Guy Talks About Surviving a Corrupt Mental Hospital

one of the staff takes this as okay this kid needs to be put down but instead of doing a normal hold he suplexes him and so he did that with the kid and he was out cold for like five minutes so my name's sebastian you can call me sebby i'm 18 as of right now and from february of 2020 to about august of 2021 i was admitted to a rtc which stands for recreational treatment center the best way to describe it is like a psych ward but long term so basically what happens is somebody refers your parents to it and they check it out and decide if it's for you and if they think it is they send you to it depending on how your family is you may have the choice to go or they may force you to i did not have a choice i was forced to but i'm here now it's over and i think it is good that i should tell my story of what happened where i start with this is kind of hard because there's there's a lot um i guess i'll start with how things were before i left so i have type 1 diabetes which played a lot into why i went in the first place and before i left i wasn't the best at managing it so i played a lot of video games and all that stuff i still do but i was putting that before my schoolwork and my health and that really scared my parents so in december i think they sent me to a consultant and i talked about some stuff i didn't really know what was going on but i talked about some stuff uh and that was it like it was like a therapy session i guess but um after it was done it was done like there was really nothing more to it so i thought oh okay and then during january the next month things got a lot better for me because what i was experiencing i was experiencing my parents being a very hard on me with like telling me to get off the computer and all that stuff and honestly it sounds really stupid to be mad about but i was 16 or actually i was 15 so i was going through a phase i guess but um yeah at that time they had let go of a lot and so i was kind of happy like i was pretty happy because i got to do what i wanted to and on february 3rd i remember i was going home from school and i thought man this is a good day like that that's not a that's not a lie like i actually remember thinking that but later that night like i was doing vr for a bit later that night i was told by my parents my mom had tears in her eyes but they told me that i was going to be going away for who knows how long they couldn't tell me how long they just said however long you need to be there and i didn't understand i hadn't ever heard of what a treatment center was or anything like that to be honest what i thought it was like a boarding school and they told me either i could go with them willingly or i could get what i know now is called being gooned so what being gooned is is like a slang term what they do is they hire two people to come to your house in the middle of the night and take you away and your parents do that your parents hire those people so this didn't happen to me because obviously i didn't want that and they gave me the choice luckily because i was stable enough to where i wouldn't fight back against them that two people like i said would come in take me from my bed and they would get in the car and drive me to the airport and they'd fly me to the rtc that has happened i've talked to a lot of people while i was there that's happened to a lot of them and it traumatized multiple people because i was told the day before that i was going to treatment some people were never told and that just happened so they thought that they were being taken from their house they like kidnapped and they thought they might be killed because their parents never told them and from the parents perspective i can understand if they did tell them it would get to the point where the kid would actively fight back against it and maybe do something drastic but this is a place for kids from 13 to 18. and i know that there are a lot of kids that you know even at that age are still like very dangerous to some people but they're just kids like that kind of thing is just one of the things that makes treatment so terrible and we haven't even gotten there yet so i went on a plane ride it was rather nice though i was kind of scared uh we got there there's not much to say about it about me getting there i was checked in it's not like a boarding school at all so this one was co-ed so you had both male and female but they had separate dorms and by dorms i mean different buildings so it was not all just one group they had separate teams what they called teams so each team was kind of divided based on different like reasons to be there i think my team was mostly based on like substance abuse even though i wasn't there for that reason but there are other teams based on violence and also like self-harm and things like that so there were three teams for the males and two teams for the females it's very complicated but there's more each treatment center kind of works in different ways the way ours worked is that you have these kind of levels so levels dictate what you can and can't do for instance there's a level called explore which is your first level the level that you get when you start explorers have very basic privileges like using an ipod uh you can have an ipod there you can have a game boy there but that was the most that you could have because you weren't allowed to interact with the outside world that was the one thing that you couldn't really do because you could be able to contact people outside like your friends and they didn't want anything like that happening you got to call your parents twice a week three times or maybe four times if you had the right level for it but as an explorer you wouldn't have that you'd be able to call them twice a week on sunday and thursday and then there's the level above it called apply like i said the level above it usually you get that level after your first two weeks there that gives you access to watch cable tv it gives you access to a game boy a very basic stuff then there are two more levels which are a lot harder to get the next level is impact impact is honestly the hardest one to get because they call that a leadership role everything impacted above