August 29, 2025: My Manifesto: The Exorcist, the MRIs, and the Psych Ward
by Harmony Witte
In honor of the swiftly approaching “Spooky Season” I thought I would write about some of the not-often-talked-about horrors of the medical and mental health care system in the United States. Specifically, some of my recent experiences seeking psychiatric and medical care. Hold on to your butts, this will be a long one! This post may be upsetting or triggering to people and mentions medical and religious trauma. There are mentions of suicidal ideation.
It all started with a headache one weekend in April. The first couple of days of the headache were not particularly notable, I’ve gotten headaches from time to time since I was in high school. I usually attribute them to stress and lay low until they improve in a few hours or even days. This headache never improved though. That first weekend I laid in a dark room on the couch and binge-watched the new medical show about an ER called The Pitt. Unlike ER and other medical shows, this one didn’t make me feel a lot of medical anxiety because all of the doctors, even those addicted to pain meds, were incredibly competent. It is fiction, after all!
At work I kept the lights in my Kindergarten EDP classroom off most of the time, banned chanting on the playground, and asked the children to keep the noise volume down. I still came to work most days through the end of the school year, smiling and laughing through the pain by dissociating my mind from the feelings in my body. Something I learned to do as a child and have gotten pretty good at, if I do say so myself! It did get more difficult to be as patient and empathetic as I like to be when working with kids.
After 11 days of the headache, I grew somewhat concerned and made a doctor’s appointment to see the nurse practitioner in my GP’s office. She referred me to neurology. I had just had an MRI the week before the headache started that was ordered by my endocrinologist to test for a pituitary tumor (there is a shadow on my pituitary that is being monitored) and Cushing’s Disease, so they didn’t order another, but did a series of tests, eventually ruling out a lot of things and determining that this was a migraine.
I remember reading a Reddit post about a migraine at this point, where someone discussed being ill for 3 months. That was unfathomable to me at the time, how could someone be in this kind of pain for that long? Oh, what a sweet summer child I was! I’ve since learned that people can experience life destroying migraines for literally years with little to no relief. The neurologist started me on meds to prevent future migraines and tried a few things to help with the current one. This included emergency triptans, trigger point injections in my neck (which helped a little for about 5 days the first time and left me with a severe postdrome effect that made me so exhausted I would cry every day on the way to work, the pain relief lasted less than 24 hours the second time), steroids, multiple migraine cocktails (Toradol and Raglan) that I had to get through an IV in urgent care and the ER (these provided just a little temporary relief for a few hours) and eventually when nothing would work– a combination of Benadryl, Aspirin, and Acetaminophen that made me so groggy it was hard to function.
Eventually, I slowly gave up hope that this would ever be resolved. I was in constant pain, unable to think clearly, unable to enjoy things. The suicidal ideation that I have struggled with since I was around 8 years old became a constant feature when pain levels would get to over a 7 out of 10. I started mentally working on my “manifesto” or suicide note. The final straw was when I started experiencing partial blindness upon waking after about 3 months of the migraine. It started out lasting for approximately 10-30 minutes each time. Nearly my entire field of vision in my right eye would be “greyed out” for this period of time. This coincided with a new combination birth control pill that I started taking for other health issues I was having, I assumed it was a migraine aura at first and discontinued the birth control. I left a message with my neurologist about the blindness…and just didn’t hear back. No one seemed very concerned about it, so I “kept on trucking” as my Appalachian family members would say.
By this point, I was working at my summer job teaching art at a day camp. The position had long hours and was hard work with up to 7 classes a day, standing in the sun for hours directing traffic, and constant noise and chaos. I tried to white knuckle it through the 8 weeks just to get through the Summer and be reliable. Around week 5 I hit a wall.
I had reached out to the neurologist again after 2 weeks of experiencing the blindness, which lasted longer each day. She saw me and asked incredulously in front of her 2 baby doctors who were in the room to see me as their very first patient on their very first day of rounds,“So, you think the ‘blindness’ is related to your migraine?” At that appointment I was finally honest in my mental health questionnaire and responded in a way that I hoped would get me help—all 10s across the board indicating a plan to end my life. It didn’t come up in conversation with either the neurologist or the nurse who took my vitals. During the appointment I grew desperate when it seemed clear that no help was forthcoming and gave what was for me a desperate cry for help, “This is really affecting my quality of life.” She just asked me if I was still working, and when I said yes, she brushed me off.
By this point, I had had a firm suicide plan for a couple of weeks and its extremely public nature combined with my motivation to go to work every day and get shit done left me incredibly concerned for my safety. At that point I reached out to my therapist and let her know I needed to be hospitalized. I had been in psych wards twice before and had experienced a certain level of trauma each time. It’s an incredibly difficult decision to give up one’s autonomy in order to be kept safe, but it felt like the only right choice at that point because I was actively researching how to carry out my plan to end my life.
