I had medication I was begging for withheld by a psychiatrist once. I was in psychosis unable to focus on work and at first he gave me a 50mg dosage which didnt do anything it was such a tiny dosage and then said bc that didnt work nothing would work Ever. I completely lost my mind for about 3 years before I got a new psychiatrist. I'm now on 300mg and it works fine and my mind is so much more peaceful but not having access to medication lost me about 5 years of my life.
Anyway. All this to say psychiatrists can, and do, frequently use medication whether that be overdosing or underdosing, to punish patients and its partially this that made me lose faith in the systems ability to actually truthfully care about its patients.
There's a series of essays called The Collected Schizophrenias by Esme Weijung Wang where she expresses a lot of her experiences being a Chinese American woman with schizoaffective disorder and she goes into a lot of things, like being excluded from university under the excuse of her "not being well enough" without being included in that decision, and the trauma of forced imprisonment of people with mental illness within the usage 5150s and sectioning. If people find themselves being like "No that doesnt happen, right?" I recommend reading the book, as its from both an academic AND someone with personal experience.
Thanks for the rec! And it's important to note that wanting a system that respects mentally ill people's autonomy isn't just about allowing mentally ill people to not take psych meds, or to decide that taking a psych med isn't worth it after trying it, but also includes allowing people to decide that they do want to try a certain medication despite the risks involved.
What I want is for mentally ill people to be able to make their own autonomous decisions about psychiatric medication, based on actually having the full information about the potential effects and side effects involved.
I don't want psychiatrists to decide on our behalf whether we need or don't need a certain medication, I just want them to give us all the information they have about the medications in order to make us able to make our own decisions.
Mentally ill people should be able to both reject a treatment, stop a treatment AND start a treatment if that's what we want to do. Because we deserve full bodily autonomy and the dignity of risk just like everyone else. It's our lives and our bodies, and whether a risk or a side effect is worth it is for us to decide.
















