being misdiagnosed, prescribed drugs that are inappropriate and ineffective for what is ACTUALLY the issue for them, AND side effects from those drugs are then misunderstood and misinterpreted as further symptoms of some other mental illness (not to mention the hell they go through on drugs they don’t need). Then, once these unfortunate patients are sufficiently confused and angry due to the improper treatment they receive that they start acting out (who wouldn’t?) they are then intimidated, traumatized, and misinformed by those who are supposed to be caring for them, further reinforcing their misdiagnosis and counterproductively making them even less likely to cooperate with treatment. And finally, caregivers are then not held responsible for their sometimes outrageous and objectively cruel mistreatment of those patients.
Okay, so I know I just threw a lot on the table all at once, so let’s break this all down – there are (at least) six issues wrapped up in all of what I just wrote, consisting of three main issues and three sub-issues.
The main issues as I understand them are 1) misdiagnosis, incorrect prescriptions and improper treatment of a mental illness, 2) misinterpretation of the side effects of unnecessary medication and treatment and the acting out that comes along with that, and 3) further misdiagnosis and further mistreatment as a result of the original misdiagnosis, mistreatment, and misinterpretation.
These first three issues obviously create their own vicious cycle, which is the one I found myself caught in for a month at the hospital in Buffalo where my own symptoms were wildly misunderstood, and my previous history of OCD was not only completely discounted, but misunderstood and labeled as other unrelated illnesses.
These three main issues would be bad enough on there own, but then add on top of that 4) the aforementioned vicious cycle inadvertently leading to abuse of those unfortunate individuals by those in authority who feel somehow “justified” in their actions and “above” those in their care, 5) lack of responsibility for those in charge for those actions, and lastly but probably most importantly, 6) the HUGE potential for the pervasiveness of all of these problems given the state of mental healthcare as a whole in our culture today.
In this series it is my goal to explore these six issues through the lens of my own experiences, the implications I have observed, the potential for other related issues in the arena of Mental Health, and what I believe desperately needs to be done about it.
See Mental Health Can Do Better, Part 1 (coming soon)
The Absolute Center of Everything 