it was considered a leadership role and what that is is basically you have to be seen as like a leader to the team and being able to help others and being able to understand yourself better and that's kind of hard for people based on the whole therapy system which i'll get into later with that you get the privilege of going out into the courtyard which is basically just an area between the boys and girls dorm that you can go out to without staff that's mostly it there are a few more things that were pretty minor uh like an extra phone call all that but then you have the test level the test level is the final level and with that you get special privileges like you can actually visit other teams because everything below that you can only talk to them during moments like pe or school or anything like that that was the only time you could talk with other teams because otherwise they'd be doing their own thing and you can't talk to them with test during free time you could go to other dorms you could go to the girls dorm and hang out with them if they wanted to but that was very hard to get and in my experience i only had that for a few days but that was kind of what was explained to me when i first got there there was a psychologist or whatever i would eventually go to her like every week to make sure i was taking the right meds and stuff she came to me asking a bunch of questions one question stood out to me if you're going to you know if you're going to kill yourself how would you do it and i said well i don't know i've never thought of that which was the right answer and so that kind of made me feel hopeful that you know maybe i wouldn't be here for so long i was kind of you know stuck in my own head thinking that because that was me trying to be optimistic about it there there was a kid there that had been there for two years in the same place and that was kind of hard for me because it was kind of like holding a mirror and not liking what i saw because i see everybody else who's been here for a long time and who hasn't left yet and i see myself and it's like i can't be like them right i'm not here for the same reason as they are i'm gonna i'll be out of here in a month this was in utah this was far away from where i live i i don't live in utah i live in texas oh wow that's a hell of a trip yeah it was it was just a plane ride i wouldn't say exactly halfway across the country but it was quite far from where i lived so it was going to another state when i didn't want to do it but i kind of had to because like i said otherwise two people come and take me i mean it would cause anxiety just to be that far away for a lot of people that sounds like a terrible idea yeah so the first few weeks of there it was really hard for me i cried a lot i mean i think most people would i had grown to resent my parents but i still loved them i still loved the people that i was with even though i was on the computer a lot i still loved you know the community i was in and then one day without warning it was all just taken away from me and that isn't easy i don't think it would be for anyone and like i said i cried a lot that uh those first few weeks it was really hard but eventually i i had to learn to get over it yeah um i would i would spend over a year there there are a ton of things that happened over the course of that time um but then after that i would go to a step down and for the spring and summer it's basically like a halfway point between um the real world and treatment where like you're getting back into real life but that doesn't matter right now uh right now i do want to talk about the treatment part a lot of different things happened but i'd say all of them were kind of connected to the team structure what people don't really realize about the teams is that you have to spend every single day with them so you have to spend every single day with about 10 or 12 people and so because of that you get to see the good parts of them and the bad parts i made friends there but i also made a lot of enemies a lot of things happen with the enemies i want to state that i never hurt anybody i'm not someone who hurts people there are people who made threats to hurt me no one ever made good on them luckily i was never in a ton of trouble with anybody because i was mostly just trying to keep myself safe and that got me through it but there were a lot of people who did get hurt and i think it'd be good to bring this up because there are some very dark parts of it though this doesn't exist anymore i want to go into the punishment system so there are a lot of things that you can be punished for physical violence is one of them abusing your medicine your meds can be one there's a whole bunch of things there are two i guess technically three types of punishments privilege losses community breaks and internal focus privilege losses are the most common and they can be for any reason the staff could find that you are doing something that they don't like and take away a privilege and this privilege could be like watching tv for three days it could be like losing your ipad pod for two days anything like that and worst part about that in my opinion is that after the privilege like you get a slip of paper and at the end of that like when it's supposed to be over you have a group at night where you go over a bunch of things but you have to publicly state what you lost the privilege for and ask to get it back so you have to announce that to the whole group which for some people was very hard but everybody had to do that that's so demeaning that sounds like something you do in prison not in a mental hospital yeah honestly that's just one example of the things that people did there was a lot of i'm going all around here but there was a lot of power tripping in the staff there were staff that the kids loved there were staff the kids hated but power tripping was very common because this was a place where the staff could do that and they wouldn't really be held responsible that's so corrupt yeah they could take away privileges for kids they could be mean to them they could do all that and what could the kids do almost nothing there were times where we were able to talk to the higher-ups and make stuff happen