On Our Own. Still.
Sixty Years After Judi Chamberlin’s Memoir, We Are Still Searching for Care That Feels Like Care
Content note: Self-harm, suicidal ideation, miscarriage, loss of autonomy, and psychiatric hospitalization
A full week had passed since I went to the emergency department and signed myself up for a voluntary psychiatric stay. I sat under the sharp fluorescent lights with “my” psychiatric doctor, a nurse, and a case manager. I felt cartoonishly smaller than all of them.
In the short time since I’d been on the ward, I had lost ten pounds—a dietitian was promised but never materialized—and I’d been pushed into a regressed, child-like state where I needed to ask permission for something as simple as colored pencils.
I was beyond irritated. I was objectively starving. I had barely slept the night before after an incident involving my roommate and our toilet left our room uninhabitable. No one had initiated a conversation with me about next steps.
After a full seven days, I had demanded a meeting with the care team to address these concerns. I was the patient, and it felt like my right to understand how I was supposed to get better.
But answers didn’t come.
No one could explain what “treatment” actually consisted of. No one could articulate a plan. There was no discussion of recovery goals or what the coming days would look like.
Then I got angry.
Not explosive. Not threatening. Just angry. And a little desperate.
I raised my voice, tears in my eyes, trying to explain that I was actively getting worse in this environment.
I was asked to calm down.
Lower my voice.
Speak respectfully.
That was when I realized we were there for different reasons.
I thought we were meeting to discuss my recovery. Everyone else seemed satisfied that I was in a “safe” environment where I couldn’t hurt myself. My concerns about deteriorating physically and emotionally seemed secondary to the fact that I remained contained.
If no one in the room could explain how I was supposed to get better, I no longer understood why I was staying.
I lowered my voice and told the team I wanted to sign myself out.
They allowed it.
At the time, I assumed I had simply ended up in a poorly run hospital.
It would take reading Judi Chamberlin’s 1978 memoir “On Our Own” to make me question that assumption.
Why We Both Went Voluntarily
In 1966, Judi Chamberlin, then 21, voluntarily entered a psychiatric hospital after a miscarriage left her experiencing severe depression.
Like Judi, I was also struggling to cope with my own depression after experiencing infertility, loss, abuse, and trauma. Similar still: I was also seeing a psychotherapist twice a week, who recommended that I seek a higher level of care. We both trusted the expertise of these professionals, assuming that hospitalization would provide the relief and support we had been looking for.
“I went to Mount Sinai Hospital full of hope. To me, admission to the psychiatric ward meant that at last I would find someone who would know how to bring an end to my suffering.” (On Our Own, p. 24)
I cannot say that I entered the emergency department full of hope. But I did enter voluntarily, knowing that I was not safe alone and that I needed help from people with more experience.
Judi and I entered these facilities because we had reached points where our emotional pain felt impossible to navigate alone.
We needed support.
We needed understanding.
We needed someone to help us find our way back.
At that moment, neither of us understood how different seeking help from an institution could feel from receiving help as an individual.
We entered through the door with hope.
Then we watched it lock behind us.
The Story We Are Told About Suffering
“A depression is something to get rid of, and the goal of psychiatry is to ‘cure’ people of depression. That my depression might be telling me something about my own life was a possibility no one considered, including me.” (On Our Own, p. 23)
That sentence stopped me in my tracks.
The dominant medical model of care often frames emotional suffering primarily as something to be treated, managed, and ideally cured. We are taught that if we are struggling, we should seek professional help. If we are struggling badly enough, we should seek more intensive professional help.
Neither Judi nor I questioned this framework.
We were committed to getting better and trusted the experts who told us what that process should look like.
Neither of us thought to ask:
“What is my depression telling me?”
“What am I reacting to?”
“What in my life needs to change?”
We wanted relief.
Judi was trying to cope with a miscarriage and the unraveling of her life. I was trying to survive infertility, loss, abuse, trauma, and years of accumulating pain.
We were taught to see depression as the problem itself.
The goal was to cure it.
And we were told that hospitals could help us do exactly that.
But maybe that was part of the problem: That we had come to believe suffering itself was evidence that something inside of us was broken.
Reading Judi’s memoir made me wonder whether depression needs to be understood as a deeply human response to pain, loss, trauma, and disconnection, rather than an illness to eradicate.
By the time Judi and I voluntarily walked through the doors of psychiatric hospitals, neither of us entered hoping simply to be “managed”. We entered, hoping to be understood. We needed someone to listen. To sit with us in our pain. To help us make sense of what happened.
We were looking for connection.
When the Institution Reveals Itself
At one point during my psychiatric hospital stay, I became furious.
I wasn’t being heard, and something came over me: a wave of heat and looseness that made me want to swing my limbs around and create as much damage to my physical surroundings as possible. It was as if my body needed to prove externally how deep my internal suffering was.
I remained reserved enough not to break anything, but I tore down yards of curtains and self-harmed to the best of my ability with a small plastic knife from a meal tray.
