And Don’t Say It’s The Ward
Very often, I have medical professionals ask me what kind of treatment I am looking for. This has always confused me, because how am I, someone with no training on psychiatry, supposed to know the exact kind of treatment that would help me the most? For the past year or so, this has continued to become a recurring thing, and each time, I am left just as baffled as the last.
But what about the times when I have known exactly what I would have needed, kept asking for it, and instead got turned down and told to deal with the worst of it on my own? Sadly, I have had way more instances of this happening than the slightly annoying question of “what do you want us to do for you”.
The current political climate of my home country is largely responsible for the way things have deteriorated in the healthcare system. Without diving too deep into the rise of right-wing politics in Finland, let’s just say that everything was a lot better before the major cuttings to the funds of healthcare and social security that happened this year. Because of these circumstances I voted against back in 2023, I am having to suffer the consequences of rich people wanting to get richer and sick people getting sicker. There simply isn’t enough money being put into the public healthcare system which I am dependent of, so what ends up happening is that people just aren’t treated at all. And that’s what has happened to me time and time again this year, starting from spring until the beginning of autumn.
Until this year, I had been admitted to a psychiatric facility every time I had gotten extremely suicidal and depressed. Two times in 2022, once in 2023, and once in 2024. Each of these hospitalization periods was extremely necessary and definitely to thank for me still being alive. I had never been denied of treatment that I was clearly in need of. Well, not until this year.
It still baffles me to this day, how you as a mental health professional can send an acutely suicidal person back home guilt-free. It’s like the doors to the only place that would have offered me the kind of safety and support I so desperately needed were forever locked right in front of my nose. The doors that none of us wants to open in the first place, because the stigma of being admitted to the psych ward is still so strong, but also the doors that end up saving so many of us from our worst enemies. But there I was, in September this year, trying to get into the ward so that I wouldn’t kill myself, three times – and three times I was turned back home.
ward.
About a month after that ordeal, I had an appointment with my assigned psychiatrist. During that appointment, she asked me a question of a variation of the one I know all too well: “In your mind, what kind of treatment would you need in order to live the kind of life you’d actually be having living?”
But the question came with a catch.
“And don’t say your ideal way of living would be at the ward.”
It was like a knife was twisted in the wound. Are you fucking kidding me, ma’am? Me wanting to get into the ward so that I don’t kill myself due to the absolutely deplorable situation my life is in is not the same thing as me wanting to fucking live at the ward. This is the kind of stuff that keeps me up at night. I understand that maybe to some people (cough neurotypicals cough) this might be a funny little joke, but to me, an autistic chronically ill person with childhood trauma, it comes across as incredibly disrespectful of my need for treatment when I’m struggling the most. Sometimes the way healthcare professionals treat me makes me feel like me committing suicide would be a better and easier option to us all.
Because who wants to stay at the psychiatric facility for any other reason but because they are incredibly sick and need intensive treatment right at that very moment? We don’t go in there to stay and live there, none of us do. The implication that I am that fragile of a human being who can’t take care of themself at all that I would want to spend the rest of my days at the fucking psych ward is absolutely asinine to me. I sincerely hope none of you readers have to put up with this kind of treatment (no pun intended).
You deserve to be treated with respect by the medical professionals who are supposed to help you. You don’t have to be okay with the way they talk to you or about your problems. Their status as a doctor or a nurse or a therapist doesn’t give them the free pass to be a condescending bitch to you. Please remember that.
Yanking the doors,
ichigonya