I am one of many vulnerable young people across the UK who have been forced against my will to spend time in a psychiatric hospital, an occurrence triggered by the deterioration of my mental health. Patients are admitted to receive treatment and ideally get better. But what happens when the patient experience becomes damaging to their identity?
When you imagine a psychiatric unit, what comes to mind? People often answer with the classic and somewhat clichéd scenario of patients screaming, crying and being restrained into white padded cells. Media representations of mental illness present the psychologically unwell as being dangerous and insane. It is true that some people who are detained in psychiatric hospitals are violent, both towards themselves and others. But it is rare that people question whether this violence is how people genuinely behaved before being admitted to a psychiatric unit, or whether such drastic and desperate displays of emotion are evoked by the situation:
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