Communique #1 from purgatory

The following issues are pretty universal in health care in general but are most obvious in mental health because there's supposed to be a contrast between a sane system and an insane patient.

The mental health system is designed to Keep You Safe. You can't die right there in front of them on their watch because then they have to pay. (Hence the extreme attention paid to preventing incredibly unlikely stuff, like someone dying of a seizure from alcohol withdrawal while in the hospital.) So they'll do anything to make sure you're safe within those walls. Even if it means you (and they) progressively get crazier and crazier.

Maybe it's really humiliating or dehumanizing. Maybe it greatly increases the chance that you'll walk out the door and jump off a bridge in half an hour. But that's not a high priority. After all, it just proves you were so "troubled" you couldn't be helped. There's nothing they could have done after you left. Also you probably "refused treatment", maybe without even knowing it. So you can go from saying "I have certain problems in my life that I can't come up with solutions for myself" to the bottom of a river in a remarkably short amount of time.

So instead of trying to solve problems, it's starting one goddarn little fight after another, one more indignity. And if you resist in the slightest they could never just be reasonable and let you have your little win for 5 seconds, they have to escalate. As if the whole fricking edifice of Western Civilization would collapse if your food wasn't delivered cold on a paper plate. You're going to eat it and you're going to like it because there's the constant threat of security around the corner. And the doctor can always add a couple more prescriptions to make you a little less agitated.

Agitated? You bet I'm agitated!

!schizos