as small as a world and as large as alone

9:38pm July 20, 2014

soilrockslove:

youneedacat:

madeofpatterns:

institutions can and do hurt people just by existing

I was never in one.

but a lot of adults in my life made damn sure I knew they existed

and that there were ~worse places~ I could be

Yep I’ve always told people that institutions did serious damage to my life long before I’d ever been in one.  People don’t always understand.

Oh man, I was never in an institution, but the reason I didn’t fight back against the meds and all the psych people and so forth was because the institution was where I would be if I couldn’t straighten up and fly right.

So yes they effected me.

And my whole childhood was lived in a certain shadow. Because I would find descriptions of people who thought and acted like me… and then they would be followed in a few sentences by “this person was placed in _____ institution”.

And the thing was… the drugs and the way the psychiatrists and my parents treated me ended up acting surprisingly like a watered-down version of… an institution.

The descriptions… that was me, too.  Also seeing people who moved like I moved, and then seeing that they were being led around town, in a line, by institution staff.  And yes, the watered-down institution thing happened, I think because my parents didn’t know what else to do, from what they say.  So they emulated what they’d seen, and it turned out badly for all of us.

I feel like psychiatry was a bomb that hit our family, and the destruction was intense, and our family was never the same, and we never talk about it, never fully acknowledge it, but it’s always there.  And I always feel like I was at the epicenter, because it was my ‘breakdown’ that the bomb swirled around.  But the damage was done to the whole family.

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