I Said

• I said I was very suicidal, in serious danger of acting it out, and therefore asked for being urgently hospitalized. I was desperate and called earnestly for help (already a teetotaler for three years, thanks to AA and DESPITE medicine).
  • They found a place for me in a psychiatric clinic, but, later, I was told that demand of mine had been an emotional blackmail.
    • Later, the same ones told me that I was guilty of not talking, of not asking for help when I needed it. I couldn’t make sense of it. I still can’t.

• In that clinic, when a psychiatrist visited me, it lasted only a few minutes, but I had to pay the full price for a normal consultation. As it was my very first hospitalization, I still believed I would really be cared for, and kept asking what kind of care I would receive. I said and kept saying I needed help.
  • The first psychiatrist I saw didn’t even answer and left the room.
  • The second one refused point blank to answer.
  • The third one, like the first one, immediately left the room without answering.
  • The fourth one answered it would be pills only. It was. Lots of pills, and nothing else.
  • Even after I had given up, and said it was therefore not necessary to go on with such “consultations”, I had to pay the full price for a normal consultation every day, though having seen nobody. I left that clinic as soon as I could: I couldn’t afford the price of such “care”, and was more and more suicidal.
    • Later, I was told that I asked too many questions, and that I was too demanding.

• At that time, because of stress (it was PTSD, but I didn’t know it by then) and depression, I suffered from overwhelming hypersomnia, sleeping 14 hours a day and more. In the clinic, every morning, a nurse asked me whether I had slept well, and whether I was still suicidal. Both my answers were a big YES.
  • They told me that couldn’t be true: according to them, either I was suicidal AND insomniac, or I slept well. They told me I was a liar.
    • Later, I discovered they had then “diagnosed” I was delirious, telling lies about my suicidal impulses, which they believed not real, only phantasms.

• As I saw they didn’t believe me when I said I was suicidal, I explained I had already committed suicide at the age of 16, and had then lived a “near-death experience”.
  • Of course, that experience, too, was immediately and obviously “diagnosed” as a delirium. As that “diagnostic” has been certified by psychiatrists, from that moment on, nothing of what I have said to doctors had been taken seriously, even when it was obvious or proven.
    • Later, time and again, I had to discover how often the psychiatrists I consulted “knew better than me” what I had lived, what I felt, and what I had said…

• Another patient having told me I was entitled to ask what kind of pills were given me, I asked so, and then discovered they had added sleeping pills to my treatment, as if sleeping 14 hours a day was not enough!
  • After energic discussions, I obtained the right NOT to take those sleeping pills, only the rest of the treatment.
    • Later, I was told and retold I was a rebel, guilty of non-compliance. (Me, an adult child terrorized by any authority figure, a rebel???!!! You’re kidding!)

• The very first day, an employee from the kitchen asked me whether I took my meals alone in my room or with the other patients. I naïvely believed the choice was mine, and told her I preferred to be with the other ones. She told me it was late, and was very embarrassed because she had, for my dessert, only a pear for me, instead of a yoghourt. I told her it was OK, never mind, I loved pears. 
  • I was astonished to discover, the day after, that I had had a rebellious behavior, and was considered a rebel, because the only one entitled to tell where I ate was the psychiatrist, not me: I had scandalously overridden his role! Nobody had told me. I then discovered the psychiatric “care” delivered was not only pills but also a lot of freedom restrictions (or not). The progression of the authorizations delivered (or not) was supposed to measure the progression of my mental health.
    • Since then, I cannot see a pear without being reminded that “rebellion” of mine. I still love pears but this memory conveys a lot of bitterness. 

• In that clinic, the doors of the rooms were equipped with a small window, as in prisons, to watch the patients. In the evening, when I changed clothes to wear my pajamas, I put the blind on, but one evening, I forgot to re-open it after that. 
  • During the night, a big noise woke me up, and I asked “What?” The noise had been the abrupt re-opening of the blind, and the answer to my question was a harsh “Nothing. Sleep!!! You must sleep at night!” A psychiatric clinic is the only place in my life where I have been woken up just to be harshly ordered to sleep.
    • Incredible? Oh no! During the following decades, I naïvely kept asking for psychiatric or psychological care, and all I have received has been far worse… 

A mix of Dante’s Inferno, Kafka’s nonsense, Ubu’s hotchpotch, and above all George Orwell’s 1984’s “Big Brother is watching you”…

“Big Brother”? Oh no, in this share I wrote only about doctors, and abstained from writing about my family’s behavior during these events…

Geneviève R.