1:01pm July 29, 2013

Mental institutions

The one good thing about being in mental institutions and other places like that? Nobody is shocked by just about anything. To have been abused, and talk about it, is normal. Suicide attempts are normal. Drug abuse is normal. You don’t have to be afraid people will be shocked by these things. I remember people just casually talking about things like how sexual abuse makes you feel dirty in a way no shower can get rid of.

It wasn’t just anything goes, though. As an autistic person (whether people knew that or not, they knew I was different at a glance) I was often shut out by other patients. One time all I did was walk into a room and my four roommates instantly decided they hated me and would make me the target of malicious pranks. There’s an in and an out crowd even there. I was never in. I found it very hard to form any sort of relationship with the other kids, unless they were approaching me.

Staff made it hard for me too. There was one girl who had a crush on me (which they were oblivious to, because they only look for straight people). She was always flirting with me and making sure she told me over and over that she was bi. She spent all her time around me.

And staff pretty much tried to shut it down. She once got me to talk to her after a long period of being generally unresponsive. She ran to tell the staff and they told her to mind her own business.

Another time I had a roommate and they decided we were bad influences on each other because we were telling each other how being restrained feels the same as sexual abuse and they couldn’t have that.

They put us on the unit for younger kids. And separated us. And then out us in two separate units, each of us isolated from everyone else on our units to the point I think some people didn’t know we existed. And they singled both of us out for needless brutality over things that were a danger to nobody.

Like she’d get tied down for standing on the furniture. And I’d get tied down for being unable to move. Yeah it’s illegal but do you realize how easy it is to manufacture a “she was a danger to herself or others” explanation? They don’t require proof, so staff can lie.

And another time I had a friend at a different place. And my shrink went out of his way to tell me that she was not my friend, would never be my friend, and only acted like my friend because there was nowhere else to go.

And on the topic of horrible pranks, these other kids at a residential facility burned their own hair to make a bad smell, and pretended that they had set the cat on fire, and that they were going to set me on fire next. They did all this without any but one staff doing anything. They were going after my roommate too so he drove us to spend the night at another house.

The kids retaliated against that staff. I heard them planning it. They started dropping hints to the administrators that they “felt uncomfortable” around him, and that they thought he was a child molester. Mind you, he spent a LOT of time alone with me, if he was a child molester I’d have known. And after hearing them actually discussing which tactics to use to get him fired, I knew what was really going on. But he still got fired just because some manipulative bullies were mad at him for protecting me.

At any rate. For all the things I hated about institutions, I really liked the fact that all these things were normal. But that didn’t make me able to make lots of friends, it didn’t mean that it was impossible to be still too weird for them.

Jen Birch, an autistic woman, describes how she became the scapegoat of her entire ward. And then they got this other patient where the staff said he had developmental problems that made him vulnerable to being exploited, and she was going “SO DO I WHAT ABOUT ME HELLO???”

And that really weird dynamic is extremely familiar from my institution experiences. Like how one person would be singled out for protection, while another would be thrown to the wolves.

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