Someday We Will Burn Down the Psych Ward
Content Note: Rape, strip searches, police violence
People need to know that psych wards are a form of incarceration. Policing is intimately intertwined with the psychiatric system: I can draw a line from the transphobic cop that raped me in his car while his partner filled out the 72 hour hold paperwork, and connect that to thirty minutes later in the hospital when I was sexually assaulted by nurses performing my intake strip search. I can’t hold that pain alone–what it felt like to get ripped apart on the hot metal of a cop car and what it meant when the nurses re-enacted that violence afterwards. The experience of confinement escalated my original crisis and denied me any semblance of care or support. I spent time in solitary, was forced on medications, and deprived of any form of privacy. Any reaction I had to my psychiatric incarceration was categorized as a symptom of my “disorder”, creating a cycle that trapped me over and over again.
When I was raped by the cops, my first emotion was a sense of grim resignation, because I knew I wasn’t going to be able to find any sort of justice—it was my second psych hold in two weeks and I now had a diagnosis of psychosis that meant I forfeited my right to be believed ever again. It meant I couldn’t get PEP or Plan B in the ward. I spent three more weeks locked up, unable to vocalize my concerns about exposure and pregnancy without getting “delusional” noted down in my chart. I looked on the hospital website later and they claimed to be “trauma informed.” I can’t stop laughing.
The psychs told me I was broken and told me I was mutilated and told me that I would never live in the community again, and the scariest part is that I almost believed them. I am forever so grateful that I stumbled into disability justice spaces that summer. I read Brilliant Imperfection by Eli Clare and realized that there was a whole movement of people harmed by psychiatry. My pain was not solely located within my pathologized mind, but instead reflective of a system designed to incarcerate us. There were thousands of survivors working to tear down the psych wards and build up alternatives to care for each other.
Every day I still breathe is a day I am fighting back. Every psych hold where I’m noncompliant is revolutionary. I think a lot about resistance in the psych ward—I’ve led protests inpatient, helped someone sneak out of a ward, and got a clinical director fired. Resistance is messy. When every choice and option for autonomy is taken away from you, we will demand our autonomy through any mechanism possible, including self destruction. If they truly wanted us to stop self harming in there they wouldn’t have set up a system where it feels like the only accessible option for enforcing our autonomy is to tear ourselves apart while we do it. When psychiatrists convince us that we have no right to fight back, they demolish our capacity to trust ourselves in the outside world. I’m still building that back, day after day. 7 months and 14 days free right now, and sometimes I still forget that I don’t have to wait for someone to unlock the door to my bedroom.
Psych survivor community saved my life. I don’t know if recovery or healing or safety are things that even make sense to me, but I do know that meeting other people who’ve lived through it, staying in touch with my friends from the ward, and organizing for mad liberation has made me feel like I can dream again. I feel alive when we can hold anger together, when we can be terrible, noncompliant, bitter patients who break shit every time we go back into a psych ward.
Some day I will burn that cop car + walk hand in hand with my comrades to the nearest psych ward, first demolishing solitary confinement and then throwing the restraints into the fire, and we won’t stop until all that is left is us and our Madness—beautiful, terrible, furiously and unmistakably ours.
