EllaEmoris

You are right. I am one if those "youths" if you call 23 youth. And in north carolina....people are not generally accepting of much "difference" here, so I feel like i came out (to a few people) just to go back into hiding for safety reasons. So now I feel stuck with no support and I can't be myself. (No just with gender or sexuality but everything.) I know this was about adolescents but I felt the same then too and was not comfortable or validated. (Actually when I was adolescent gender was just starting to be publicized on tv but not exactly accepted, more like spectated and probed at. Like Chaz Buno? or My Name Is Jaz..I'm not sure if these are the right spellings but if anyone remembers the shows, thank you . but it was something I didn't want to watch because I was told early that basically that was just unacceptable/not an option. (I also had a time in adolescence where I wore mostly "boyish" clothing and my mother said she would burn them all if I didn't throw them away immediately)

Like most people said here I think listening and trying to understand is best. I remember trying to broach these subjects with my parents and it didn't go as I thought it would. My older sister is gay so I thought it would be somewhat "normal" but I was seen as trying to imitate her. And I distinctly remember my mother watching a documentary or something about transgenderism when I was very young and her saying "I just couldn't handle if one of my daughters did that to me. I just wouldn't be able to accept you being my son all of sudden". So needless to say i never even brought up the gender thing. I wish she had been more open. At some point people are going to have to stop blaming it on what they were taught and start learning new things. Everything can't stay the same and no one wants to stay in the dark for the rest of their lives, having to hide themselves. I'm tired of hearing things like "your generation has all these new found gender things/sexualities/every one thinks they're gay now. We never had that in my day." Yes, yes you did. It just wasn't spoken about. (Sorry this comment isn't supposed to sound mean to the people here. In just speaking generally about the people who AREN'T supportive or even who are violent and angry about it. And I don't understand that because it really isn't their decision to make.

Wow thank you for understanding. This is how I feel. I hate that I have the illness in the first place and I hate having to go inpatient and then on top of that there is zero freedom. Every thing is unfamiliar and you are more than likely getting a med change and then you're(at least I am) very sleepy and having side effects and on top of that all these rules. Last time I was inpatient I was locked out of my room by staff from 8 am til 5 pm everyday because I would go back to my room to lie down because the new med change made me tired all of the time and they thought I was "isolating" so they basically forced me to go and sit in group all day. And when I went as a child/teenager there was a patient who was also always tired (they wouldn't give us anything for insomnia until 3am) and in the mornings before group, staff would just stand in her room and yell until she woke up and basically drag her out of bed (again we were under 18 at the time). I understand having rules but...they don't have to be so aggressive. Like what is the worse thing if we miss group?? There's another group later. Or someone can just talk to us one on one. We are in a MENTAL Ward. You can't just force people to engage.

I know this post is kind of old but I was trying to find out if someone can refuse to remove piercings and stumbled upon this. That treatment sounds horrific and traumatizing and I can't understand why there are speculations about if it happened that way or not. As someone who has been to psych many times I can tell you 1. This is not an unusual thing to happen to patient (depending on the place obviously but I am somewhere in the US where mental health treatment sucks). And they do not care all much about you as much as the nurses here would like to believe. Also 2. The insinuation that may have not happened that way and that the patient "may have ripped them out herself" is exactly why patients don't report things in psych wards because who's going to believe us when there already preconceived assumptions? (Also there are not usually cameras in the rooms where you're inspected so the staff member could have easily lied and said the woman did it herself.) Also I have piercings and am always asked to remove them but it honestly doesn't make sense to me as I've had it explained as "we don't want to risk another patient pulling them in a fight". Which to me is useless reasoning because hypothetically if there was an altercation, I feel like i would get hurt either way, and as someone else said in terms of self harm, there's only so much you can do. Also piercings aren't generally cheap. And I don't want to have to get everything re pierced over and over again. (I'm sorry this was so long...this is just something that makes me very upset and annoyed as someone who really hates themselves and piercings are the only thing I sort of enjoy and that ground me back to myself. And i feel like the hospitals make it worse than it needs to be, in addition to treating us like we are stupid and less than human.