The Mental Health System Is a Trap — Not a Path to Freedom

Let's stop sugarcoating it.

Let’s talk about the modern mental health system. Not the glossy brochures. Not the polished websites. I’m talking about the system as it really operates — a cold, bureaucratic machine that keeps people stuck and calls it "care." A system that traps people in cycles of dependency, sedation, surveillance, and shame. It’s time we say it plainly:

The mental health system is more like a prison than a pathway to healing. And, I'm not talking about the 1950s, I'm talking about today, 2025.

Let that sink in.

There are a lot of good people working in the system, but the system itself traps and destroys people.

We talk about “recovery” while forcing people into locked wards. We preach about “autonomy” while threatening them with court orders and chemical restraints. We toss around words like “support,” but what we really offer is containment. Compliance. Control. If you’ve ever been inside the system — not just worked in it, but really lived in it — you know what I’m talking about.

Diagnosis becomes your life sentence.

The moment you receive that label — bipolar, schizophrenia, borderline — your identity is rewritten. Suddenly, your words carry less weight. Your pain is pathologized. Your story is no longer yours; it belongs to the psychiatrist, the therapist, the case manager, the chart. Try to protest and you're labeled “noncompliant.” Try to take charge of your care, and they’ll say you're “lacking insight.” They don’t want recovery. They want obedience.

Medications become your shackles.

And no, this isn’t anti-medication rhetoric. This is anti-coercion. It’s about the people drugged into silence, the people who show up for help and walk out sedated beyond recognition. It’s about the pills prescribed not to heal, but to pacify. Meds handed out like candy with no end in sight, no plan for tapering, and no real conversation. Try to say you want off them, and watch how quickly the threats come in: “You’ll relapse.” “You’ll end up hospitalized.” “You’ll be a danger to yourself.”

Funny how much danger we’re in when we want to feel like ourselves.

Facilities become cells.

Locked doors. Stripped rooms. No phones. No privacy. Monitored bathroom breaks. Surveillance in the name of safety, but it feels a lot more like punishment. Like a system built to break you down until you accept your place in it. If you’re lucky, they’ll let you out in a few days. But the stigma follows you everywhere. The records don’t disappear. And neither does the trauma of being locked up for having a mind in distress.

They call it help. But it looks like control.

And control is what this system thrives on. Control over your mind, your body, your voice, your narrative. The people in charge don’t want to hear that maybe trauma, poverty, racism, abuse, isolation, and oppression are at the root of our suffering. That would require systemic change. It’s easier to call it a “chemical imbalance” and throw you on a prescription plan for life.

We need to say it: the system isn’t broken. It’s working exactly as designed.

It was never built for liberation. It was built to manage the “undesirables,” the “unwell,” the inconvenient. It has always aligned more with social control than with social justice. And every time we pretend it’s enough — that it’s just a few bad apples or an underfunded clinic — we’re complicit.

I’m angry because I’ve seen people go in full of fire and come out as shadows of themselves. I’m angry because peers — people who’ve been there — are often co-opted into enforcing the very system that harmed them. I’m angry because people are still begging to be heard while the system throws another diagnosis into their file and moves on.

So yeah, I’m angry. And if you’ve lived through it, you probably are too.

It’s time we stopped asking the system to save us. It won’t.

We save each other.

Through community, through real peer support, through movements rooted in dignity and self-determination. Through voices that refuse to be silenced. Through rage that refuses to be pathologized. Through building alternatives that don’t retraumatize people in the name of care.

Let’s burn the illusion to the ground and build something that actually heals.

Not a prison with a treatment plan.

A future with freedom.