The mental health system is broken. I know — I went through it. Last fall, I was consumed by anxiety and a growing certainty that I was being followed. Driving to school, picking my son up from daycare; no place felt safe from the people I believed were trailing me.
When I told my partner, he reassured me it wasn’t happening. But he works from home and rarely goes out, and I couldn’t trust his read on a world he didn’t move through. So I turned to a friend who had just graduated from social work school. She heard my story and called it a crisis. Soon she had called my partner and my sister, who is also a licensed social worker, and the alarm was sounded.
What followed felt less like care than a checklist. Call a psychiatrist. Call a counselor. Tell them you’re in crisis. Find a day program. Hand the person off and consider the job done. I believe the people around me were trying to help. But they were following a script written by a system that, in my experience, is built to move people along, not to heal them.
I was enrolled in a day program at Holyoke Medical Center. That is where things got worse.
I knew as soon as I walked in that this was not a place of healing. The program was in a dim basement. Patients on long-term stays in the psychiatric unit could look down into the courtyard at us. Each day began with about 20 of us going around the room and rating our suicidal thoughts on a scale. By the time the check-in reached the last person, I felt more depressed and hopeless than when I had arrived.
That was the model: put a room full of people in acute crisis together and ask us to do the work. In five days, I never had a single one-on-one counseling session. By day three, I was mostly waiting to see the psychiatrist, hoping for a benzodiazepine prescription to quiet the crushing anxiety that the program itself was causing me. I left on day five with a prescription and no relief from what had brought me there.
Afterward, I was assigned an outpatient counselor and psychiatrist. What I learned from them wasn’t how to heal. I learned what not to say so I wouldn’t be sent back, and what to say to get more medication, which the psychiatrist was quick to prescribe.
At no point did I feel that any of this was for me. It felt like a system that didn’t care who I was, and whose solution was to medicate me and put me in a room with people in deeper pain until I concluded I “wasn’t that bad.”
That is not treatment. People in crisis need time with a trained professional who listens to them as individuals. They need care built around what they are experiencing, not a one-size-fits-all group. And they need settings that feel like places of recovery, not storage. I’m not writing to blame the individual staff members, many of whom are likely as overstretched as the system they work in. I’m writing because what I went through is what passes for help right now, and it should not be. Until this changes, we are not healing people in crisis. We are processing them.
Akesa Mafi lives in Springfield.