Before my hospitalizations, my mother, father, and stepfather all wanted to help me, but didn’t know how.
Euphoria, by Viesia
Neither my family nor I knew what was wrong with me. In the hospital we began to figure out what was wrong with me, and what could be done to help me. I needed the kind of help only a mental hospital could provide.
I appreciated my need to be locked up. I knew that only the hospital could keep me alive. In Gaebler Children’s Center 3 East kidspeak, I was “locked up and fucked up.” Aware of the threat I posed to my self, I realized a certain amount of my autonomy would need to be sacrificed in interest of my own safety. Unfortunately, sometimes the hospital dehumanized me for no valid reason, instead of out of the necessity of keeping me alive.
In the hospital, clinical language and attitudes facilitated an us-versus-them divide between hospitalized children and the staff who worked with us on a day-to-day basis. We children regarded these staffpeople as amorphous and interchangeable. We interacted with them and reacted towards them as if their individuality had been submerged into their role as staff, unless, that is, the staffperson decided to temper their professional role with a human warmth that was more compassionate for all of us, staff included. I was always happy when a staffperson, instead of treating me as a breathing, walking pathology seething with weird symptoms and bizarre behavioral patterns, treated me as a human and I got to treat them like they were human in return. I treasured those rare occasions when our encounters and communications transcended our roles and we related to each other as people aware of our shared humanity. You can’t dehumanize someone else without dehumanizing yourself.
But mutual dehumanization was the unfortunate modus operandi in the hospital. Overall, one staff person wasn’t all that different from another. They had power and authority, we didn’t. Their point of view had validity, ours didn’t. They physically restrained us when we were “out-of-control” or used mechanical restraints as a disciplinary method of controlling us. A distinction was made between physical restraints, when the staff held kids down, and mechanical restraints, devices the staff used to restrain kids for long periods of time.
