Invisible Fine Print and Sometimes the System is a Little Broken: Healing From Treatment

What they don’t tell you about inpatient psych treatment is everything, in short. To take the long route of things they do not mention would mean devoting an entire book series to the scandal of treatment--a story in and of itself.  

      

     What they will tell you is that a 201 commitment may be voluntary, but they avoid mentioning you have to sign, or else you will be put on a 302--in other words, involuntarily committed.  

No one will mention that therapists are mandated reporters, or that children will have their fragile and chaotic worlds completely obliterated if they open their mouths; no one dare utter the truth about some of the caseworkers. No one mentions that many children in the hospital get taken from their families, or that their loved ones will abandon them, determining these children are too fucked up to fix.  

They forget to mention how an alarming number of adolescents get dumped at shelters because they stay months in one program, until their insurance is tired, and the programs are tired, and the child does not improve in the way a treatment team hoped. So, they forget to mention that these young people all too often become broken adults doing drugs, bouncing from street, to prison, to hospital, to shelter, and detaching from a reality does not and cannot love them anyways.

They forget to mention that a 201 to a child or teenager is utter terror; a 201 or 302 can be a trauma in and of itself that leaves you more broken than when you walked in the door--or more appropriately, were wheeled into the door. Forgot to mention, the 201 and 302 surrender you to dehumanization, distrust, and within that--you won't have freedom to move anywhere of your own volition. 

They will mention on your 201 that you are free to sign out of your treatment. However, no one will relay that it's a loose clause, and in reality--they might just 302 you for your efforts. 

During the 201, I will be damned if they remember to tell girls on eating disorder units about all the other girls who are skinnier than you--praying that they might drop dead. They forget to mention the feeding poles named Fred, and wheelchairs carting hollow fourteen year olds with more willpower to not need. Or perhaps they show you a 55 year old woman who really knows what she’s doing with a feeding bag attached to the stomach, and it both seems terrifying and invigorating- but it was not mentioned before signing the 202.
 

They forgot to mention that the doctors will be too tired, stretched, and busy to spend time doing their actual job, leaving patients to help one another, when the reality is they do not know what the hell they are doing themselves. Perhaps someone might mention that despite the 200 page chart so many patients have garnered, and the bleak outlooks everyone predicts, many can and will go on to thrive. That perhaps, despite your one, or fifty hospitalizations, plus the gamut of incorrect medications and therapies, you are not broken. That despite your past, you still have a world of opportunities, and you will not end up on disability, or dead in a dumpster pushing drugs and repeating the cycle.

Unfortunately, they will forget to tell you about that, too.  

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