Survivors’ guilt is real.
It was over a year ago that I got out of HBM in Worcester, and it still haunts me on the day-to-day. I’ve asked myself why I can’t move on. And there are reasons. Obviously, it permanently changed my ability to trust providers and be open if I needed help. Worse, given how PTSD works, I now have a trauma reaction to people with featues that resemble those of the people who held me there. More broadly, it changed the way I see humans as a whole, and the lengths that people will go to to join together and cause harm to victims. And obviously, the most psychologically damaging aspect of it by far was that I had no way of knowing whether I would ever get out.
But, I did get out. And before I left, I secretly gave my phone number to someone else who was in there with me, who I’m pretty sure was having her first psychotic break. Which, what that means, is that she needed help. Mind you, nothing about that “hospital” was remotely helpful; we were just being increasingly traumatized by the day. But because she was so ill, there was no way for her to get out and go someplace that could help her. Because HBM was operating under the guise of being a place of healing, the most vulnerable people were the ones being damaged the most. I was the lucky one, because I was less sick, so I was able to eventually get out of there. I don’t know if this woman ever made it out. And believe me, I wish I could use her real name, because she is a real person and unless she died, she still exists somewhere. I hope she’s okay, but I doubt she is.
So, I had spent two weeks in the trenches with this lady, and after I left, she called from the wall phone in tears.
“I’m scared,” she said.
She was 100% justified in that. And there was nothing I could do. Obviously, we couldn’t take pictures. Any time there was a “group,” they were extremely serious about getting all their jail-pens back afterwards, meaning we didn’t always have anything to even write with. I had tried asking, and it didn’t go well. So, we couldn’t document anything. Then, when I got out, the Department of Mental Health completely ignored my complaint. Most people in the general population won’t listen, because you’re immediately discredited the moment you say it was a psychiatric hospital. But the problem is, that what that means, is that the hospital is able to hold hundreds of people, including children, and cause major, permanent psychological damage, and nobody cares or does anything because it’s happening to people with mental illness. Other regimes have picked up on this as well, which is why unspeakable things have been happening to people with mental illness since time immemorial. I had spent my life thinking that in the USA in the 21st century, these sorts of abuses could never happen. I think a lot of my compatriots still think that. And I just feel this tremendous sense of responsibility, because I know. Not just the potential for human cruelty, but that this is happening every day right under our noses.
Mind you, when I got out of there, I warned everyone I knew. I couldn’t save the people who had already been there, but I could protect those at risk.
About a week ago, I happened to be in touch recently with someone who I was in a peer support group with last year. She mentioned that there had been multiple times when she was in a mental health crisis, but did not go to the emergency room, specifically because of the information I had given her. Which, everything I had said was 100% true. If you go to the emergency room, they might help you, or they might hurt you. I am not going to stop sharing this graphic organizer of where you might be forced to go once you’re on a “bed search”
So, I stand by having warned her. But this does put me in a terrible position, because on some level, I was responsible that she didn’t go to the emergency room, meaning she could have died. Furthermore, in the future, she still could die. And it’s totally unfair to me to have to live with the weight of that. I have to warn people of the danger because I was unable to neutralize that danger via complaints to the authorities. I can’t get accountability for HBM. I can’t get people out of HBM. I can’t get people help for the trauma of having been there for months and months on end, when I can barely deal with the trauma of having been there for two weeks.
So I warn people. Because dealing with the psych section of the emergency room is literally just gambling. “What’s the likelihood that I would have survived the night if I hadn’t come in?” “Now that I’m here, what’s the likelihood that I would be safe if I went home?” “What’s the risk that if I’m put on a bed search, I’ll end up someplace harmful (ie HBM) rather than helpful?” People in that scenario are already dealing with so much, that forcing us to go through an if/then flowchart in our minds, trying to calculate probability with trauma in place of actual numbers, calculating benefit vs risk of truthfully opening up to people who probably do want to help but have no say over the “bed search”… these are things that nobody should have to do when we’re already in mental health crisis and asking for help is hard enough.
So. I’ve been working on myself. I’m doing okay. It’s not the ideal life that I would have wanted at 35, but I’m not in crisis. If it were just about me, I would continue working on PTSD, including PTSD from HBM, but I wouldn’t be here writing this. I’m writing this because HBM is still killing people. They traumatize the people who come through their doors. They prevent people from being able to ask for help in life-threatening crises. And they leave people like me in the crossfires with knowledge that I never wanted, trying to help others navigate risk, in a scenario where the risk of permanent harm from a bed search increases in exact correlation with the risk that the person will die if they don’t put themselves on a bed search.
In the past year, the political tide in this country has not turned in favor of people with disabilities. Clearly, the establishment is doing nothing. Nothing is going to change until the people raise hell. Because going to the hospital should never be dangerous. In the peak of a mental health crisis, nobody ever should have to ride it out alone.