I've been sectioned twice: incarcerated. Held in a locked hospital ward against my will. I'm still trying to make sense of it, to understand how I responded. At some moments I was docile and accepting; at others, defiant and resistant. The first time it happened I felt overwhelmed with fear of the hospital staff, and of their interference in my life. At one point I was tackled to the ground and hauled into custody by a hospital warden. At another point I was forcibly injected with anti-psychotic medication. Did they not understand how terrifying it is, to have one's body transgressed? Eventually the drugs did their work: obedience and compliance followed. I became a Good Patient. I learned quickly that I must keep my real thoughts to myself, and play along with the power dynamics. And only by doing so did I convince them that I had obtained the grand prize: insight. (For those unfamiliar with the term: insight refers to “the ability to recognize one's own mental illness.” - Wikipedia. Of course, it's a catch-22, when denial of mental illness is categorised as a symptom! Damned if you do and damned if you don't.)
I’m sitting here feeling into the enormity of your encounters with incarceration. Even when, as you say, you have also been well loved and are mostly situated on the outside of hospital walls, I imagine there is still so much digestion needed of these experiences. Hopefully writing will help and your voice feels very clear and warm. I’m glad you’re including yourself.
And I’m glad you (and I) live at a time when mad voices can ravel with other discourses to make a richer knottier fabric. I guess there is some unravelling going on at the same time of the standard medical views? I’m not sure what kind of cloth we are making but it will be alive.
Thank you for your solidarity 🙏 it is together that we make the change! I have the advantage of coming from a long genealogy of madness. This makes it much easier to resist the psychiatric demand that they control the definition and parameters of NORMAL
I’m sitting here feeling into the enormity of your encounters with incarceration. Even when, as you say, you have also been well loved and are mostly situated on the outside of hospital walls, I imagine there is still so much digestion needed of these experiences. Hopefully writing will help and your voice feels very clear and warm. I’m glad you’re including yourself.
And I’m glad you (and I) live at a time when mad voices can ravel with other discourses to make a richer knottier fabric. I guess there is some unravelling going on at the same time of the standard medical views? I’m not sure what kind of cloth we are making but it will be alive.
Thank you for your solidarity 🙏 it is together that we make the change! I have the advantage of coming from a long genealogy of madness. This makes it much easier to resist the psychiatric demand that they control the definition and parameters of NORMAL