I think we should actually talk about the level of privilege involved when we see people post online about their 24 hour psych hold. Which they come out of with comparatively minimal trauma and a bunch of "funny" stories about the other people locked up with them.
Because I want to de-center their voices for once. We hear about psych wards from that sort of perspective a lot- where the person has a short term stay for something like acute suicidality or depressive symptoms. And the experience they have is that of a brief "holiday" or an inconvenient day-long hold. And they meet "strange" and "properly mentally ill" people (to paraphrase their narrations).
So. What about these mentally ill people they meet on the ward, then? The people living on wards longer term? The people who live most of their adult lives inside closed psychiatric units? The people who will die on the ward? The people held against their will? The people who have been imprisoned, and the key thrown away? The people who aren't fully aware of the world around them? The people who are experiencing a different world of their own? The people who are so heavily medicated that they're barely awake? The people who are in so much distress that all they can do is scream and cry and fight back against staff? The people who have endless trauma from restraints, injected sedatives and lost autonomy? The people whose lives have been restricted to the monotony of ward rounds and medication time?
They're not stories for someone's tiktoks. They're not the backdrop to someone's 24 hour hold. They're real people. They're real and they matter. And their voices and lives need to be centred when we talk about psychiatric units.
There are people who live in psychiatric units (often against their will) for years. Decades. The majority of their lives, even. People die in psych wards. And their voices are often forcibly removed from these conversations- be it through dehumanisation, saneism, trauma, or the fact that they're often still behind the walls of a psych ward. Or because their lives have ended whilst imprisoned.
When we talk about anti-psychiatry, psych abolition and psych wards, I beg you, think of these people first. Remember them, uplift them and their stories. Centre them. Always.
It's a bigger story than a 24 hour window. It's about stories spanning weeks, months, years, decades.
A lot of people don't get the option to leave after 24 hours. To go voluntarily, willingly. To experience little to no trauma on psych wards. To have their bodily autonomy in tact.
So what I'm trying to say is... Please, please remember that behind every "quirky" 24 hour hold story, there are decades of pain, saneist violence, societal exclusion and psychiatric abuse. Zoom out. The picture is bigger, and the story is longer.
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