about a year and a half ago during a crisis, i went to see a professor who’d told me i could trust her and that she was there to help. she got drunk, professed herself to be my New Mother, and, when i had a flashback in front of her, immediately summoned armed cops to forcibly escort me to the nearest psychiatric ward.
ambulances and cops and flashing lights were a regular occurrence at my childhood home because of seriously ill family, and i was able to dissociate enough to not get shot or otherwise injured by the well-loved police of this godforsaken suburb, who’d told me–as if we were in a movie–“we can either do this the easy way or the hard way”. still, my belongings were seized and i was detained in a tiny, screamingly white room without my comfort objects, the ability to ground or regulate my sensory input, my clothing, my dignity, or even a way to tell a single person where i was and what was happening.
beforehand, i snuck into the ER bathroom to flush two bottles of prescription medication that could have gotten me criminally charged if found in my possession. she’d known i’d had them when she called the cops. they got down the drain the instant a nurse barged in without asking, because crazy people can’t be trusted to urinate in private.
i spent the night and next day confused, distressed, endangered, and utterly alone, detained against my will in a hospital unequipped to process psychiatric patients, in a town i’d never been to–because i’d been stupid enough to take a suburban, white, bleeding-heart liberal woman at her word and have a child-rape flashback in her driveway.
then i got a thousand-dollar bill.
keep cops out of mental healthcare.
+ keep coercion out of mental health care
Forced care isn’t ‘care’, it’s violence and it only makes things worse.
QueerAnarchism 