[This is a particularly disturbing blog, so please take care if you are likely to be triggered by references to sexual assault or rape.]
Early October brings the anniversaries of both a rape and a sexual assault that I went through in separate years.
October is also the month that I was locked up on psych wards during four separate years and repeatedly pinned down by male nurses; I was violently stripped of my trousers and knickers and injected in my bottom with drugs that made me feel my mind was out of my control and which took my body physically out of my control because I was so sedated and also had a debilitating restless leg-like syndrome – a side effect called akathisia.
Forced injections felt physically, psychologically and emotionally very similar to the experiences I had of rape and sexual assault in the outside world.
I felt desperately vulnerable as a woman locked up in psychiatric hospital. We had to sleep in a strange building full of strangers with no ability to lock our bedroom doors. There was a male patient in 2009 who repeatedly tried to flash the women on the ward and another man who got right in my face, completely unprovoked, to call me a “c*nt” in the most aggressive way imaginable.
With all the memories of sexual trauma surfacing for me, all I wanted while I was on the ward, was to repeatedly shower. But the shared bathrooms were often dirty with faeces smeared on the toilet seat, cigarette butts and the stale smell of smoke, someone’s abandoned knickers, toilet roll strewn around and other people’s hair in the shower. And when staff confiscated my bottle of shower gel they gave me one tiny, difficult to open, clinical smelling sachet to use in exchange. So I repeatedly went back and forth to the soap dispenser by the sink in the bathroom, only to be told off like a naughty schoolgirl for having made a bubbly wet mess of the bathroom floor.
A shocking number of rapes and sexual assaults are reported by involuntary inpatients, committed by fellow patients or by staff. (See report in the Independent here.) Working on a psychiatric ward, particularly on night shifts, is the kind of job a sexual predator would seek as nobody believes mad people even when we attempt to report sexual assaults or rape directly.
I met other rape survivors on the wards. One young student told me that she’d been raped as a child by a friend of the family and then she had been disbelieved when she tried to tell her mother. Suddenly in her first year at university, smoking weed brought up the traumatic memory and when she lost control mentally, it landed her in a locked psychiatric ward. She was in a desperately disturbed state, repeatedly counting to try to stay calm and blocking the door to her bedroom with whatever furniture she could manage to use. She was on 1:1 nursing and was frequently assigned male nurses which I fruitlessly tried to explain to the staff was inappropriate. I don’t believe they were aware of my fellow patient’s story as often the victims of violence, violation and abuse may disclose those experiences to fellow patients but not to the staff of an abusive psychiatric system.
In 2020 I felt especially vulnerable one night when all the staff on duty were male. It triggered memories of the sexual assault I went through years earlier and it made me regret never reporting that crime to the police. In a moment of courage I decided it was better late than never and made that call.
But when the police arrived on the ward the next morning to take my statement, an angry female nurse came to my bedroom door and told me I had no right to call the police and confiscated my mobile phone from me. She assumed I had called to report a “delusion” of sexual assault by the night shift staff as I had confided my state of fear to that nurse the evening before just as she was finishing her day shift. She refused to listen when I tried to tell her that in fact what I had done was to report a real sexual assault from years before.
It took many days before the staff eventually returned my phone – my lifeline to the outside world and above all to my children who as under-18s were not allowed to visit me. (The staff acknowledge that adult wards can be too frightening an environment for children with so many disturbed people in such a small space, and with it the possibility of witnessing violent ‘coercion’ by staff – but apparently for vulnerable adults in extreme distress, these wards are the right environment for us).
There was an older woman I was locked up with during another admission (who had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals for decades) – she used to coach all the women on how to avoid getting raped in the night by barricading our bedroom doors with a chair… she was particularly worried about a very pretty, very disturbed young woman: “things go bang in the night in these places” she kept telling us.
Anniversaries bring up memories whether it is the date of a happy event or of a sad or even traumatic one. As the autumn weather sets in a huge amount of bad memories and trauma are coming up for me that I can experience as physical flashbacks, an extreme heaviness in my body and nausea in my stomach. My concentration has been shot to pieces as I constantly find myself staring into space. And my mind races into panic mode easily if faced with any stress or any practical problem to solve.
Nights are the most difficult.
Then suddenly in mid October, about 2am, I just accept the fact that I simply don’t feel safe enough to sleep, even though I know right now I am no longer in physical danger. Beds are associated with trauma and I give myself permission to wait for morning sitting safely on the landing at the top of the stairs. I keep myself company with familiar songs that speak to my heart – repeatedly returning to a song I loved in childhood and that I sung over and over through those long days locked up under section: ‘Memory’ from the musical ‘Cats’, by Andrew Lloyd Webber. The lyrics speak of the hope of dawn while the haunting melody speaks to my soul.
When dawn does come outside my window, it brings me the light and the courage to finally speak my story out loud. As I press ‘share now’ on my Facebook post, I’m coming out publicly as a survivor of rape and sexual assault and I feel no hesitation. Shattering the silence and shame that had imprisoned me, I knew would be a liberation.
Mad in the UK hosts blogs by a diverse group of writers. The opinions expressed are the writers’ own.