The below are some tweets from this morning I thought I’d share along with an old essay from 2007. Sometimes it feels important to retell these stories. I follow my muse, my inner guidance and do so. I don’t spend so much time thinking about this stuff anymore, but as a writer I’ve found that there are many people who need to hear this from someone else because they think they’re the only ones such heinous shit happened to. Or worse, they have come to believe they deserved the heinous shit because there is no one in their environment to reflect to them their real beauty and any sort of belief in their inherent well-being (we all have that).
The tweets:
I am a privileged, well-educated, middle class white woman, yet, I know some about unprovoked police brutality. …
Once one is perceived as mad one is no longer safe-we become targets of the worst sorts of violence. I was thrown down a flight of stairs…
With no threat of violence on my part, I was thrown down the stairs and then HOG TIED in the back of a cop car. WTF? Handcuffs? Anyone?
I was, of course, freaking out at this point so when they dumped me at the county mental ward they, in turn, laid me out on a table…
The tied me down by my wrists and my ankles and then they shot me up with mind numbing, soul and body killing neurotoxic drugs…
If u think that what happened to me is anything less than gang rape,you’re not appreciating the level of hostile violence I was subjected to
I’ve in fact been raped in the more traditional sense as well and this was actually far worse because it was perpetrated by multiple people (and it went on for far longer)
Such is the mental illness system! Such treatment is guaranteed to further traumatize and harm the already vulnerable and sensitive.
Standard psychiatric treatment routinely retraumatizes which causes more problems.
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My Forced Psychiatric “Treatment”
And a collection: Coercion, subtle or otherwise, is the rule in psychiatric care…
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*it is potentially dangerous to come off medications without careful planning. Please be sure to be well-educated before undertaking any sort of discontinuation of medications. If your MD agrees to help you do so, do not assume they know how to do it well even if they claim to have experience. They are generally not trained in discontinuation and may not know how to recognize withdrawal issues. A lot of withdrawal issues are misdiagnosed to be psychiatric problems. This is why it’s good to educate oneself and find a doctor who is willing to learn with you as your partner in care. Really all doctors should always be willing to do this as we are all individuals and need to be treated as such. See: Psychiatric drug withdrawal and protracted withdrawal syndrome round-up
It’s become clear to me that whenever it’s possible that it’s helpful for folks who’ve not begun withdrawal and have the time to consider a carefully thought out plan to attempt to bring greater well-being to your body before starting the withdrawal. That means learning how to profoundly nourish your body/mind and spirit prior to beginning a withdrawal. For suggestions on how to go about doing that check the drop-down menus on this blog for ideas. Anything that helps you learn how to live well can be part of your plan. That plan will look different for everyone as we learn to follow our hearts and find our own unique paths in the world. Things to begin considering are diet, exercise and movement, meditation/contemplation etc. Paying attention to all these things as you do them helps too. The body will start letting us know what it needs as we learn to pay attention.
For a multitude of ideas about how to create a life filled with safe alternatives to psychiatric drugs visit the drop-down menus at the top of this page.
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As a retired nurse, who worked twenty years of career in psychiatry, I have seen this happen way too often. In my state, there is a law that the deputy sheriff can only transport patients to the unit in handcuffs. This includes little old ladies who end up having a urinary tract infection and that is why they were acting weird. I’ve also seen male patients provoked by male staff. I once worked on a unit where all staff was female and in the three years I was there, I only saw one patient who had to be put in seclusion.