Mental health: Let’s have a more humane approach

By Jathinder Sandhu, Local Journalism Reporter, Megaphone Magazine/The Shift

They wheeled me in on a gurney with restraints on my wrists. The white nurse said the only time they do that is when you are a danger to yourself or others.

Bullshit. I have never been a danger to myself or others. Never. I think it is their own fear that makes them act this way. They drape their draconian practices under the guise of humane treatment relying on a poor sod’s imprisonment in the back ward of some monolithic asylum like in the days of Philippe Pinel.

I guess my educated Punjabi face brings fear, especially post 9/11. I want to scream “I am human!” but I am made to feel like an insensitive wild beast caged in like a humpback whale in a bathtub. 

My friend once advised me not to yell on the street or else. I get that now.

The first time I got put in the seclusion room in the psychiatric unit of a hospital I screamed and screamed. I could hear ghastly howls resound in the corridor. You can’t be yourself there, or they punish you with a seclusion room or meds administered via hypodermic needle with six burly security guards holding you down. They have metal toilets like in a supermax prison and fluorescent lights flood the ward. 

Breakfast, lunch, dinner are the only way you can discern the time of day while in seclusion. All I could do was sleep to the sound of white noise, which acted as a consistent hum that lulled me into a dream state far more pleasant than reality. I have become familiar with that hum, to the point where at home I will sleep to the sound of a fan in my bedroom. I sleep well that way.

One time someone defecated in the garbage can in one of the bathrooms. I was shocked and disgusted. You meet all kinds in a mental hospital, but mostly those addicted to drugs. My family put me in there. I smoked too much pot and got delusional. So off to Vancouver General Hospital (VGH) I went. 

I have become familiar to feeling numb. The psych meds make you feel that way and if you try to wean off of them, the main threat is a trip back to the mental hospital. I have been hospitalized more than 20 times. It was my parents’ response to my using pot. But all I learned was how to smoke cigarettes and drink copious amounts of coffee until my fingers were stained with nicotine and I developed COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease).

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It’s not easy living in the Downtown Eastside, sleeping in strangers’ homes. Sometimes I was lucky enough to get into a shelter. It was also the time when women were disappearing from Vancouver’s skid row. I now feel that, looking back, my involuntary stays at VGH and Riverview may have kept me safe from predators. I knew one of the women that got murdered. That still haunts me.

But the question remains: How do we deal with situations deemed insane? Even before my own diagnosis, I had a love for people with schizophrenia. As a teenager I would go to the library and borrow books written by R.D. Laing. I learned about the dismal history of asylums. I read the poetry and appreciated the art of those deemed schizophrenic.

Now close to 60, I have mellowed out. Or maybe I have learned that, as John Mellencamp says, you can’t fight authority because authority always wins.

However, I still wonder why the mad are not seen as human. I don’t understand the fear and never have. Or maybe I lie. There was a time I was afraid. It was when my mother had a nervous breakdown and started seeing things. I was horrified at seeing her eyes flit back and forth as she lay in her darkened bedroom. And to this day I feel responsible.

However, even though I have my problems with the modern-day psychiatric hospital, I would welcome a Canadian institution any day instead of one in a developing country like India. In India they still chain schizophrenics to trees. In some places in India, the public can pay a fee to ogle at the mentally ill patients like they did in the Victorian age in the West. I kid you not. Globally we have even a longer way to go for justice.

I want to see the mental health treatment model reformed. In its place, let’s have decentralized supports in the community and respite centres focused around nature, along with non-invasive therapies, such as holistic sound and art therapy or Eastern approaches like massage and acupuncture. And yes, the use of medication.

However, no restraints, involuntary commitment, seclusion rooms or forced drugs. The right to choice should always be at the centre of any kind of therapy — medical or otherwise.

In short, no inhumane treatment. To me, that would be a step in the right direction and a healing approach. I might stop feeling like that humpback whale stuck in a bathtub, if that was the case.  

Jathinder Sandhu is a Surrey resident who has spent time in involuntary care. She is a published poet, writer,  multimedia artist and member of The Shift peer newsroom.