I became anti-psychiatry because of what psychiatry did to me and what I saw it do to others. I walked in with severe Complex PTSD. They put me on Lexapro. The suicidal ideations started about 3 weeks after. When I told them what was happening, they brushed it off twice. The third time, I wrote it in the patient portal, where they couldn’t ignore it. That landed me in psychiatric hospitalization for eight days and nights. This was a manufactured mental health crisis.
In the cuckoo’s nest, they stacked medications on me. None of it helped. All of it made things worse. They refused to believe me about my own lived experience in this body. They wouldn’t acknowledge that the SSRI caused the suicidal ideations. When I refused to keep taking Lexapro, the psychiatrist insisted I should stay on it longer. I pushed back, using my doctor’s words to validate my stance. She responded by putting me on another SSRI. That place was a warehouse of polypharmacy and misery. Everything ran on coercion, control, and billing codes. Not care.
When I got out, I threw the pills away. I refused their outpatient program because it was the same facility that had neglected and abused me, calling it treatment. When I filed complaints, the licensing board told me no one had done anything wrong. They said it was all standard treatment, so it was okay. That told me exactly what the standard is. They do this to everyone.
Since then, I’ve heard countless stories from other survivors. Tales of being dismissed, coerced, mislabeled, drugged, and trapped on medications that wrecked their lives. Stories of people fighting like hell to get off pills they never wanted in the first place. And then I saw the research showing the whole “chemical imbalance” story was never anything more than a marketing scheme. How are we supposed to trust an industry that sells lies at that scale and calls it science? Especially when the truth is revealed, and they still keep pushing the goddamn pills?
From an Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) perspective, what they call “treatment” makes no sense. Human beings need connection, safety, attunement, and support for the nervous system to settle. We need cultures that reduce allostatic load, not increase it. But psychiatry pathologizes natural human responses to an abnormal, punishing culture. It responds to distress with drugs, restraints, locked doors, and diagnostic labels that follow people for life.
That’s why I want psychiatry shut down as fast as possible, without abandoning the people who are tangled up in it or relying on it because they were given no alternatives. People deserve actual support, not an industry built on domination, hierarchy, and the medicalization of suffering.
I became anti-psychiatry because I survived the abuse that the industry calls care. I want a world where suffering is met with presence, understanding, and genuine community, not coercion disguised as help.
Psychiatry isn’t just coercion. It’s control. It’s money. It’s not human. It’s not about helping people at all. It’s about maintaining the power structure, keeping the money flowing, and exploiting vulnerable individuals for profit. The suffering of human beings is the product, and the system is designed to extract it, normalize it, and profit from it. That’s why it has to end.
