When I was 15, I went through a pretty terrible breakup with my then-girlfriend, and instead of supporting me, my parents left for a vacation.

I was alone in the house, and I took a massive overdose of psychiatric drugs. I took anti-psychotics, anti-depressants, mood stabilizers, and tranquilizers and washed them down with alcohol I had been hoarding for a while.

There were boxes and boxes of drugs in my house because I had been diagnosed schizophrenic and borderline. I had taken small overdoses before, but I usually freaked out and called the hospital within a few hours. This time, I was calm, and I lay down on the couch to die in my sleep. My sister ended up finding me. I was in a coma for a little over a week after being taken to hospital.

After recovering from the coma I was sent to an open psychiatric ward. An ‘open’ ward means that you can go around the hospital, and you can leave the hospital with supervision. Everyone on this ward was anorexic or bulimic, except me.

In the book “Women Who Hurt Themselves”, Dusty Miller draws corellations between eating disorders and invasive treatment in childhood. Women with eating disorders were often sexually abused, or had unescessary and invasive medical treatments when young, such as enemas. This barbaric invasion of the body continues in psychiatric wards, where they are force fed. They are punished for not eating, like their extremely complex emotional problems mean nothing and they are just not eating out of wilful defiance.

After spending a few weeks in the open ward, I was sent to a locked ward. A locked ward means you can’t leave. For any reason. I had been doing pretty well in the open ward, hadn’t caused trouble and hadn’t attempted any escapes which I had often done in previous wards. So it didn’t make any sense that I had to be sent to a locked ward for further treatment. Well, that wasn’t the reason I was sent there.

There was only one other girl in this ward at the time because it had just been opened. This girl was a completely delusional stalker. She was completely out of touch with reality and had no sense of boundaries whatsoever. She was dangerously obsessed with somebody named Adam or Aaron.

I was in this ward for a little over a month. While I was there, I was attacked in my room by a male nurse. I didn’t want to get out of bed one day, so he dragged me out bodily, smashed my face against a wall and hollered at me. When I complained to his superiors, I was told that they had never heard such a complaint about this guy, so they didn’t believe me. Ths guy was sitting across from me the whole time, smirking.

When I finally got out of this ward I went on a short but intense binge of illegal drugs.

Fast forward to age 17. I’d been in and out of institutions every few months since being in the locked ward, but I always voluntarily committed myself and usually only stayed for a week or two. At age 17 I was involved in a highly abusive relationship, I had also been kicked out of home and was living in refuges.

The last time I committed myself I was taken to a ward called Roselle, because the place I usually went to, Cumberland, had no beds. While waiting in intake at Roselle, I was informed that I was to be strip-searched for weapons. I had never been strip-searched before at any institution. I told them there was no way they were going to do that.

I was told I could strip myself or be held down and forcibly stripped by nurses. That was my “choice”. No one had told me before I committed myself that this was going to happen, and I had no option of refusal, so telling me I had a “choice” was ludicrous.

I became extremely agitatedand kept refusing so four or five male nurses were called in to hold me down. I was kicking and screaming but powerless.

Later that night in the ward I couldn’t sleep. So I was given tranquilizers. I didn’t want to take them, but I was told that I had asked for them and therefore I had to take them. I never asked for them. Eventually they bullied me into taking them, but I still couldn’t sleep.

I didn’t commit myself to anymore institutions after Roselle. I just went back to my parents and became a shut in.

The idea behind mental institutions is the same as the idea behind prisons. If you bring a whole bunch of lunatics in one place together, they feed off each other’s lunacy and enable each other. It makes them easy to prey upon than one lone crazy guy on the outside, who might actually be able to defend himself.

The nurses that physically attacked me, manhandled me and forced me to take dangerous, mind-warping drugs would never get away with it outside of institution walls. Not in a million years. They would be completely reviled by society as sociopathic, sadistic predators. Especially the ones that prey upon children. They would be arrested and charged as criminals.

Just like with soldiers, policemen, and prison guards, though, psychiatric nurses somehow enter a different plane of morality when they punch in the clock.