My first experience of mental healthcare was in 2012, after my niece passed away. It was the day my son was starting at nursery for the first time, and while we were waiting for the bus, I saw somebody who had passed away – my husband’s uncle, and I ended up going to A&E in an ambulance. I’ve been seeing things like this since I was 12 and my father died, but the difference is that in Jamaica, it’s considered more normal to see people who have died. There is a cultural difference in this country which means it is seen differently.
At the time, I was grieving my niece. And my whole family was worried about me, so I agreed to go to A&E. I thought I was in a safe place, but it wasn’t a safe place. The clinicians were asking me about immigration. They wanted me to take a blue tablet to make me sleep, but I didn’t want to be away from my two children – I had never been away. They were staying with my neighbours and tried to explain that I was worried about them, that my niece had died and I was having marital problems.
I was being pressured to take the tablet and in the end they held me down, with a sheet over my face, and injected me. I tried to fight them – they way they were treating me made me more frightened than the things I had been seeing. But I was kept in, and over the next two weeks I was transferred to two different hospitals, ending up in a ward in Springfield, while my husband looked after my children.
It felt like a prison and I had no dignity. I felt the drugs I was being given were too much and no one listened to me. I didn’t feel there was any plan for my care either. I was on the ward for two weeks then discharged. Whie I was out, the home treatment team came to visit me, but they were quite rude and wouldn’t take their shoes off in my house. They didn’t listen to me about my medication either. I had no therapy and no one was talking to me to make sense of what had happened. And if I was a white person, would it have been the same? I feel like my experience would have been different.
Three months later, I was admitted to hospital again. After that, my husband and I divorced, and he got a court order to have the children so I was separated from them, I only saw them at weekends. I had nowhere to go and social workers were coming to talk to me about my children while I was in hospital. Sometimes I ask myself, if I had had a physical health condition, for example cancer, rather than a mental one, would I have been treated in the same way? I don’t feel like I was treated like a human.
Twelve years later, I have been admitted around five times. I am on mediation now, although I do not take as much as they want me to, and I have been well for a year. I have done a hairdressing course and I am now doing a beauty course. [can we say a bit more about how you are doing now?] But I have accepted that I may become unwell again, as it seems to happen every three years.