The Time I Was "Exorcised" Because Of My Mental Illness

I had just dropped out of high school. I was on the brink of turning eighteen.

A professional I was seeing at the time highly suggested I be sent to a "level 3 treatment facility".

I was unaware, at the time, that a level 3 facility was actually just a group home for troubled kids.

I agreed to go. I agreed because I thought that maybe it would help me. The idea sounded nice - this big, safe, medically structured building with nurses and doctors and counselors who would work with me and talk to me every day and cure me of the problems that I had. 

I was young. I was only 17 - I can forgive myself for being so naive. 

In my defense, though, how could anyone - how could even a grown adult - have known what I was stepping into when I walked up to that door?

That plain brown door?

That tiny house?

See, it wasn't a big medical facility I was signing myself into. It wasn't a fancy nursing center or rehabilitation place or hospital or safe haven of any kind; not like what my mother and I were told; no, we were told, as we sought out a social worker to take on my case and place me in a treatment facility, that I would be sent to a nice medical center that was specialized and equipped with trained professionals who were licensed to give me the care that I desperately needed. 

We were told, as I signed off on paperwork in conjunction with my mom, that the center they selected for me would be top-notch quality, that I would be in good hands. 

And we trusted them.

I trusted them. 

I trusted them when they told me that I was being placed in a nice, secure little youth treatment center in Fayetteville,  North Carolina; this amazing center that would undoubtedly heal me, would undoubtedly change my life.

I can give them that much credit. It did change my life - I had no idea how much my life would change as I sat in the passenger seat of a car that was driving an hour and a half away from my home. How drastically my whole adolescence was about to end as I walked up a gravelly driveway to a plain brown door at the height of a small stone porch that opened up to an old, tiny brick town home.

I remember the way I hugged and kissed my mom goodbye as she promised to see me soon, and I promised that I'd get better, and the scene might have seemed like a pleasant one, but in reality, we were both confused. Because why was this a regular house? Why was there just one ordinary woman greeting us? Why did my placement appear to be that of a foster home?

Why weren't we warned that I was being handed off to unqualified, unprofessional, and unfriendly people in a cruel and inhumane setting that was far from the "treatment center" my guardian and I had consented for me to be?

If I had known, I would have never signed the papers.

My mother would have never signed the papers.

But how could anyone know?

---

The level 3 group home I was placed into was chaotic, dismal, and filled with many dark memories.

Perhaps the darkest memory is that of when a staff member attempted to give me an "exorcism". 

Laugh if you want, or raise your eyebrows, or cringe... it's definitely a cringe-worthy topic. 

I cringe sometimes even still when I remember Ms. W.

Ms. W. was a middle-aged woman; late 50's perhaps; with grayed curly hair and vintage clothing, and a necklace with a vial around her neck. 

She, along with several other staff, were highly religious - very, very religious - in a scary borderline-cult manner. On a minor scale, residents such as myself were forced to pray at every meal, forced to go to church every Wednesday and Sunday, and if anyone disapproved or refused to take part, they were punished. On a more drastic scale, staff would sometimes shame us for being "horrible sinners" - our mental health symptoms were sins - and they'd tell us we had to repent, to beg forgiveness for our sins. Our terrible sin of being emotionally unwell. 

One day, in 2008, I was having a meltdown in a bedroom. I don't remember what triggered it, or what pushed me to the point that I exploded the way I did. I do remember pacing around the room, crying and occasionally kicking the furniture. I remember punching my fists into the pillow on the bed and clawing at my face. I remember pulling thumbtacks out of a board that hung by the window and fervently stabbing those tacks repeatedly into the wall. 

I don't remember how it started, but I remember how it ended. 

With Ms. W. walking into the room and saying,"Child, what is wrong with you?"

Everything after that happened in a flash, but I remember it in clear detail to this day. Ms. W. licking her teeth and putting her hands on her hips and telling me that I was a damaged, disgraceful girl. Ms. W. telling me that I was never going to be worthy of love or forgiveness because I couldn't control myself better than that. Ms. W. telling me I was a lunatic, a madwoman, tainted, satanic, wrong. 

Ms. W. told me, that day, that I had a demon inside me. 

I must have a demon inside me, because why else would I be so unstable, so out of control?

What else could possibly explain my memory loss, my night terrors, my escapades in the middle of the night with no recollection of what happened, no knowledge of what I had done? 

What, if not demonic possession, was possessing me to scream and cry and stab the bedroom wall?

It happened in a flash.

Ms. W. stepped towards me, reached her arms out, and pushed me down onto the bed.

A flash.

She touched her necklace, pulled the little copper vial from around her neck.

A flash.

She started chanting in tongues, in an ancient biblical language of sorts that I couldn't understand.

A flash.

The vial had water in it. She claimed it was "holy water"; she threw the water onto my body as I lay there on the bed, unmoving, confused, afraid. 

A flash.

She continued to sprinkle water onto me while mumbling, and when she finally started speaking English again, it was to tell me, "By the grace of God, may your demon never come back."

---

There's really no words to explain what I'd ultimately like to say. 

The best way to explain is in little realizations:

The realization I had when I jumped from my bedroom window one day and tried to run away, because I knew I couldn't stay there in that house any longer; not when the other girls were punching me in the face and throwing shoes at me, and the staff were laughing and letting them do it every day.

The realization when I bolted down the street, terrified; consumed with sheer horror; and approached two men down the street, two men shoveling in their yard, and I begged them to help while I panicked and cried - and they were going to help me... until I got caught by a worker pulling up in her van, demanding that I get in with her and stop acting out. 

The realization I had when my family came to visit me for Valentine's Day and saw the ugly brown bruise on my right cheek, and they were shocked. Upset. Mad.

The realization when I was finally pulled out of that group home that I was right all along... that "treatment center" was a horrible place. I was never wrong... they were the ones who were wrong, for doing and allowing what they did.

The realization when, years later, I began receiving real psychological treatment, and I learned that I was not demonic, not possessed, not tainted or sinful or bad.

I was a human being, and I might have been broken, but that didn't mean I couldn't be fixed. And being fixed didn't mean being forced into prayer or being thrown onto a bed with holy water. 

Being fixed didn't mean using religion to rid a demon from inside me, because there was no demon to shed. There was nothing inside of me except me, and there is nothing wrong with who I am. My emotional problems, my diagnoses - those are things that are real medical problems with real medical solutions, but the sad fact is that we have a long way to go as a society to destroy all of the negative stereotypes and beliefs people have about mental illness. 

You wouldn't send children with cancer or diabetes or asthma off to corrupted companies staffed with people who tell them they are sinful or evil or that their sickness is their fault, would you? No, right? So why would you herd children with psychiatric issues into places where they were being told those very things? Where even adults in similar places, no longer minors, are being treated like demons and freaks?

Most people don't know things like that are going on.

I sure didn't know what I was walking into the day I signed myself into that home in Fayetteville, NC, and neither did my mother, who would have taken me and fled if she knew what was going to happen when she left me there alone. 

The only way we can stop something from happening is by first bringing awareness to the fact that it does happen, and that is my intention with this blog.

I might not be able to physically do much, yet, but right now I can share with the world what I know, from personal experience, so that, piece by piece, hopefully the wall of ignorance can be broken.