ABSTRACT
The author interest in mental illness and social support is deeply personal on several levels. As a teenager, he was institutionalized on more than one occasion for what was thought at the time to be my inability to get along socially in both school and in his family. He was no longer tortured by mental illness. He accepted that he have a chronic, lifelong illness that requires treatment to which he willingly complies. He wrote the first three fictionalized poems namely Institutionalized, Stuck, and Four Point Restraints. Institutionalized remembering what it was like to be a teenage girl institutionalized for depression against her will. Stuck is about what it is like to sit in a mental ward where the orderlies ignore us, and our symptoms are out of our control. Four Point Restraints is the last in the series. This is about being tied down to a table against our will.
