“I have no voice”: black mental health patients in a care system they say is racist Mental health
IT has been more than four decades since Devon Maraston, a 66 -year -old community and music organizer, was transferred to a psychiatric hospital where he was restricted, injected and forced to take the medicine. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia.
He said: “Everything was said about me and about me, but no one asked me how I was doing.” “I had no voice, and there was no one to say:” Do not do it with him, “or:” Listen to him, listen to what he was saying. “
The experiment had a profound impact on his life and put him on the way of the campaign for better care for ethnic minorities with mental distress. However, progress was painfully slow.
“Nothing has changed. Everything is still the same – it’s only more covered by the items in the mental health law that makes it look fair but equality and justice is not there.”
The latest data draws a scary image. The results of the latest report from the Care Quality Committee (CQC) show that the number of adults who were sent for very urgent mental health care from crisis teams more than twice between 2023 and 2024.
The report, which was published on Thursday, also raised concerns about the excessive representation of blacks who are being detained under the law, and found that they were more likely to be held by eggs.
The cursed report warned that people became more satisfied while waiting for help and attached to a “harmful cycle” to re -accept the hospital.
Tewa, 22, described her experience in mental health support services as “an incredible shock.” Her struggle with her mental health began when she was thirteen years of age and began to secure self. She was diagnosed with depression, anxiety disorders, suicide thinking, as well as eating disorder. She still has nightmares she spent in the children’s mental health unit.
She said, “It was a horrific experience that I do not wish for anyone.” It indicates the use of restrictions, restrictions, and the use of forced medicines.
“There were nights, perhaps there were four employees who took care of 12 to 15 young men who were suffering from very serious incidents in self -harm. So we will be those who have to go up to our friends’ rooms, help them, save them, and scream to employees.”
She was supposed to be an important teacher from the hospital. But she said: “Every night, I was waking up to sweating and very afraid, and the presence of nightmares of restrictions and accidents in the wing.”
Devon and Toya believes that their race affected the care they received. “There were times when attitudes escalated faster and much faster – the situations that the force may have been used when the necessity was, or was seen as aggressive when I was not. In my opinion, he had a clear racist smear.
Devon still clearly remembers the first night that it was divided. The matter ended in the hospital after his mother, who was concerned about his well -being, but he did not fully understand mental health, says Devon, the doctor. The doctor arrived with the police and an ambulance to transfer him to a psychiatric hospital.
Devon said: “I went to the office where the night nurse was and said:“ Sorry, I love, I think you got the wrong person, I should not be here. ”Suddenly I see two or four big white men falling in the corridor after me, he ran me on the ground … You injected me and expelled me for four days.”
His life has completely changed. “I could not breathe. I was waging from my mouth. I could not eat properly. I saw people around me in a similar atmosphere. I thought, I was going to heaven. I would die. When I looked through the window, I was able to see the big land where the wing was located in the building and the flowers were growing and everything was calm. Psychological drugs to calm me down.
He added: “Any person accused of mental problems or becoming violent or black and dangerous in society, it gives you calm … these dulls and the drugs that professionals give to me and us are different from the people who give them to younger white men. They do not get the same things that the black man gets.”
Dr. Sarah Hughes, Mind CEO, said: “The threads common to the stories of Devon and Toya, which extend for several decades and exceed generations and races, appear to any extent we still have to continue sealing racism in mental health care,” said Dr. Sarah Hughes, CEO of Mind.
While Hughes welcomes a CQC report on Thursday, saying that it indicates some positive early progress in implementing the framework for the patient’s race and care providers, “ultimately more accurate evidence of the barriers faced by people from racist societies while trying to get help and recovery.”
For Devon, recovery was possible thanks to music. She arranged a nurse who admits his talent for him to start a workshop for music for other black men who struggle with mental health issues. In 1992 he participated in the founding of sound minds.
When asked about what should happen after that, Tiwa, who is now a young activist working with mental health care institutions, said that changes to change should focus on people’s living experiences. “If any person knows what is similar to being part of the system, the people who have suffered from it … these people will not have part of the change.”
“Listen to us. Ask what we need, and we will tell you.”