I dealt with Mountain View by starting my own local chapter of Mental Patients’ Liberation Front, and even though they were utterly coercive and we had no rights to speak of, I managed to get most of the patients in agreement that we should listen to each other and be mutually supportive, and try to ignore the horrible treatment the institution was subjecting us to. And I also got the support of a significant percent of the staff members, to the point that it polarized the institution and disrupted its functioning. I was making sense to a lot of people, and making their jackbooted authoritarian ways look silly and indefensible. Upper echelon clinical staff eventually decided I was a rabble raising psychiatric rights activist and booted me out, as if they’d caught me trespassing.

So I make friends with the other mental patients. I’m thinking initially “I don’t belong here this is a mistake”, like most of you probably would, but the other mental patients here on the Seriously Disturbed Ward…umm, they don’t think they’re Napoleon and they aren’t seeing pink elephants and I can talk to them. Heck, I can even explain the stuff in my papers that got me into this place and they understand it (with varying shades of disagreement or ideas about what some things would mean that don’t overlap with my own). And I can understand the stuff that they are wrapped up in and concerned about...

After a week or so, we have started calling ourself the “patient people” instead of “patients” because to survive in this place you need to be very patient with the confrontational and abusive staff who belittle you and order you around, and patient with the situation in which you’re locked up and when not in immediate danger from the psychiatric professionals are generally bored. And we start referring to the staff when they behave at their worst as “impatient people”. We continue listening to each others’ stuff and give each other reality-checks and confirmations of the authenticity of feeling this or that based on what has happened to us here or there, and give each other pragmatic advice and sympathy and just someone to talk to about it. And pretty quickly we’re overtly saying that the only therapy in this place is what we are providing to each other. There are a couple of nurses, one in afternoon shift and another on night shift, who applaud this and say it is excellent. There are others on both of these shifts and everyone on the morning shift who regard it as inappropriate behavior and try to discourage us from talking to each other. The woman whose husband put her in there has a doctor who starts issuing instructions to the staff to stop this behavior. My doctor is mildly supportive but mostly for what he thinks it means regarding me individually. He thinks this is all my doing. At first it sort of was except that it caught on like wildfire once some of this stuff had been said out loud once or twice. There is another doctor who thinks the whole phenomenon is a great success story for “milieu therapy” which usually means “the therapeutic advantages of being surrounded by walls and barred windows” but now because we are essentially doing mutual therapy (and not assuming each other to be “sick”, by the way) we are part of each other’s “milieu” …at any rate he thinks it’s all wonderful and is instructing his patients to participate in our home-grown group sessions.

By the fourth week the staff is openly bickering, not just in the conference room behind the nurse’s station but in front of us out on the ward floor, and we’re behaving like calm patient little Zen masters. One guy hooks up the teenage couple with an attorney friend he knows and although he won’t “take their case” he gives them simple legal advice. I flirt with the married woman in front of her husband when he comes to visit and we imply to him that the two of us are having an affair in the hospital and he suddenly starts saying he’s going to talk to the doctor about her coming home. The guy with the Jesus freak parents is drawing his nightmare visions in crayons and it seems to help him cope and for crayon drawings they are pretty good.

Then one day I’m out in the barbed-wire enclosure (“yard”) where they let the patients go to smoke and get sunlight and when I come back in I find all my stuff is piled in the middle of the intake corridor and they won’t let me go onto the floor. “You aren’t crazy and you can’t stay here. You have to leave. Take your stuff and get out of here.”

...[I]nto the modern shiny psychiatric institution was tossed a stranger who had been handing out strange feminist manifestos, and he had just recently read an article about a group of psychiatric inmates calling themselves Mental Patients' Liberation Front, so when he deciced he wasn't getting what he'd come for, he decided to start a chapter right there in the hospital.

And the members of this new Mental Patients' Liberation Front wanted to talk about sex and politics and religion and love and suicide and life and death; and some of them wanted to sleep with each other while others wanted to sleep on the couches or on the floor, and they said, "So what if it it's emotionally intense, or unorderly, or different from normal? Does it hurt anything?" They complained about the godawful boredom, and some of the women put their makeup on their boyfriends while the men giggled, and the men shaved their eyebrows instead of their cheeks while the head nurse scowled from his plexiglass office.

In group therapy, the patients, now calling themselves the patient people, began discussing and redefining values. The nurses who had come to beam parentally and guide the therapy were told they could join in or listen patiently, but not to interfere impatiently with the patient people talking; after awhile, some of the nurses started talking, too.

But there were also a lot of very threatened and insecure people there who didn't like their reality tested like that, and they yelled, became violent, and insisted that personal contact was psychologically damaging to their patients' well-being. The patient people insisted otherwise, but the fearful ones lost their patience as rapidly as they were losing their patients, no matter how patient the patient people tried to be with them. Psychotropic tranquilizer drugs were ordered all around. It didn't look good for the patient people.

But some of the other therapists and an administrator or two began speaking up for the patient people, saying that these outspoken patients had an interesting set of ideas about reorganizing the care plan procedure of the institution. Some of them even went so far as to say that they didn't think the patient people were crazy at all.

Until one day a fiery MPLF radical or two found all personal possessions stacked in piles on the corridor floor after returning from weekend pass:

"You can't stay here any more. No, you can't talk with any of the other patients. Get your stuff off our floor and leave. If that stuff is still here tonight, it goes outside into the street."

Day Eleven in a substance abuse rehab facility. Excuse me, a multi-component self-growth therapy center, and it had been the other aspects -- "social skills and communication skills and how you integrate into your social environment" -- that had lured me into signing myself into the place, not the substance abuse rehab stuff.

I'm trying to come out. It's 1982 and the terminology available for coming out as what would later be called genderqueer or nonbinary does not exist yet, so I wish for more fluent social skills, to be a speaker, to have an influence on people and affect their thinking, you know?

Unfortunately, I find them heavy-handed and authoritarian.

It's not quite that I'm not getting anything out of the experience -- I like the class they call "psychodrama" and also the informal chatting with the other resident patients. But I'm not broken and I didn't come in here to turn myself over to these folks to let them "fix" me.

One thing that's gotten on my nerves by this time is their insistence that we be honest and open about what we feel and think, but the staff don't share what their actual feelings and reactions are -- they're instead constantly telling or reacting according to what they think we need to hear.

Derek thought to himself, "Seriously, do I need this? It's been a long day"

The administrative staffer handed me another stack of forms and said, "Fill this out".

Whoa. The name of every prescription drug and when it was prescribed, going back ten years?? I'm supposed to just rattle that shit off from the top of my head?

When I first read your posts on this subject it took me a while to realize that I fell into a "True Scotsman" fallacy about you: No true schizophrenic could be so functional, rational and lucid, therefore you could not be a true schizophrenic.

[T]oday's facts are embedded in today's situation. We accept them as being self-evidently true, as signifying what they are; or at least, we try to. We are unhappy with puzzles and ambiguities, uneasy with shifting roles and mysterious behavior. Why?

Because they demand something from us. Present events act on us and call for action by us. Since we can change them, not simply define or describe them, they acquire a moral presence. They pose a question of responsibility, and by doing so they change the way we look at them.