A pain specialist referred me to the Johns Hopkins Hospital Pain Treatment Program (PTP) because it is supposed to be one of the top hospitals in the country for pain. When you’re living inside a body that’s been pushed past its limits by trauma, medical harm, and years of fighting just to survive, you follow the path you’re told will lead to real help. I went in expecting support from people who understood pain. What I found was a system that had no interest in my lived experience and no understanding of what a lifetime of trauma actually does to a person’s capacity to function.

The head of their pain treatment program, Dr. Glenn Jordan Treisman, told me my nervous system “believes it’s being dive-bombed by lions.” That part was accurate. A lifetime of threat, trauma, and the constant grind of trying to stay alive inside systems that don’t give a damn will do that. But his idea of treatment was nonsense. He wanted to lock me in a secure psychiatric ward for at least three weeks and pump me full of chemicals. Then he’d send me straight back into the same unsafe environment I’d come from, the environment that pushed me to ask for help in the first place. That isn’t medicine. That’s adding more threat to a system already drowning.

If I’d been able to in that moment, I would have asked him what he thought happens to a human being when you take them out of the few spaces where they still feel a shred of safety, strip away their relationships, isolate them in a locked unit run on rules designed for control instead of healing, take away the one medicine that actually helps them, flood them with heavy psychiatric drugs for weeks, then release them back into the same unsafe world with even fewer connections than before. From an Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) lens, the outcome is obvious. You push them deeper into survival mode. You erode their capacity for connection. You damage the very conditions required for recovery.

But Treisman never even considered that. He bypassed the reality of trauma completely and tried to pin everything on me. He dismissed the lifetime of harm that shaped my nervous system and told me I was born with familial dysautonomia. That was nonsense. I would never have survived into adulthood with that. I didn’t show symptoms of dysautonomia until recent years, until after the mental illness industry piled on more threat, dismissal, and load.

This is what these systems do. They pull vulnerable people into environments that mirror captivity, then call it care. They ignore the inherent hierarchy and domination of their own institutions. They pretend that social forces, cultural forces, and medical violence have nothing to do with a person’s suffering. And when people collapse under that weight, they say it’s our fault.

The setup is so anti-human that it’s amazing the suicide rate isn’t even higher. We all know why it spikes after people are released from psychiatric hospitals. They go in seeking help and get harmed by the very institutions they turned to. They come out with less safety in their bodies and their lives. They’re isolated, overloaded, stripped of connection, and then handed more pills and told they’re not trying hard enough.

From an IPNB perspective, the pattern is clear. Humans come back to life through connection, safety, and community. You can’t restore a person’s capacity to regulate by subjecting them to domination, isolation, and contempt. You can’t heal someone by removing everything that keeps them even a little anchored. And you sure as hell can’t tell someone living with a lifetime of trauma that they’re the problem and call that care.

They disable us, deny they’ve disabled us, then blame us for sinking.