Ensnared in the Thorns of Psychiatry: Experiences of a Black girl in an American Psychiatric Ward—An Autoethnography
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Date
2025-05
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
Since the corrosive inception of the United States, Black Americans have been duplicitously subjected to carceral violence; carceral institutions act as epicenters of state surveillance, isolation, violence, control, and labor. The assertion that American psychiatric wards are carceral may appear to be disillusioned, however the evidence of their carcerality lies within the very architectural designs of these institutions. Both the design and control systems of American psychiatric wards are akin to those of America’s notoriously abusive prisons. Psychiatric institutions have historically been used to intimidate, subjugate and oppress Black American communities. Psychiatric institutionalization acts as a method of mass incarceration to disappear populations. Due to harmful and institutionalized ideologies such as carceral sanism, ableism, racism, and sexism, the abusive experiences of institutionalized Black patients are frequently unheard or silenced and thereby unaddressed. This paper employs autoethnography to analyze, examine, articulate, and derive meaning from my experience, as a young Black woman, in an American psychiatric ward. Furthermore, this paper strives to bring visibility to a largely silenced issue, psychiatric violence, that is undergirded by a tenacious web of oppression.
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Keywords
Ontology, Psychiatric Violence, Misogynoir, Carceral Sanism, Institutionalize, Medical-Industrial Complex