willitpass
Don’t try to offer me help, I’ve tried everything
- Mar 10, 2020
- 2,937
I've been through so much trauma in my comparatively short life (early 20s) that I often turn off my feelings. I do not allow or know how to feel properly when I remember things. Usually I can look back at something fucked up that happened to me and feel absolutely nothing about it. It's purely factual recollection. Every now and then I'll have a sudden wave of remembering something and all of the emotions will come flooding on in. Today it's about all of my years and years of experience in the mental health care system.
The things I witnessed were beyond fucked up. I watch people cutting down at the end of the hallway to the point of leaving pools of blood while staff stayed in the day room with the rest of us and ignored them. One time another patient spent days attempting to severe a tendon in her arm and staff knew what she was doing yet waited days until she was practically there to actually take her to the medical hospital. I watched many, many patient fights, including a time where I ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time and people were fighting each other on top of me. I saw more restraints than I could ever count and the screams and pleading of "you're hurting me" "please let me go" "I want my mom" "I can't breathe" will never leave my mind. I saw children thrown across the room by staff when I was on the pediatric/adolescent wards. I was there for the night someone almost died due to neglect and was carried out on a stretcher and I listened to the staff discussing protocol and trying to figure out if she ever needed CPR for paperwork purposes. I sat on the phone with family while another patient projectile vomited because they had gotten into something and tried to kill themselves. I heard patients, including children, called the most horrific names and told the most fowl things possible by the staff meant to protect us.
I was restrained multiple times, not because I was doing anything wrong but because I was being noncompliant and they wanted to use it as a power move. Most of them occurred when I was a minor. I remember after one of them I had just been chemically sedated and was still restrained to the floor but they let me call my dad. They held the phone up to my face and all I could say, sobbing, was "they did it again". After one restraint they locked me in the isolation room (essentially a padded cell, plain white rubber walls and floors, multiple locks on a door with a viewing window, nothing else) and said I could get out when I calmed down… No coping skills and they had just carried me, stripped me, restrained me, sedated me, and now I was just supposed to calm myself down? I was medically neglected, allowed to sit there and almost choke on my own vomit at times. I was told my family didn't know how to handle me. I was told that I would never make it anywhere in life and I was stupid. I was called attention seeking. I was given the wrong medications. I was given an overdose of a medication. I went through so many things of nightmares.
The things I witnessed were beyond fucked up. I watch people cutting down at the end of the hallway to the point of leaving pools of blood while staff stayed in the day room with the rest of us and ignored them. One time another patient spent days attempting to severe a tendon in her arm and staff knew what she was doing yet waited days until she was practically there to actually take her to the medical hospital. I watched many, many patient fights, including a time where I ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time and people were fighting each other on top of me. I saw more restraints than I could ever count and the screams and pleading of "you're hurting me" "please let me go" "I want my mom" "I can't breathe" will never leave my mind. I saw children thrown across the room by staff when I was on the pediatric/adolescent wards. I was there for the night someone almost died due to neglect and was carried out on a stretcher and I listened to the staff discussing protocol and trying to figure out if she ever needed CPR for paperwork purposes. I sat on the phone with family while another patient projectile vomited because they had gotten into something and tried to kill themselves. I heard patients, including children, called the most horrific names and told the most fowl things possible by the staff meant to protect us.
I was restrained multiple times, not because I was doing anything wrong but because I was being noncompliant and they wanted to use it as a power move. Most of them occurred when I was a minor. I remember after one of them I had just been chemically sedated and was still restrained to the floor but they let me call my dad. They held the phone up to my face and all I could say, sobbing, was "they did it again". After one restraint they locked me in the isolation room (essentially a padded cell, plain white rubber walls and floors, multiple locks on a door with a viewing window, nothing else) and said I could get out when I calmed down… No coping skills and they had just carried me, stripped me, restrained me, sedated me, and now I was just supposed to calm myself down? I was medically neglected, allowed to sit there and almost choke on my own vomit at times. I was told my family didn't know how to handle me. I was told that I would never make it anywhere in life and I was stupid. I was called attention seeking. I was given the wrong medications. I was given an overdose of a medication. I went through so many things of nightmares.
