Fresh from the ward

Feedback on having been detained in psychiatry

Psychiatry is not an exacting science. Maybe I would consent to medicate myself using synthetic drugs once Science has made sufficient progress, by half a millenium.

The nonexistent solidarity masked in the social body by the veneer of politeness and conventions can be felt more strenuously within the institution. I speak there of the relationships between patients : in my experience, it is up to the one who will leave first ; seeming ties may be forged but a relationship founded on nothing more than the time spent together during a psychiatric sojourn is not made to last.

One step further above the hierarchical ladder, the nursing staff of caregivers seems to be regulated around two caricatural archetypes, one swearing only by the observation of medical prescriptions and the other mainly by “compassion” steeped in good-doing and sentimental mawkishness. Both however bend to the rule, and receive their habitual payment in place of actual efficiency in recovery.

A third, least encountered profile, of which one may already assume that those did not disown the ideals of care that stand for themselves once one trods this path, demonstrates the more common sense and the less uptightness around regulations by definition maladjusted to the diversity of individual and singular cases.

Amongst « those who get back home at night, » remain final decision-makers i.e. psychiatrists proper, a peculiar species which, if one may not either claim with entire certainty that this would have been their sole motive, seems at the very least having resigned themselves to simply contribute to the advancement of psychopathological Research – the hijacked usefulness of the practice of writing down the taking of medication and the observations recorded during interviews.