I'm a Cyborg But That's Okay
Thanks! You just gave me a great movie recommendation.
On topic: I was in a psychiatric hospital for about a week, in the early 2000s - involuntary commitment. I learned one thing, and only one thing, while I was there: never use the word 'suicide' in a letter to someone, even if you have no intention of committing suicide and even if your letter doesn't say that you're planning to commit suicide. Just don't even use that word, period. That's all I learned. All the stuff they tried to teach me in the group meetings was useless and irrelevant to me. I just sat there and was bored for several days.
I was extremely lucky, because they wanted to drug me with Haldol for no reason at all, and I insisted that I didn't want to receive any Haldol. Haldol is one of those 'gateway drugs,' where, if you take Haldol even once, it ruins your life so completely that you have to keep getting committed to mental hospitals over and over again because the Haldol itself causes permanent, crippling side effects and withdrawal effects even at low doses. I'm lucky that they respected my wishes when I said I didn't want Haldol. I wasn't a violent or argumentative prisoner, I was quiet and obedient and polite, which is probably why they didn't insist that I must have Haldol. But if I hadn't been so lucky, they might have forced me to take drugs anyway.
So all I really learned from the experience was that there is this one particular magic word, and if you say that magic word, you get locked in a mental hospital, so don't ever ever ever ever ever say that magic word under any circumstances unless you are speaking to someone close to you whom you absolutely trust. If I have to talk about it nowadays I might say 'The S-Word.' And then I give numerous disclaimers like 'I'm not going to do this, I just wanted to say something about it.'
I have a vision of what psychiatric hospitals ought to be, but right now I don't have the money, time, or resources to make it real.