25/06/2026
In a mental health forum someone asked what it's like to be in a psychiatric hospital. Here's my reply:
It's like being in a cuckoo's nest! The first thing they did to me was violate my right to informed consent. Before we even got through the first locked door. Then they strip searched me. And you can imagine that was traumatic.
They took away all my personal belongings except for my clothes. Wasn't even allowed to have shoelaces. And then the electronic monitor was locked on my wrist.
I was assigned to a room and a psychiatrist. The room was not clean. There was hair, toothpaste, toothbrush and more, but it wasn't cleaned up until the fifth day I complained about it. The psychiatrist was one of the people most in need of mental health care that I've ever met. Just awful! She told me my treatment plan was "take your meds and go to group."
I was treated like a number, an object, and a problem. I was given multiple medications based on the psychiatrist's whims, without any real consideration about the effect they might have on me. I had to fight with the psychiatrist about keeping me on the SSRI that was causing the intense suicidal ideations for which I was sent to the cuckoo's nest! What the ever loving f***?
There was no individual therapy and group therapy was marginal at best. Most of it was crap. Some of it was insanely awful. One poor staffer stood up at the beginning of the session they were supposed to lead and said, "I've never led a group therapy session before and they didn't even give me a handout on how."
Food was gross, the menu heavily laden with fatty foods and few vegetables. The cafeteria sewage backed up but they kept serving food anyway. The place was riddled with roaches and smelled like rancid cooking oil.
Many of the employees seem to not give a s***, and some of them were clearly there because they were allowed to be nasty to people who couldn't fight back. Nurse Ratched lives. She was younger and prettier than in the movie but she was just as much a sadistic crazy b**** who reveled in her position of power to harm other people and keep them under her control.
And patients were threatened with being committed if they didn't want to stay until their insurance benefit ran out.
They supposedly had art therapy but we were just allowed to access art materials. Twice in a week. That's all. And the first time was cutting pictures out of magazines for a project the staff needed to complete. That's not therapy. It's not even art.
Also, anytime the schedule was behind, the first thing they cut out was access to outdoors. And outdoors meant a small yard with a high fence where the sun would hit certain parts at certain parts of the day.
And they check on you every 15 minutes around the clock which makes it extremely hard to sleep or feel safe in bed.
They were also always looking for ways to keep people longer. They changed my medication a tiny bit and then said, "by law we have to keep you another 48 hours to make sure you're okay." Another person reported that they made him stay because he tested positive for a bladder infection.
One poor person was doped out of consciousness. They left her in a chair without even a pillow to prop up her head. She sat in her urine and diarrhea for hours. They got her cleaned up and awake in time for her family to visit. After the family left, they doped her up again. They didn't monitor or care about her fluid or food intake. Her breath smelled like acetone. Nobody gave a s***.
There was a lot of paperwork to fill out. Daily reports and goals and blah blah blah that were not helpful just providing them with the documentation they needed to prove that keeping you there was in your best interest. But it wasn't.
During the checkout process, they had a big guy hanging out in the area where people wrote their assessment of how they've been treated. He leaned over my paper and smiled like he was trying to scare me into writing only good things. F*** him! I wrote the truth. I only felt confident enough to do that because I happened to have a friend on the outside who was a lawyer and would stand by me if I needed.
There was nothing supportive or healing about being in that warehouse of human misery and forced drugging. It robbed me of a week of my life, when I could have been doing things and being with people that actually supported my well-being instead of degrading it further.
By the time I got out of there, it was like they had nuked my nervous system back to preschool. Artistic my whole life, I couldn't even hold a brush. I had to go back to smashing, stomping, smearing and blowing the paint.
And that psychiatric abuse was the beginning of a cascade of negative medical events that destroyed my way of life, relieved me of virtually all my prior relationships, cost me my life savings, and left me disabled while being denied disability on the basis that " there's nothing in the record to indicate that all the trauma you've been through prevents you from being able to work." Because doctors didn't put much trauma in the record.
The biggest thing I learned through this is that the mental illness industry is not about health or care, but exploiting and monetizing human misery for the benefit of corporate interests.