After the incredibly traumatic intake process that I detailed in earlier posts, when I met with my care team, I was assured on the first day that I would be treated for both the depression and the headache. They told me I would be transported by ambulance to the Belmont location for the MRI that my neurologist had just ordered, and that I would be able to see a neuro specialist while in the psych unit. These things just never happened.
I have no idea what changed, but within days it became apparent that my care team believed my head pain was due to anxiety. They never scheduled the MRI—telling me insurance would not pay to transport me as I had access to care outside of the hospital. They never scheduled the neuro specialist. I was offered Tylenol, triptans (the pharmacy didn’t have access to the triptan that had most recently been prescribed, so I was left taking one that made my hands and face numb and didn’t work for my pain) and Ativan. At one point I took triptans for 8 days in a row. I expressed concern to my nurses that its not supposed to be taken more than 4 days in a row, but they were unconcerned.
This continued for almost an entire month of hospitalization until I casually mentioned to my care team that one of my parents was also experiencing head pain and partial blindness and had received a diagnosis of papilledema and idiopathic intracranial hypertension. Suddenly, this was a medical case again and they wanted me to get out and get tests done as soon as possible! By this point, I had tried 5 new psych meds and the additional side effects were horrendous. I kept being told I was “sensitive to medication” which honestly feels like an insult.
I was so ready to get out of the hospital by the end of my last weekend there after a series of lockdowns that left us confined to our rooms for 8.5 hours over 2 days. These lockdowns are incredibly traumatic, and I don’t think a lot of people in the general public knows what happens in psych hospitals during them, so I will elaborate a bit here. Lockdowns happen when a patient gets violent and out of control. Keeping in mind, these are units full of often profoundly mentally ill folks who are often going through delicate medication changes or who are denied meds they are used to taking, causing withdrawals.
Lockdowns are terrifying for other patients on multiple levels. On one hand, it’s triggering as hell to have someone screaming, yelling, throwing things, and punching walls. On another level the patients have ZERO power while in the hospital, there is a massive power imbalance between the patients and the staff. These people we rely on to wash our laundry, pass out snacks, take our vitals—are suddenly strapping the disruptive patient to a gurney with belts and forcibly injecting them with medication that acts as a chemical restraint–leaving them tied down to scream, cry, yell, and whimper for what may be hours, until they eventually tire themselves out and conk out. After witnessing your first lockdown, the implication that it could be you next, is always, always there during patient and staff interactions.
There were at least 2 staff members who hated their jobs and the patients so much that they refused to ever speak to them. When I first encountered this attitude, I thought I was just being crazy. But after seeing this Mental Health Specialist speak and joke with other staff members and visitors, I realized it wasn’t that they had social anxiety any time I spoke to them, it was that they didn’t see me as fully human. They perhaps saw us all as a threat. Its so incredibly dehumanizing to say “Good morning” to the person taking your vitals or doing room checks every 15 minutes only to have them look past you as if you don’t matter.
While psych hospitals are no longer a One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest situation with padded rooms and lobotomies—patients are still dehumanized and treated in incredibly inhumane ways, often by well-intentioned or burned out mental health specialists.
Lockdowns often sound a lot like the way exorcisms are depicted in movies with distant blood curdling screams for hours on end and often-unintelligible yelling. At one point during a lockdown, a patient ran down the length of the hallway, we could see the shadow passing under the door– followed by 6 or 7 staff member’s shadows quickly behind. The patient called out for all of the other patients to exit their rooms and stage what can only be described as a revolt. We all sat there, wide eyed, in horror as this happened. I felt so incompetent in that moment, unable and unwilling to risk my own safety and upcoming freedom to help out this other patient.
The day after I was finally released from the hospital, I had an MRI and an MRV at 7am. While being poked and prodded and having an IV inserted and a cage placed over my head for the duration of the MRI, I couldn’t help but think of the beginning scenes from The Exorcist, when Regan undergoes an angiogram to test for brain lesions. Angiograms aren’t really done anymore as they have been replaced by the MRI. The scene depicts arterial spray from Regan as a tube is inserted into her neck during the testing. The unsettling scene climaxes with the impossibly loud clanging of the machine where Regan finally cries out in pain and fear. I played this in my mind as I laid in the MRI machine, my body vibrating from anxiety and the sounds of the machine. The Exorcist was on my mind a lot that week between the hours of screaming in the psych unit and the medical testing.
We often look back at that scene as an example of how barbaric healthcare treatment was as recently as the 1970’s and I suspect society will do the same in a few decades with current psych treatment. Locking patients away to sit all day under fluorescent lights, sleeping on canvas pillows, having their bathroom and shower time interrupted every 15 minutes, taking away their dignity and humanity in the name of safety. It is barbaric. It’s unconscionable. People deserve better. These are desperate people, people in physical and mental pain and torment. People who have often sought help for themselves voluntarily are being treated as if they were violent criminals, as if their pain isn’t real. I have (some) hope that Gen Z, who have a really open-minded approach to mental health, will reform the industry.