“Stadard Treatment,” Watercolors, ink, psychiatric hospital pencil. 12×9″
One of the most important connections in my history is between the torture and trafficking I survived as a teenager and what happened years later when I was sent to a psychiatric hospital after developing intensifying suicidal ideations from Lexapro. Those experiences were not identical, but they are connected by conditions of power, bodily autonomy, confinement, and inability to escape.
When I was 15, a man abducted me into sex and domestic slavery. He trafficked me and subjected me to systematic suffocation torture every few days for almost 10 months. I could not leave. I had no control over when the torture happened. I could not control what happened to my body. I was physically restrained, degraded, and dependent on the person who was harming me for the most basic conditions of my survival. My nervous system was developing inside an environment in which another person had almost total control over my access to safety.
Forty-three years later, a doctor prescribed Lexapro, commonly offered to those who suffer from PTSD. I asked for a pharmacogenomic test and was told “we don’t do that here.” The prescriber declined to warn me about potential Suicidal Ideations (SI) from the Black Box medication. She also failed to follow the FDA safety protocol of checking in with the patient and asking specifically about SI. Then the hospital’s “embedded” psychologist dismissed my complaints about intensifying SI. By week 5, I was so distressed by these crazy and intrusive SI, that I typed my complaint into an email through the ChristianaCare patient portal. The hospital could no longer ignore the issue. It was in writing.
The prescriber responded by telling me I needed to go to the ER and ask for a psychiatric evaluation. From there, the whole “mental health” system treated the ideations as evidence of a psychiatric illness requiring my being locked up, rather than accounting for the drug’s contribution. I was placed in an environment where other people had control over whether I could leave.
The psychiatric hospital was not the house where I was held captive. There was no trafficker, nor systematic suffocation torture. But from an Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) perspective, the nervous system responds to relational conditions rather than stated institutional intentions. Confinement, loss of movement, and external control over one’s body are consequential for anyone, but especially for someone whose development included prolonged captivity.
Months later—after it was too late for me—I finally had the pharmacogenomic test and learned I have two copies of the gene involved in SSRI metabolization, making me an ultra-rapid metabolizer with a paradoxical response. There was a biological, chemical, genetic, and scientific reason for the suicidal ideation I reported, but could they listen to my complaint? NO!
Ethical literature on involuntary commitment recognizes this directly. SAMHSA identifies involuntary commitment as a significant limitation of liberty. Its trauma-informed guidance highlights safety, trust, collaboration, empowerment, voice, and choice as central principles, explicitly recognizing seclusion and restraint as potentially retraumatizing.
That creates a profound problem when someone with a history of captivity enters psychiatric “care” because they are experiencing suicidal thoughts. The person may need immediate support, but the intervention too often removes some of the conditions that help a human nervous system experience safety: choice, bodily autonomy, predictability, meaningful consent, and the ability to leave.
In my case, the suicidal ideation emerged after starting a medication, yet the resulting “crisis” was interpreted purely through a psychiatric framework instead of examining what had changed immediately prior. Suicidal ideation describes what someone is experiencing, not why it is happening. All I needed was to get off the damn pills for a few days. That’s all! But that’s not how the system operates.
Before Lexapro, I lived with serious trauma-related issues; after starting Lexapro, severe suicidal ideation led to hospitalization and restricted autonomy. Viewing that sequence as a relational and biological event is fundamentally different from labeling the experience as “mental illness.”
I object to the assumption that psychiatric hospitalization is automatically “care” because it occurs in a medical facility. Care depends on what happens in the relationship. If a person is terrified, losing physical control, unable to leave, and subjected to decisions by those with greater power, their experience of increased distress cannot be dismissed simply because the setting is called “treatment.”
Confinement is destabilizing for anyone. For someone who spent ten months learning that another person controlled whether they could breathe, move, or escape, loss of bodily autonomy carries a distinct developmental context. While psychiatric confinement did not produce identical responses to original torture, its impact was affected by I experienced before.
There is a fundamental difference between protection and control. Protection preserves agency wherever possible, while control removes it. A person in crisis may need protection from acting on suicidal thoughts, but that does not eliminate the need for clear communication, consent, choice, and coercion minimization. And I had no intention of acting on the thoughts. I was not interested in dying, not after everything I had endured and how hard I had fought to survive most of my life. But the system still treated me like I was the problem.
Decades after surviving an environment where escape was impossible and my body was controlled by another, I entered an institution during a medically-induced crisis where I again faced restricted autonomy. The circumstances were different from abduction, but the loss of control was central.
Psychiatric hospitalization was not merely where I was sent for suicidal thoughts. It was part of a sequence: a medication produced severe suicidal ideation followed by dismissal of my complaints, followed by institutional confinement and loss of control, despite my developmental history of trafficking, torture, and physical restraint.
When care providers take complete control of the environment, they deny the elements required for genuine healing: safety, agency, predictability, and attunement. For someone with my history, these are not optional details or secondary considerations; they are essential to authentic care and harm reduction. It’s been eight years since that psychiatric abuse, and I’m still trying to recover, because the entire disease management industry is practically built against what I biologically need for wellness. Until the mental illness industry confronts the traumatic weight of institutional control, it will continue to harm the people it claims to help.