but there was a lot of corruption within that and it was kind of just people taking out their lack of power i guess in their real world towards this kind of simulated world because that's what it was treatment wasn't a real world it was a fake world it was wake up you do your morning chores you go to the gym you eat lunch or you eat breakfast you eat lunch you go to school you eat dinner you have free time and you go to sleep the same schedule every week sometimes they had you know monotony breakers aka things weren't the same but mostly we like the kids had to make the difference between how this week was going to be different from the last one because that's all it was every week was the same thing over and over and over for more than a year and it got very boring but back on subject so privilege losses were the most common the other two community break and internal focus not something that i would ever want anyone to have community break wasn't as bad as internal focus community break results from physical violence things like that like i was talking about earlier and what they do is they decide on an amount of time it can be anywhere from 12 to 48 hours where you have to sit at your desk and do nothing for that whole time oh my god that's literally torture that's not the end that's not the worst of it you you get to sleep obviously but you had to sit at your desk you had to fill out some papers about what you did wrong and i don't know i personally never got on cb i i never had if but those two were very weren't very common but when they did happen it was pretty bad and like i said this resulted from physical violence abuse of substances uh self-harm and then the last thing internal focus internal focus is something that can only be permitted by your therapist your therapist you get assigned with when you're admitted and they are the only ones that can punish you with that like i say punish but they don't see it as punishment whatever it's a punishment what you do is that it's basically community break but long term you have to sit at your desk doing therapy work and that's really all you can do i know one person who had to deal with that for over a month they couldn't talk to anyone anyone that talked to them would lose a privilege or some sort of punishment would happen to them because you weren't supposed to talk to them they were in a room at the end of the hall you couldn't talk to them they couldn't interact with anybody except for their therapist and the staff that gave them food obviously they were fed well they couldn't be mistreated in that manner but like i said there's a kid who was there for over a month that's solitary confinement basically yeah that's like illegal yeah i mean it was a lot to take in when i first saw it luckily it doesn't exist anymore at the treatment center that i went to because during my step down program some of the kids i think convinced them to not do it anymore or something all i know is that it doesn't happen anymore which is great because it's not something i would wish for anybody i don't think the united nations let you do that to kids like i think they literally said that solitary for kids is considered a type of torture yeah and honestly a lot of it can also depend on what you're there for i knew a kid who had to go on an iaf who had a lot of dysphoria he constantly wore sweaters because he didn't like how he looked and what his therapist made him do is she took away all of his sweaters and everything like that and made him deal with that for the duration of the iaf which was a couple of weeks i think it was maybe two or three that was very hard for him he was one of the friends i made he was really hard to see because how much i cared for him and how much i knew that he didn't deserve that but at the same time it wasn't that he was there for no reason i'm not saying that i condone it but the reason that he was there was because he refused to participate in anything for a long time and that was their solution to it like he would just lay in bed and not do anything and it got to become a nuisance for us because we couldn't always have enough staff to look over him but also go to the cafeteria and eat so sometimes we had to stay there and eat food there i probably got mad at him sometimes but everyone goes through things differently right so yeah those are the levels of punishment iaf was very rare cb was a bit less rare but privs were very common so during my first few months were probably i'd say that they were the worst because i was getting used to it and it was hard and also i had the lowest levels during my first like three months i had a kid who had just gotten his apply level during our nightly group he walked up to me so what i think he said before he did this so i think he called me like the f slur i don't know why i remember that i probably made him mad for some reason but he called me the absolute and then he stood up to me implying that he was going to hit me but then he backed down this was in his first two weeks of being there this was in my first few months of being there like first two months that never happened to me before i didn't really like run away or anything i just sat there because i knew in my head i was like okay if you're gonna hit me the staff are going to put you in hold and i'm sure you know what a hold is yeah for those who don't know it's when someone becomes a danger to themselves or others they have to put them in a hold or a pi4 which is basically they put you on the ground they put your hands behind your back they basically just neutralize you i guess they make sure that you're not a harm to other people or yourself a bit later on i will tell you how holds are not always done in the same way most of the time they are but there was one incident but yeah that didn't end up happening you know he stood up to me like he was gonna hit me but then he backed down uh he was put on cb for that for 12 hours in my opinion rightfully so even though you know i didn't like that they had that punishment but yeah also with cb you most likely lose the level that you had and go down a level i would like to tell a funnier story because i don't want this all to be a video about how awful treatment is because