Then I sat on the floor weeping in a despair so deep that I felt I might never be able to stand again.
Looking back, what disturbs me most is not my behavior.
It’s that nobody seemed interested in helping me understand what it meant.
My distress was visible. My suffering was obvious. Yet the focus remained on managing my behavior rather than understanding what had driven me to that point.
When I read Judi Chamberlin describe her own experience, I recognized the feeling immediately:
“Suddenly banging and kicking became logical. I had attempted to be reasonable, to explain myself—and this was what they thought of me. My anger mounted. I was not only a prisoner, I was a caged animal. Suddenly nothing was important except freedom. And freedom lay on the other side of a locked door.” (p. 37)
The circumstances were different. I was not placed in seclusion. I was not locked in solitary confinement. And unlike many psychiatric patients—both in Judi’s era and today—I retained the ability to sign myself out.
But I recognized the loss of agency.
The feeling that no matter how clearly I tried to communicate my suffering, I was no longer being understood as a person trying to communicate something. I was a patient exhibiting symptoms whose suffering was serious, but not serious enough—according to institutional standards—to override my ability to leave.
Elsewhere in the book, Chamberlin writes:
“The more I argued, the more I was looked on as sick. It was a sign of health to follow the rules. But the rules seemed designed to drive me crazy.” (p. 32)
That observation helped me understand something I couldn’t articulate during my own hospitalization: Once a person enters a psychiatric institution, sometimes disagreement can become evidence of illness. Anger can become a symptom. Resistance can become pathology.
And when that happens, it becomes nearly impossible to be heard.
In some circumstances, that dynamic can have far more serious consequences, including involuntary hospitalization and further marginalization of people already struggling to be heard.
The Big Difference: I Could Leave
After the meeting with my “care” team, I signed myself out.
By that point, I saw no reason to remain in a place where the people responsible for my treatment could not explain what that treatment actually was. I had lost ten pounds under their supervision, the promised dietitian had never appeared, and my concerns seemed less important than my willingness to remain calm and compliant.
But looking back, the most important part of that decision is that I was allowed to make it at all.
Since Judi’s institutionalization nearly sixty years ago, some legal protections and patient rights have expanded, although access to those protections remains uneven and shaky.
The biggest difference between Judi’s experience and mine is that when I reached the conclusion she had reached—that the institution was not providing the help I had come there seeking—I was allowed to walk away.
I was not forced to take medications like Thorazine, as many psychiatric patients, like Judi, in earlier eras were. I was not placed in seclusion. I was not trapped in the same ways that many psychiatric patients once were.
That difference matters.
It reflects real progress.
At the same time, I am not entirely sure I would have been permitted to leave had I been completely honest about the extent of my suicidal thinking. Before signing the paperwork, I made sure the staff understood how I planned to manage my own aftercare and that I had a therapist I would resume seeing bi-weekly. I knew it was important to appear reasonable. Cooperative. Stable.
Even as I was leaving, I had begun learning a lesson that Judi and many former psychiatric patients describe throughout “On Our Own”: maintaining agency often requires demonstrating the kind of behavior institutions recognize as healthy.
Still, I was fortunate.
I had an exit.
Judi often didn’t.
Many patients still don’t.
I Thought It Was Just My Hospital
“I thought that my story was an isolated example of poor treatment, rather than a representative case of the damaging effects of mental institutionalization.” (Chamberlin, p. 67)
This was exactly my assumption about my own psychiatric hospitalization.
After signing myself out, I didn’t conclude that there was something fundamentally wrong with psychiatric hospitals. I assumed I had simply ended up in a poorly run one.
Maybe it was a bad week.
Maybe the ward was understaffed.
Maybe communication had broken down.
Maybe the people responsible for my care were overworked and doing the best they could.
Reading Judi’s words was both validating and unsettling because she had arrived at the same conclusion nearly fifty years earlier. She, too, initially believed that what happened to her was an unfortunate exception rather than something larger.
What unsettled me was not the similarity between our experiences.
It was the possibility that neither of us had experienced an exception at all.
By the time I finished On Our Own, I found myself asking a question that had never occurred to me after my discharge:
What if the frustration, powerlessness, and lack of meaningful support that both Judi and I experienced were not simply the result of individual failures?
What if they were predictable outcomes of institutions organized around different priorities than the ones patients bring with them when they walk through the door?
What Comes First?
One of the most striking things about reading “On Our Own” was how often Judi described a gap between what patients needed and what institutions were designed to provide.
“The process of psychiatric diagnosis and hospitalization is about power far more than it is about medicine.” (On Our Own, p. 112)
When I first read that sentence, I wanted to reject it.
But the longer I sat with it, the harder it became to ignore how often questions of power surfaced during my own hospitalization.
Who could leave and who couldn’t.
Who made decisions and who lived with them.
Whose interpretation of reality carried weight and whose did not.
Who was allowed to be angry and who was expected to remain calm.
