For government, health insurers, and other stakeholders, the message of empowerment, self-management, and participation of healthcare customers was not to be ignored any longer.Īs a technical physician with lived experience of psychosis and psychiatry, I have struggled with these themes. Since the end of the 20th century, professional participation of people with lived experience was becoming a hot topic in the healthcare sector, and it was gaining ground. In those early years, psychiatry in Northern-Europe started to tilt, opening up towards a movement that already started in the 1960s, trying to empower psychiatric patients. It also left me with a deep fear to not end up in psychiatry to not have this situation of dependence and lack of freedom represent the end stage of my life. This terrible experience perhaps paradoxically boosted my ambition that I should defeat the disease they call schizophrenia and continue with my life. So I adapted and just made the best of it.Īt some stage, however, there was an incident, which led to me, first, being isolated, and then receiving an involuntary injection with a major tranquilizer. Unfortunately, professionals were on real holidays, resulting in me having no clue as to what I should do, or what was expected of me, to get out of there and appear healthy. I adapted relatively quickly and even began to experience something akin to being on a “break” from my usual activities, helped by the relatively relaxed state of the closed ward during the summertime holiday season. I lived through the days by trying to settle in and enjoy the company of other clients. Without explanation by any nurse or psychiatrist and a folder full of meaningless flyers, I had to survive in the chaos of the closed ward, experiencing that the persons interacting with me apparently were under the impression that I was incapable of reasoning. The experience of being confined changed my meaning of freedom, something which lasted for years after discharge. The first weeks at the closed ward were terrifying. My admission and its subsequent impact have been greater than my family, friends and maybe even the professionals at the psychiatric ward may ever have known. Having been floridly psychotic for a few months and having threatened my own and others’ existence in various creative ways (through a system of social and societal decay, for example), my family, the judge and the psychiatrist decided that there was a real danger, requiring me to be admitted to hospital. I started hearing voices in 2003, but my first real encounter with psychiatry wasn’t until 2011, when I was involuntarily admitted to a psychiatric closed ward.
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