“Girl: Interrupted,” in real life.

I have written extensively on social media about having experienced various kinds of interpersonal abuse, as well as the fact of my depression and my struggle to embrace that part of myself. What I don’t talk much about — here or in person — is the landscape of how mental illness began for me as a child, or the fact that I was institutionalized and drugged up for a significant portion of my adolescence. Despite knowing I suffer from mental health issues and that I would probably benefit from professional help, I’ve long had a passive aversion to it, without really knowing why. Recently, I saw someone close to me go through a version of what happened with me when I was institutionalized as an adolescent. I began writing it out, and seeing a lot of things with greater clarity.
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I think that when people hear you say that you grew up in an abusive environment, they imagine the harm as being what the abuser inflicts upon you. That part is terrible, and scary, and humiliating, and feels like it will never end during the years you are in it. But I’ve long said that I think that the most destructive part of abuse is what it does to your relationship with yourself. One way I can put it is that when people I meet as an adult ask me what “group” I belonged to in high school or what my image was, it’s hard for me to know how to answer. When I think of myself in high school, all I can see is an outline of a teenager carrying something so heavy and dark. If I want to be lighthearted about it, I’ll joke, “oh, you know — I was a sadgirl.’” The reality is that I can’t remember a time when I didn’t think of myself as “fucked up,” “intense,” a carrier of heavy things. Even before I had the language for those things, when I look back now, these are the words that match feelings that were always there.

Since I have memory of an awareness of myself as an emotional person, I had a sense of living in 2 worlds at once. It set me apart and made me “not normal,” even though I’ve always been good at presenting in a conventional way (something that structural privilege like whiteness, able bodied, etc, enables). I didn’t tell anyone what was going on because that wasn’t an option, or didn’t feel like one to me. I didn’t know how to talk about it, and I figured I was just a whiny brat and over sensitive, and that the fact of how un-okay I was confirmed that I was the fucked up one; that everything my abusive adult said to me was true; that I really was this freak of a person that I feared, deep down, was the real me.

Freud said a lot of pretty dumb stuff, but one thing he said that has always stuck with me is: “secrets make you sick.” Shame and self-hatred are like bacteria; keep them closeted and in the dark, and they grow, multiply, gain power over the ecosystem of you. When I was growing up, I thought I was a freak, a weirdo, a bottomless empty void of a person who was fundamentally Wrong. More than hating myself, i was afraid of myself, which is one of the most alienating and lonely things to feel. In journaling recently about how I felt growing up, I wrote “There was so much empty there, I could feel it. It made me miserable. I could feel my nothingness, feel how worthless I was. I used to imagine being married to some faceless man and waking up every day, a total stranger to the person whose body lay next to mine. The quiet hopelessness of knowing that no one would ever know me. They would run from that much nothing. I would run from that much nothing.”

I don’t know whether to call it nature or nurture; I don’t know whether abuse tattooed this way of being onto my DNA or whether it’s a mental illness that runs in my family or if it’s a way I specifically am wired or even if it’s what science has proven about epigenetics — that trauma alters DNA in a way that is passed down to subsequent generations. I don’t know how much of which it is or if it is all of one thing or none of another. And to me that is not relevant. Because surviving an abusive environment is really just the intro to living life as a person with trauma. If you get past that part, you realize that what you really have to survive is yourself. The poison you have swallowed and the way it turns you against you. We are the only thing we are guaranteed in this life — the only relationship we are sure to be in forever, the only place we will definitely always live. What trauma and mental illness do is make even that place unsafe. Just like growing up: nowhere is safe.

Not even your own head.
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When I started to come apart at the seams as an adolescent and externalize some of the total lostness and hopelessness I felt, my parents sought professional help for me (and, it must be said, they had the resources to do so). If this sounds confusing to you, since my parents were the dysfunctional ones, it’s a longer and more multilayered conversation for another day about interpersonal abuse. Im fortunate enough to have never doubted that my parents love me; however, they are also people in their own right, with their own traumas and unhealed issues. My parents acted how they did in spite of how much they loved me; not because of how much they didn’t.

I feel for my parents on one level. They could not admit to themselves why it might be that their child was so miserable That was a shortcoming on their part, but I know it was also scary for them to see me spinning out of control. They didn’t want to find me dead and saw how real of a possibility that was. And so, they submitted themselves and me to the only system we are really told about — doctors and hospitals.