Even the meeting that ultimately led me to sign myself out revolved around power more than healing.
I arrived hoping to discuss my worsening condition, the lack of a treatment plan, and the basic needs that had gone unmet during my stay. The conversation quickly shifted toward my behavior, my tone of voice, and whether I was being sufficiently respectful.
We seemed to be operating from different definitions of success.
I wanted to understand how I was supposed to recover. The institution appeared primarily concerned with whether I was safe, compliant, and manageable.
Psychiatric hospitals exist for a reason. There are moments when people need immediate protection from harm, medical evaluation, and stabilization. But stabilization is not the same thing as recovery.
Judi makes a similar observation later in the book:
“Mistreatment takes many forms—anything from insensitivity by staff members to outright physical brutality—and it is far too common. Even isolated instances of mistreatment should be intolerable in a system devoted to healing the sick. But a great deal of evidence seems to show that mental hospitals exist to control their inmates.” (On Our Own, p. 122)
Many patients enter these institutions seeking understanding, connection, and help in making sense of their suffering, only to discover that institutions often prioritize safety, stabilization, compliance, and order over the relational and emotional needs that brought them there.
The disappointment that follows may not be the result of a failed hospital. It may be the result of expecting one institution to do two very different jobs.
The Things We Were Actually Looking For
“I and many others have learned the importance of emotional support from caring people, support that is difficult to find in rigidly structured mental institutions. Yet, it is in search of such support that many people have gone voluntarily into mental hospitals, only to discover that hospitals make true human contact between patient and staff nearly impossible.” (On Our Own, p. 75)
Judi and I were seeking emotional support, understanding, connection, and practical help for the overwhelming challenges in our lives.
Reading this passage, I found myself thinking not about therapy sessions or medication, but about food.
One of the most frustrating aspects of my hospitalization was that I rapidly lost weight while repeatedly being told a dietitian would come speak with me. Every day, I was assured that help was on the way.
Every day, no one came.
Judi describes similar challenges with her diet. The food in her hospital was so unappetizing that she survived largely on bread and margarine because it was the only thing she could tolerate. There were no fresh vegetables or salads available. The diet contributed to her weight gain, which only worsened how she felt about herself.
On the surface, these examples seem minor compared to forced medication, seclusion, or involuntary commitment.
But I think they reveal something important about institutional care: people in crisis often need very ordinary things—nutritious food, sleep, fresh air, practical assistance, meaningful conversation, and genuine human connection.
Yet both Judi and I found ourselves in environments where even those basic needs were surprisingly difficult to meet.
The issue wasn’t simply the food. It was what the food represented.
What Works Instead
Like Judi, leaving the psychiatric hospital did not magically solve my problems.
I was still depressed. I was still struggling. I still had to figure out how to rebuild a life that felt unmanageable. If anything, I felt worse about myself. I had entered the hospital believing that a robust system of support existed for people in crisis. After leaving, I realized how thin many of those supports actually were.
For a while, I felt forced to perform normalcy because I didn’t know what else to do.
But one of the most powerful aspects of On Our Own is that it doesn’t stop at critique.
Judi did not spend her life simply arguing that psychiatric hospitals fail people. She spent it imagining what could exist in their place.
Throughout the book, she returns to a surprisingly simple idea: people need one another.
Not surveillance.
Not coercion.
Not endless assessment.
People need understanding, practical help, dignity, autonomy, and relationships with others who have survived similar struggles.
Many of the alternatives Judi advocated for—peer support, crisis alternatives, mutual aid networks, and community-based care—are built around this insight. They begin from the assumption that people experiencing emotional distress are human beings in need of support, not only risks to be managed.
That vision feels just as necessary today as it did when “On Our Own” was first published.
Nearly Fifty Years Later
Nearly fifty years after Chamberlin wrote On Our Own, too many people are still discovering what that title meant: that even after reaching out for help, they can find themselves facing suffering largely on their own.
The question before us is whether we are willing to build systems where people do not have to choose between autonomy and care.
Places where someone in crisis is not reduced to a diagnosis.
Places where anger is understood as communication before it is labeled as a symptom.
Places where people can ask for help without surrendering their humanity.
Judi Chamberlin’s questions did not disappear with time. Neither did mine. The details are different, and progress has been made, but the underlying question remains the same:
When someone reaches out in their most vulnerable moment, will we offer them containment—or will we offer them connection?
I entered the psychiatric hospital because I believed I needed help. I left questioning what kind of help we have built, and what kind we still need to create.
Reading On Our Own did not give me a simple answer. It gave me a different question to carry forward:
What would mental health care look like if we began with the belief that people in pain are not problems to be solved, but human beings to be understood?
That is the work still in front of us.
Not simply making institutions better at managing suffering.
But building a world where fewer people have to lose themselves in order to be cared for.
Reference:
Chamberlin, J. (1978). On Our Own: Patient-Controlled Alternatives to the Mental Health System. Hawthorn Books.