#2 ESCAPING WITH WORDS

INDIGO DAYA

“I’ve been locked up in psychiatric hospital units heaps of times. For me, it was always traumatic, unsafe and never helpful—so it’s no surprise that I frequently tried to escape, sometimes with great success, sometimes with only a bruised body or spirit to show for my efforts.

My most successful escapes came after I surreptitiously watched how staff responded to escape attempts by other mental health consumers. A person would take off down the stairs towards the street, then a pack of staff would head after them down the stairs. I noticed that the stairs also went up, towards some office space, and that was the key. So, when I escaped, I ran *up* the stairs instead of down. I’d wait quietly, just out of sight, for the nurses to run out, look around, then come back into the unit. Then I could calmly stroll out.

My escapes had different motivations. Sometimes I was so scared of what they were doing to me, I was trying to get to safety. These were the escapes I needed the most, but they invariably failed.

Sometimes I needed to deal with practical stuff that the staff wouldn’t help me with. You know, like feeding my cat.

A few times I escaped to go get a decent coffee because the unit only had decaf, which is an abhorrent crime against humanity.

Mostly I would come back on my own after realising there was no escape from a psychiatric system that has so much authority and reach.

My best ever escape was my last one. It didn’t involve running with my feet. Instead I escaped with my words. After years in the system I realised they were never going to hear me or help me. And so, I wrote a beautiful, completely false recovery plan to show my psychiatrist. I kept a straight face while telling her all the things I knew she wanted me to say, like how I wanted to keep taking my medication. I faked just the right amount of believable, sincere vulnerability. I got the discharge I needed and have kept myself free of psychiatric services ever since.

Absconding will never stop while institutional indignities, abuses and rights violations continue to exist. I shake my head when I hear mental health staff debating how to stop so many consumers absconding from psychiatric units. The way to stop absconding is kind of obvious to me: run a service that we actually want to use (you know, that’s respectful and helpful) and we’ll stop running away from it.”