6th post
2-3-13

I was nine years old the first time I felt the pain of being "housed" in the system. My mother had me committed. She drove me to Memphis Tennessee and dropped me off at a "hospital" for long-term inhouse therapy. This experience left me feeling betrayed and unwanted. I know now this was never the case, but during the six weeks I spent in that place I could not understand. Really it's taken years for me to understand. My mother was trying to raise my sister and I alone. We were poor, I was a very hyperactive and destructive little boy. My mother had just not too long left my father, a relationship of abuse so serious the physical, emotional and psychological scars remain to this day. Her new relationship was with another abusive man, not at all as serious as my father, but nonetheless very unhealthy. I acted out at school, the school recommended I needed to receive mental help. My mother took me to mental health and they recommended the hospitalization, Medicaid paid for this. To my mother's thinking this was all about helping me. She believed the doctors. I do not hold any of this against her. I do however feel this system is flawed and abused. The time I spent "housed" at the hospital in Memphis was horrific. It made me fear authority, made me mistrust all adults and feel confusion. How can we as a society believe pills and isolation can help our children? Why is it that when a child acts out or is disruptive that the child has to be diagnosed? It seems to me that we as a culture have lost something when this seems normal. Truly it saddens me when I read about all the programs set up to provide mental ehlp to children. Telling children they have mental problems, giving them pills, "housing" them in hospitals, all seems cruel to me. Why can parents not just talk to their kids? Why do strangers need to tell them what is wrong? I don't know, it all just seems crazy to me. It seems like a huge conspiracy. The doctors push the pills and the pharmacy companies cash checks. Our country is full of "mentally ill" people cruising around on pills, diagnosed - and the "hospitals" at least the ones I've been in are harmful not helpful. Strapping a child down and shooting him up with psychotropics is helpful how? Sitting a child down telling him "look you have this disorder that is why you act out take these pills or we will have to strap you down again, take the pills or you cannot go home, take the pills or you will go back to the hospital"-
In my mind this is insanity. Back in the day there was no such thing as sending a kid to a "hospital" for being bad at school or fighting. Nowadays it is normal, at least I get that impression. I could be wrong, obviously my surroundings make it hard for me to gauge the outside world. And yes this isolation affects one's judgement. These walls do not have emotions or opinions, so if no one ever responds to my writing I am basically living like the men in Plato's mythical cave. So sometimes my outlook is slanted solely by my own experiences. Any way. Just a few thoughts, not a lot happening here, just striving to survive this concrete coffin - being isolated like this breeds a loneliness so powerful it crushes and suffocates.

Remaining,
Jesse