This is already a pretty lengthy read, and I don’t know how to summarize this part of it to you. My mom put me in therapy when I was 14. I would see a therapist a few times, then my mom would get paranoid that I was talking to the therapist about her, and would yank me out. She would often rage at me in her states of paranoia and anger. It was confusing. I felt like a fucked up kid, and it was easy for me to settle down into that image, since I didn’t know who the fuck was really there inside me. I didn’t feel any personal connection to therapy. It was just places my parent took me but I knew nothing would ever change. There was no escape from my situation. The only thing I liked was that being in therapy signaled I was fucked up, which was how I felt inside but didn’t know how to articulate to people. Despite all fear, anxiety, and shame that hung heavy in the air I breathed and moved through, it was ultimately a pretty numb time in my life.

When I was 15 doctors started putting me on antidepressants. It got to the point that I was on 4 or 5 different prescriptions at once. None of it made a difference to me. I didn’t feel any connection to it or investment in it, even though they were pills I was putting in my body. A pill would not stop my hand from picking up drugs or tools of self harm or other things I did to my body without thinking much about it because there was so little me there that it was like doing things to a corpse.

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It was also when I was 15 that I got sent to psychiatric institutions. I spent about 4 or 5 months of my sophomore year of high school cycling between inpatient and intensive outpatient programs, missing school under the pretense of having mono. In the hospital, I felt like an ant in an ant farm. All of it was meaningless and honestly the hospital was a pretty fucked up place. You want to see how flawed the insurance system is, look at how inpatient stays at psychiatric institutions are structured. Insurance companies want to shell out the least amount of money possible, so they agree to cover someone’s inpatient stay for a “crisis period,” usually thought to be about 3–5 days. This is what happened for a lot of kids I met in the hospital who were on Medicaid, who had tried to kill themselves or OD’d on drugs. The idea is to fast-track you onto medication and then boot you. Simply put, this is not how mental illness or recovery work, pretty much ever. At its heart our mental healthcare system is about money, and never about the human minds and lives at stake.

The people who work at these institutions almost always exhibit obvious signs of compassion fatigue or secondary trauma. The problems they are supposed to be addressing are too big; there are never enough resources or staff; they’re not paid enough; etc etc. it’s a classic story that will sound familiar to anyone who’s ever worked in a nonprofit. The result is that they treat psychiatric institutions wth the same mindset as jails. The goal is control and discipline; not the more complex and time-consuming work of addressing each person as an individual, figuring out who specifically they are, why they feel as they do, and how to help them live a life.

People were regularly held down by staff members while another staff member shot them full of sedative because they’d become “out of control.” Once, when I would not stop crying, I was put in “the quiet room,” an all-white room with only a tiny window and a cot in it. I was kept there for what I think was two days but don’t really remember, since there was no clock and I had nothing in there — not even a pen or paper. I am a very privileged white woman who has not been subjected to the US incarceration system at all. But from what I hear, the quiet room at a relatively privileged psychiatric facility doesn’t sound too different from forms of solitary confinement, which humanitarian organizations the world over have equated with torture.

I did not get better in the hospital, and unless there are ones out there that are radically different from what I knew, I don’t think those are places people go to get better. I would strongly caution you against sending a loved one there. We just don’t give enough of a fuck about people as a society, and are not ready to admit that just as physical bodies need care and attention, so too do minds, and so the structures available should be approached with caution and thorough vetting.

So very much of it is about money. The hospital put us, adolescents whose brains and bodies were still forming, on medications that had only barely cleared the FDA and with tons of fine print, because they had made deals with those pharmaceutical companies. They also offered us small amounts of cash — I don’t remember but it was somewhere in the $20–60 range — to participate in “testing,” surveys on the effects of medication we’d been prescribed. In theory that may sound ok, but remember that we were adolescents — minors — that we were in crisis but being viewed as guinea pigs, and that many of these kids were poor and had been sent there by Medicaid.
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Still. My overarching memory of the hospital was that I loved it, that it felt like vacation. As an adult, I always wrote that part of the story off to the fact that I was Fucked Up. But thinking back, I realize that the reason I loved being in the hospital was that compared to being at home, it did feel like vacation. I would rather give up my freedom and my chance at a normal life because hey, my life was already very not normal, and as fucked up as this place was, I didn’t know any of these weird professionals, and they couldn’t hurt me. At least everyone was finally treating me like things were as bad as they felt to me.

