and here is the thing. all psych wards are bad. every single one. I don’t think there is such a thing as a good psych ward—I’m willing to believe that there are some good people who work in psych wards, who have good intentions, and who might end up helping some people. but the psych ward as a whole? There are no good psych wards. The structure of a psych ward inherently prevents it from being good. Even if you personally think you had a good experience in a psych ward, most likely what that means is that the abusive practices weren’t used on you. But those things are still there. even if you weren’t put into solitary confinement, it is extremely likely that your psych ward still had a room for that. even if you weren’t drugged without your consent, it is very likely other people were being drugged without consent!! even if you weren’t strip searched, or tied to your bed, or starved…it is VERY likely that your psych ward has protocols for all these things and regularly does them to many people who come through the ward! And it is vital to think about how your race, class, and other identities affected your experience before making broad claims about things “never happening” in psych wards.
Psych wards are inherently violent, oppressive, and unethical based solely on the fact that they are a form of incarceration, but even beyond that? If a psych ward is committed to enforcing compliance and incarceration, it is going to have some of those abusive measures that I listed above, and that is going to be standard protocol. Even if there are good people working in a psych ward, their reach is going to be limited—the power of the institution means that they constantly have to weigh the decision to break the rules and help someone, or to follow violent protocols. Most clinicians and staff will choose not to lose their job and even if they find it personally distasteful, will still choose to enable these types of violence. Good people on the inside are not able to fundamentally change the reality of what psych wards are and what they can do.
I strongly believe that people who say they have good experiences are the outlier and also are likely to be white and rich. Even if people don’t think that their experience was abusive, a lot of people generally find it boring, unhelpful, and mediocre. And so, so many people are experiencing abuse in a daily fucking basis in these places. Even if there are individuals who manage to escape the worst of a psych ward, the fact that the psych ward has the power, structure, and protocol to do these things to anyone is a problem.