it is awful but you live a life you have your life a life i guess and it's not all bad i was able to do it so i'm going to need a bit of context for this so let me uh explain so there were a lot of different kids who came in there some were like on top of the social ladder but then some were at the bottom one kid came in i'm gonna call him andrew that's not his real name but you know confidentiality when he came he seemed like a great guy we really like liked him at first as time went on though he kind of went from like the top of the social ladder to the very bottom because nobody liked him because he had very destructive tendencies whether it was you know physically or like mentally like he would insult people he would break things so we had a tv through the course of my stay it had been broken three times at least one of those times was by him maybe two i think it might have been two i think it was two he broke the tv two times the tv was kind of like our life our life support because that was like cable but like you had like the cop shows and all that but it was what we had so he kind of went just because of that so we all hated him and so there was another kid that i was a friend with jake let's say and he was a really good friend of mine while uh we were there but um one night we were in a room with andrew and uh we decided that we were going to play a prank on him we got a tupperware we filled it with water so we took one of his hands we put it in there and then we had a sock it was funny because jake was known to do this like he filled two socks with lotion and then he put the socks on andrew and then scribbled a mustache on his face and then wrote something on his desk i don't know what it was i think it was something from his mom like he said from your mom like something like that we both found it hilarious but we ended up getting punished for it pretty badly we had to sit at our desk for like half the day which honestly considering the whole like cb thing was very light and actually was kind of funny because we had a group about this like we have group therapy sessions which i'll go into we had one like every day each of the weekdays and we talked about it in group therapy and we didn't just talk about what we had done there was a point where the therapist was like well andrew you also need to understand why exactly people are doing these things to you which i thought was hilarious because honestly everybody had lost respect for this guy it was just like all across the board nobody liked him we gave him chances and he didn't take them and so it was kind of just like we couldn't really do anything but i found that hilarious looking back on it i think it was worth it even though i was punished i lost one of my levels jake lost one of his levels too which was really hard for both of us but i think it was worth it i don't regret it i'd do it again it was the most like freeing thing because i had never done that to somebody i i don't really come from a place where like we do that but yeah that was hilarious he also got on if andrew but we didn't really have sympathy for him it was kind of messed up to be honest because there are roles that we have as a team one kid brings back food for other people who can't be there at the cafeteria and that kid specifically would um only get this guy like toast or like very basic things even though he wanted more it was kind of funny to me kind of like he deserves this but at the same time he's kind of messed up i don't know i i was kind of conflicted on it but this kid andrew there was a lot of things with him i think now is the time to tell the story this involves andrew so from what i can remember we were in the group room aka the room where we have the tv and andrew he's getting mad about something we don't know what it is but what he ends up doing like his anger grows into like physical anger and he ends up throwing a domino at the staff computer now one of the staff takes this as okay this kid needs to be put down like he needs to be put in a hold but instead of doing a normal hold he suplexes him and if you don't know what a suplex is you put the kid like in between your arms and you jump up onto the ground and the point is is that their head hits the ground very hard and your head doesn't and so he did that with the kid and he was out cold for like five minutes now we were in the group room a couple other people they were laughing their asses off myself i was trying not to because even though it was very messed up we felt that it was kind of deserved in a way like he got what he was coming to him because in a treatment center if someone throws a fist at you you can't throw a fist back if you throw a fist back you're getting them put on cb as well and this kid was prone to do that he was prone to throw a fist he'd be on cb a lot so when we couldn't do anything because then we'd get in trouble as well we could just you know back down and like call a staff or something but seeing that happen was kind of just like us feeling that he finally got what he deserved even though it was very messed up he ended up getting a concussion from that and he had to stay in a dark yeah he got a cushion he had to stay in a dark room for a couple of weeks a week or two into his concussion he gave himself an even worse concussion i don't know if it was intentional but he slipped and hit his head um in the shower the staff was fired however he was only fired because the parents threatened to press charges there are also cases where staff do that kind of thing and they don't get fired because nobody presses charges that happens but luckily that was not one of those cases the staff did get fired even though we didn't hate the guy but you know he did that so he couldn't he couldn't continue to work there if they were going to press charges so yeah that was a huge thing they decided to pull him for the program uh andrew and on the day that that happened a lot of things happened um we are all celebrated because we all hated him because the kid was pretty rich a lot of people tried to get him to give them things i was not one of these people but a lot of them did and i don't really blame them because they were just trying to get stuff because he