Thinking back, that makes me mad. That I hated living at home so much that I would rather live in a place where I accumulated a constellation of needle marks in my arm from all the times my blood was drawn to monitor my vital signs and medication levels; a place where I had to strip down to my underwear once a week so a stranger, often male, often with an apprentice staff member in tow taking notes, could check over my body and make sure there were no new signs of self-harm; a place where we were all treated like kindergarteners holding guns. It makes me mad that I hated living at home so much that I loved living in that place, and rather than ask me why that was, or try to dig into that further, the mental healthcare professionals tasked with saving my life let me believe that it was because of something inherently wrong with me. And right there with me were plenty of people living other horror stories — other kinds of abuse they would be discharged to — people with less resources and less privilege than me. I’m telling you. “Girl Interrupted” doesn’t show the half of the reality of what’s wrong with mental healthcare. This shit goes deep.

Eventually I went back to school and kept going to therapy. I didn’t “get better.” I acted out worse and worse til I eventually OD’d at school. And ironically, that was the best thing that could’ve happened to me. That was my saving grace, my way out. I was institutionalized again, briefly, before being sent to a 2-month residential treatment program, then a 2-year program. I came off meds, finally lived away from home, and was lucky to have people who helped me put the walls in place of where reality actually stood. I had people who pushed me to look inside myself and confront whatever was really there so that the fear of it would no longer rule me. And that is how, slowly, I “got better.”
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I don’t really know why I wrote all of this out. One thing is to let you know that mental illness and mental health issues do not really have a “start” and “end,” at least not for me or anyone I know, though there is endless variation amongst bodies and minds and the different ways they function. There is not a time when the people you love who struggle will be “better,” “over it.” We have to be careful not to reproduce values of capitalist production within our interpersonal relationships and the ways we view health — not to see recovery as the means to an end and prioritize the fastest and most efficient fix. That’s not how people work.

I’ve never healed anything without first looking at it, and without a space where it was safe for me to do that. One thing you can do for folks is to be that space of calm neutrality, of nonjudgmental acceptance, where your friends can let their breath out and be however they are, without you trying to fix them or thinking about that as the goal. It is much easier to avail yourself of support when you know that you don’t have to “be” anything for people other than whoever it is you are at that moment. That is one way to help people feel less alone.

Another thing is to think outside the box when it comes to mental healthcare, and to not assume that doctors and institutions are unilaterally there to help. Sorry, but from where I’m sitting, capitalism and the need to turn a profit put professionals and institutions at odds with truly helping people. That doesn’t mean that helpful resources don’t or can’t exist within those structures, but mental healthcare must be navigated with care and trepidation. It must be treated like the issue of vital importance that it is. Just as we have to think past the police as an institution to protect us, I believe we must also think past doctors and healthcare corporation structures when it comes to caring for our minds. It doesn’t mean we can’t utilize those resources to whatever extent they may be helpful. But we have to do that in tandem with approaches that go beyond the conventional — that move towards community care, networks of each other and of people outside of these structures.

I guess the last thing I will say is that we also have to rethink the way we treat kids in our society, and how we support them — or don’t. How we don’t listen to kids or treat them as experts at their own lives, people with thoughts and experiences worth listening to and putting words to. In reality, all these things I am saying now are things I have thought since I was small — but it took me this long to believe in the validity of them enough to speak them, let them have a shape and be real.

In my adult years, various people have approached me or told my friends or family that they sensed that things were not right in my home or wanted to be able to help at the time. For everyone today: you can. I understand that we often don’t want to get involved because we don’t know someone else’s situation, don’t want to barge in uninformed and blow their shit up, etc. That’s totally valid. One of the worst experiences I had growing up was the one time I called a shelter and they traced my phone line and sent a cop car to my house without telling me.

There are intermediary things you can do. Small things that count, a lot. There are ways you can reach out to children just to say — hey. If you need to talk, I’m here. It seems like your home life is stressful. Or, I saw how your parent did x or y, did that make you feel weird? Or you can offer them opportunities to do activities that get them out of their home environment for at least some period of time.

You don’t need to swoop in and call Child Protective Services. But there are things you can do to help a part of that kid stay alive. To give them a window out, so they can at least see something different, let out some of that fear, and let in a little more oxygen. There were a few people in my childhood who did that for me, and they kept parts of me alive. The parts of me that thought, maybe this IS really wrong. Maybe I’m not entirely a piece of shit. Maybe there will be a day when I can actually talk about it. They reflected back to me a different version of myself than the one I got at home — a person worth listening to, a person to feel something for — and I cannot tell you how desperately I needed that.

Take care of each other, guys. Show up for your “strong” friends. Show up for your “struggling” friends. Be there for each other in meaningful ways, ongoingly, consistently. For, as Rupi Kaur writes, “if we can’t learn to be kinder to each other, how will we ever learn to be kinder to the most desperate parts of ourselves.” Here for all of you…don’t hesitate to reach out.