The Flawed System of Psychiatric Wards: My Year in Lockdown

Over a year of my life has been spent locked up in psychiatric wards. Not because I wanted help, but because the system decided I needed it. Five times I was institutionalized, each stay lasting two to three months. And each time, the experience was the same: cold, clinical, and utterly dehumanizing.

When you arrive, they strip everything from you. Your possessions, your phone, your access to the outside world—they take it all away. They pat you down, remove any sense of individuality, and throw you into a locked ward filled with people struggling as much, if not more, than you are.

The wards feel like prisons. You can’t leave. You can’t smoke, no matter how much your body craves it. You’re monitored constantly, like a specimen in a glass tank. The showers are cold, the environment sterile, and the doctors visit you for 10 minutes every few days, just long enough to adjust your medications and move on. They don’t listen. They don’t care.

If you don’t agree with their decisions, you’re forced into compliance. They’ll inject you with medication whether you consent or not. I hate needles, but that didn’t matter. They didn’t treat me like a human being—they treated me like property, something to be controlled and subdued.

The environment was chaos. People were screaming, fighting, and dragging you into their delusions. Sleep was impossible. At night, the sounds of people yelling kept you awake, adding exhaustion to the growing list of mental burdens.

For me, the worst part was the complete lack of understanding. As a philosopher, my thoughts and ideas are complex, but instead of engaging with me, the doctors dismissed me as "crazy." They couldn’t understand my perspective because they weren’t philosophers—they didn’t even try.

When I was released, it didn’t matter where I went. Even being homeless, living in a tent in the woods, felt better than being locked away in those wards. At least in the wilderness, I had freedom. I could breathe.

But the trauma of those experiences lingers. The psychiatric system didn’t help me—it harmed me. It didn’t listen to me—it silenced me. And it’s a system that continues to fail countless others.

Psychiatric wards are not places of healing. They’re places of control, where individuality is stripped away, and patients are treated like problems to be solved, not people to be helped. This is a system that needs to be torn down, destroyed, and rebuilt from the ground up.

Because no one should feel like a psychiatric ward is worse than a tent in the woods.