was like he was really rich but he left we were all happy about it and that was the end of the saga of andrew next i think i do want to talk more about the therapy system so the therapy system i'll preface by saying when i left i was very afraid of having a therapist again because of how the therapy system worked in that treatment center like i said every weekday you'd have groups and so these groups were basically everybody in your team would be in the group and depending on what day it was you'd either talk about stuff you talk about a variety of things from like a handbook about how to deal with your problems and whatever which was pretty just dry and cut or you'd have like problem solving group psg is what we called it where you would address a problem that you were having with another kid publicly to the group and the other kid would kind of have to like defend himself against it and you would have to talk about it there were a lot of things it could backfire on the kid that was doing it and they could be they could end up being shamed for it the kid that you know was causing the problem could be shamed for it all of that it just kind of sucked because it was kind of just like a public shaming that happened every week when there was a problem that needed to be addressed then thursdays you had a group where you would um talk about your own problems you would have to do that you'd have to talk about your own problems in front of the whole group in order to make it further into the um the program like to get higher levels and there are people that didn't want to do that people were better at doing it than others but everybody had to they had to follow by those rules to make it up and because of that a lot of people struggled it took a lot of people's a lot more time than others and that was hard for them and there was also individual therapy which i won't say a ton about i mean i was lucky my first therapist was pretty nice even though she was very hard on me she made the lows feel very low but she made the high points feel very high i did like her when i was doing well there was a time where i was doing very poorly and she was making it very known to me and it was very hard but i got through it just as i have been doing it all the time and um yeah that was how therapy was during treatment the step-down program was a bit different that's kind of more where i got my hatred for therapy towards because it's it's a bit of a story but to make things easier during the step down uh they would take away all of the um the things that i used to take away my boredom like uh all electronic devices including tv stuff like that and i was always like okay can i at least like go bike outside and i could do that for an hour at a time because i couldn't be out for more than an hour without a phone it's a whole bunch of rules that i would explain more about if i have more time but it's totally okay it was basically just like my therapist was allowing a lot of things that i wasn't okay with and every week i was getting in some sort of problem because i had nothing else to do my therapist was constantly getting mad at me for that and so it was a cycle of i do something that he doesn't want he keeps being mad at me and i go another week with nothing to do and that continued until about august which i was then told you're going home in two weeks and i was very happy about that i didn't like brag about it because treatment didn't do a ton for me but one thing it did is it turned me from somebody who didn't care for others and just into somebody who did i try to care a lot for people because i don't want people going through the things that i've gone through i don't feel like anybody deserves that nobody deserves to be sad even if there are bad days i want to try to help people make them better because i've gone through bad days and i have had nobody and that's how it was in treatment there were upsides there were downsides you know it's not a terrible terrible place there are places far worse that are still in operation this is why i wanted to talk to you about this because the place i went to is still in operation there are other places that are still in operation they're still doing these things the place i went to isn't uh they're a lot lighter from what i've heard but there are places that are still doing these types of things and i want people to know that i i want anyone to know that treatment is not somewhere that you send your kid unless it is the last thing that you can do because my parents in my opinion they made a mistake by sending me a treatment they could have helped me so much more but they kind of gave up on me which is very hard but is the truth they gave up on me and turned me over to other people that they thought could help me more and it didn't work right um now i'm 18. a lot better i've had a job for a while i'm taking a break over the summer i'm doing well in school a lot of things have gotten better i'm doing better with my health my diabetes i'm doing a lot better with that but i still try to keep treatment out of my mind um it was very bad time for me luckily i have a therapist it was hard for me to talk to him but i'm very happy with him now i'm in a lot better place but i want people to know that treatment centers aren't what they look like on the outside you could go to the webpage for my treatment center i'm not going to share it but you could go to the webpage and see oh it's just this happy stuff and like your kid will be so happy here they won't yeah no they'll live every week trying to make it different and that is not a life you want to live you want to live a life where you get to be in the world the actual world not a life where you get to be in a fake world and not even a good one like this like this might be fake but like you can have so much fun here but that kind of fake world is not somewhere you want to be i wouldn't wish this on anybody that i knew so that's that's all i want to say thank you so much and thank you for being on tell me a story [Music] might think it's boring but i'm interested

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Id: O7m3xOKVZsg

Length: 33min 50sec (2030 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 21 2022