The Story About The Mental Hospital
Table of Contents
Introduction
This page contains descriptions of my personal experiences. Who am I? I'm the person who made this website. Most of this website is dedicated to general information in terms of facts and such. While this page is factual, it will not apply to everyone's experiences. Probably because it is not about everyone's experiences. It is about my experiences.
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General Information
[Note, this section has been moved from the "reasons" page and will be expanded at some point. This message will be removed once this page is filled out more.]
The Story about the Mental Hospital (1 week in 2022)
[W.I.P.]
In the year 2022, I wanted to kill myself. Before I continue with this story, I feel the need to state the obvious - me wanting to commit suicide had absolutely nothing to do with me being transgender. Having access to gender-affirming care did not make me want to die. If anything, access to the masculinizing treatments I desire has been one of the good things about my life, and I would be even more depressed without it.
I spent a lot of the year 2022 wanting to die. I had attempted to seek help via trips to the emergency room. Occasionally I had attempted to commit suicide. Sometimes, I would chicken out due to fear of the pain associated with death. Other times, I had been stopped by my partner at the time.
Side note: that was a terrible relationship, and I only stayed in said relationship for as long as I did because I was so full of self-loathing that I felt like being with that person was a greater form of self-harm than it would have been to actually end my own life. I was being treated very poorly, and was often actively encourage to kill myself prior to being stopped. Shortly before that relationship ended in June of 2023, that partner had gotten me into a really bad car accident that I later learned was apparently a suicide attempt. We both survived the crash. The car (and the relationship) did not.
Did you know that if you go to the emergency room, and explain that you want to kill yourself, the standard response is just "Well, you're asking for help, that means you aren't going to do it. You'll be fine. Just go home." There are some people who have not experienced depression that are naive to think that going to medical professionals and asking for help regarding suicidal ideation result in receiving help. I am long past the point of believing in such fairy tales.
At the end of May 2022, my partner at the time (now ex, obviously) prompted me to voluntarily endure a week in an in-patient mental health facility. At the intake appointment, the people who I was speaking to made it seem as though (based on my evaluation) that I would be having a roommate. The adult unit had 2 types of bedrooms - single rooms for one patient and double rooms for two patients.
Not only was I not put in a room with a roommate, I was put in the room meant for additional monitoring. It was the tinest room in the facility with a window on the door (none of the other bedroom doors had windows, but this one had one with a window on the outside to ensure minimal privacy). The only furniture in this room was a single chair and a bed (even the regular single-bed rooms had a desk, dresser, etc). I had to keep my belongings in a laundry basket on the floor.
The room was freezing, and I was not allowed to have my pajamas at night. I tried asking for my pajamas back nearly every single day, complaining about the cold at night. In response, I had various answers ranging from "safety risk/health risk" to "it would make other patients uncomfortable if you wore them during the day." I attempted to persuade the staff into allowing me to have access to my pajamas at night, but was repeatedly denied.
When I asked why I was put in the room next to the nurse's desk with lights so bright I could barely sleep at night, I was told that it was becuase I had had a mastectomy, and because I was being prescribed androgel. They were worried that I might "do something" to another patient, purely due to being transgender and despite having no history of ever harming anyone.
This was a co-ed unit, with both cisgender men and cisgender women. As far as I am aware, none of the cisgender men - with naturally masculine levels of testosterone and without tits - were treated as though they would attack other patients at any moment. I was also forced to use a separate bathroom/shower - again, one meant for high-risk patients. Considering that the hospital now has several lawsuits regarding staff sexually abusing patients, I think that they need to get their priorities straight regarding what policies would genuinely result in the protection of patients.
It would be an exaggeration to say that I received treatment during my stay. When you are in a place like that, your interactions with actual therapists is severely limited. The majority of the time, you are only interacting with other patients and staff members to make it very clear that they could not care less about what you are doing/saying, so long as you are not actively trying to kill yourself.
The majority of "treatment" seemed to consist of group activities, the content of which would vary wildly. No specific discussions were ever allowed, and it was all kept as vague and unhelpful as possible. One group session consisted of a very bizzare thought experiment game. Click here to jump to a rough outline of the game. It is a weird group game that I have not been able to find more information on, but have been forced to play it on more than one occasion.
There was only 1 time this game was played during my stay at the mental hospital. All the patients were split into two groups to discuss who they thought should be able to survive and go on the spaceship to save humanity. The staff member running the group seemed surprised that no one picked the "16-year-old school girl" but everyone picked the old farmer and the teachers. She then spent way too long talking about how the schoolgirl was at a perfect age for helping with "repopulation."
Not a single patient seemed even remotely comfortable with this topic of discussion. I tried pointing out that there was no reason to assume that the "30 year old teacher" was male, as there was no gender associated with that short description of a person on the list. The one patient who was unfortunately triggered by the staff member proposing the idea of the ideal result of this thought experiment being that of a hypothetical teacher more than twice the age of a hypothetical teenage girl having frequent intercourse for the good of humanity was sedated for asking to leave (politely) and for subsequently crying in her room.
I never experienced forcible sedation during my stay, though I was indirectly threatened with it for complaining too often. The food was terrible, and I can't say that there was anything about the environment that promoted the idea of wanting to be alive.
The facility promised a continuation of treatment in the form of an app called "Aptihealth." It is a joke to consider this app treatment of any kind. After being discharged and forced to use this app, I quickly had to stop taking the medication I had been perscribed as there was no way for it to continue being perscribed to me.
The app was garbage, disorganized, and had no way of easily contacting anyone. There was no sort of customer service, and very minimal user interface. The only thing I was able to do (other than answering a pointless survey of questions) was attend weekly therapy sessions with a randomly assigned therapist (that would change every time).
Whenever I feel as though I no longer want to be alive, I am reminded that I have to avoid mental health facilities, as they do not provide any help and overall do more harm than good.
Edit: I only checked myself in becuase my ex (aka the person I was dating at the time) told me that I had to check myself in or else she would break up with me. The only reason I remained in a relationship with her was due to the self-loathing I was experiencing at the time. Staying with her was primarily an act of self-harm.
Sometimes, I feel as though her existence makes transgender women on a whole look bad. That is why I do not talk about her.
Before someone says something about me, I acknowledge that everything about this woman is very much unique to her and completely unrelated to her gender identity. She did, at some point, accused me of turning her transgender. All I did was ask her what pronouns from a list she would prefer to use, explained what estrogen HRT does, as well as how bras work and she ended up shoplifting women's clothes from Walmart. That's not my fault.
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The Space Thought Experiment
The general premise of this game is as follows...
A long time in the future (say, 1000 years or whatever) the Earth is no longer habitable, humanity has left Earth, or some variation. There is a need to restart the human race. From a list of people, choose only 10 to put on a space craft to either bring them back to Earth, or some other somewhat habitable planet, etc.
Of the list of people, each person has 2 traits of the following categories; age, profession, health status, gender, or some other miscellanous random trait. (ex. a male model, an old farmer with 1 leg, a 40-something year old teacher).
This is a game played as a group. Everyone in the group has to discuss which of the people on the list that they think would be helpful for whatever reason, and explain. There is also a section regarding what crops/animals would be the most efficient to bring along to survive.
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