I am back to let you all (all 2 of you lol) know about a podcast I stumbled upon called Committable. A lot of feelings came up for me while listening to it and I needed to share them and also give this podcast its flowers. The host, Jesse Mangan, started the podcast to try and figure out what happened twenty years ago when he was involuntarily committed by something called a “Section 12.” He and the show’s producers interview lawyers, Jesse’s family members, and other professionals to gain clarity on what happened as well as the whys and hows.
I think what really got me about this podcast is that it gave a platform to not just the people that have been committed, whether voluntarily or involuntarily (if you’ve lived this you will know that there is actually very little difference between the two) but also those in jobs that are working to change this outright dismissal of people’s human rights.
One of the overwhelming feelings that came up for me when listening to this is that once somebody has the process of a commitment started, societal privileges kind of go out the window. Once you are seen as a psych patient or potential psych patient your status, your career, your life outside of the hospital no longer matter. You are now subhuman and an unreliable source of your own life, feelings, and experiences. Which is part of why abuse is rife within mental healthcare. You could be a New York Times bestselling author. You could be a doctor. You could be a well-off, white man, but nothing that you say or can corroborate matters. And it’s all legal and supposedly for your own good.
What I really appreciate about this podcast is the platform it has built for people subjected to the various mental health systems throughout the U.S. Many people who have gone through this process have been trying to bring awareness to its injustices, but the fact that we even had to be put through the process tanks our credibility. So it’s not like we haven’t been talking about it and trying to get someone to pay attention, it’s that much like in the hospitals, nothing you say is believed or taken seriously.
You may not know if you haven’t read my blog before, but I have been hospitalized more times than I can count in my life. And each time that process was started I was treated as though I had committed a crime for experiencing hallucinations. As though I had done something wrong for being depressed or anxious. As though I was either a pathological liar or delusional and not living in reality simply for stating that a misunderstanding occurred, that I was not in crisis and that the whole process was traumatic and detrimental to my overall well-being. I’ve only been involuntarily committed once and that experience contributed to my current diagnosis of PTSD.
As a patient, you’re treated, quite frankly, like shit. People talk to you as if you are the dirt on the bottom of their shoes. They are antagonistic and patronizing. They are cruel. They are sometimes sadistic and don’t deserve to be working in those professions. When you’ve been through the system for as long as I have and been to as many hospitals, outpatient facilities, doctors, mental health practices, etc, you notice a pattern. Everywhere you go if there is more than one person working there there’s going to be an example of someone who seems to take pleasure in abusing vulnerable people.
The process of being committed is a tremendously dehumanizing process. It is also one of the most Labyrinthian, convoluted, bureaucratic, and traumatizing common healthcare-related processes that there probably is. When you ask questions and they even bother to give you an answer no two people will give you the same answer and that’s if they don’t view you as a nuisance and forcibly sedate you for wondering about your own care.
I’m thankful that the creators of the Committable podcast have built this platform and our having frank conversations about the problems with the way things are currently handled. There’s finally a platform for consumers of mental health services that is not being silenced or sanitized by a larger non-profit organization to make it palatable, that is showing our mental health care system for the carceral system that it truly is. As I said earlier in this blog post people like myself who have gone through this process have tried to speak up about the trauma that it causes and have been ignored or silenced. And at some point, speaking up gets to be just reliving your trauma for no reason? People need to hear this. People need to know that at any point we are all one bad day, one misinterpreted behavior or word, one concerned family member calling in a welfare check away from having our rights ripped away from us and nobody caring or having the power to do anything about it.
