When I was in high school, I was admitted to Sheppard Pratt for mental health related issues. I was not doing well and was seeking professional treatment. However, this is not at all what I received from one of the “top 10 psychiatric hospitals in the nation.”

            I was 17 years old and put in a group for adolescents ages 12-17. This alone was an isolating experience as I was nearly an adult and expected to contribute to group therapy with children just starting middle school. Participation was mandatory but anything shared was immediately used against you and could even result in punishment. If anyone mentioned that they had previously engaged in any drug use, self-harm or other negative coping mechanisms, the group leaders would humiliate and lecture them during group. The smallest emotional reaction would result in getting sent out to the “quiet room” to sit there by yourself until one of the group leaders thought it would be okay for you to return. The explanation for this is that your time in isolation was supposed to help you calm down and relax but it felt more like being put in a time out corner.

            We were pat down every day and our pockets were checked before we could go to our small groups. We could not have shoelaces, use pencils with erasers or pens. We were not allowed to sit close to one another or socialize. During lunch we had to sit a few feet apart from one another and watched the move RV (by the end of my time there I swear I saw it about 10 times). We were threatened to be sent to the more intensive unit if we did not get better. These threats were often incorporated with stories of children screaming and resisting as they had to be restrained and sent off. I do understand that some of these rules and regulations exist to prevent people from causing harm to themselves or others but much of it felt like imprisonment and it definitely did not create a comfortable environment to get well in.

            One of my worst experiences there was a few days into my stay when a 12-year-old who was taken there on the “bus” with me (I say bus in quotations because that’s how it was referred to, but it was really just a Ford Flex with like 3 kids in it) privately reported to the administrators that I was smoking cigarettes on the bus. When they heard this, they sent three adults to pull me out of group in front of everyone and take me into a private room where they forced me to strip down into my underwear in search of these cigarettes I was accused of possessing. I was sobbing as I had to get practically naked in front of multiple strangers who were reprimanding me the entire time. I had not smoked on the bus and I did not have any cigarettes on me. When they found none, they told me to get dressed and return to group, barely giving me time to wipe my tears. Later, during my family meeting, my social worker had informed my family and I that these administrators did not ask the driver or any of the other children in the car before searching me. If they had taken time to fact check the information given to them by a child, the search would have never happened. I also was confused at the whole situation because logically it would be impossible for me to role down a window and smoke a cigarette without the driver noticing and I’m sure if I did, he would have reported it himself.

            I left my time in the hospital feeling even more hopeless than I was when I arrived. When you are struggling with mental illness there is so much general encouragement to go to therapy, to go get help but what are you supposed to do when that help fails you? Because I was mentally ill, I was treated as incompetent and felt stripped of my autonomy. None of the professionals there respected me as a person. It was humiliating and dehumanizing. I know that my experience is not an isolated one, nor the worst I’ve ever heard of. Many of my friends who were sent away for residential treatment were subjected to physical punishment and abuse. It is taught as though the mental asylum model where mentally ill and disabled people were subject to torture and neglect is just a thing of the past. Although a lot of methods and practices formally used in these institutions are now illegal, it is still very legal for minors to be abducted in the night by transporters and sent states away to mental institutions. It is still very legal for mentally ill individuals to be kept in cramped dorm rooms with little to no privacy. It is still legal to cut off an institutionalized child’s communication to the world.

https://www.change.org/p/uinta-academy-shut-down-uinta-academy?recruiter=1168438379&recruited_by_id=af5c1df0-3b59-11eb-bf46-53ef0bb26e3b&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=copylink&utm_campaign=petition_dashboard

This link is a petition to close down one of the residential treatment centers a friend of mine attended involuntarily. Please sign! The comments show a lot of the experiences individuals have had there.