Psych Hospitals

Psych Hospitals, Criminalization, and Not Breaking

Psych hospitals.

Towards the end, I was fucking with the clinicians and doctors. Not to be cruel. To survive. Because when you’re in there, you learn real fast who sees you as a patient and who sees you as a problem.

I went into Eugene and I was labeled as a criminal, not a mental health patient.

I remember I reached for someone — without my glasses I can’t see anything — and the police had taken my glasses. A reach turns into criminalization and court stuff. One move. That’s all it takes when you’re Black, biracial, and in crisis.

But did the white girl that physically attacked me in the hospital get in trouble? I doubt it. She befriended me first. Then she grabbed my hair and made me fall off the bench.

Did I resort to violence? I am not a damn fool.

I stood up and took the books. The books about the N word and the Black experience. The whole hospital saw. I chose to read instead of react. I chose to learn instead of swing.

I chose Salem rather than Eugene. I chose the shelter rather than the streets. I gave up my car for sanity and strength and learned to navigate through criminalization — which ended dismissed, not a charge. Because I wasn’t a criminal. I was in pain.

I went to hospital rooms where I was told I was a N word. But in Salem I was told I was “just like Kamala Harris,” meaning I was biracial. Meaning they could see both sides of me. Meaning maybe I wasn’t a threat to them.

I rose this time. Did not break. It was more a set break — where I saw jail cells, where I saw my whole life flash before my eyes — but I didn’t break.

I think with mental health you deal with trauma. The death of my mother hit me hard. That was the ashes. The death of my father gave me closure and a confidence that no one will break me.

That was the cocoon.

So yeah, I fucked with the doctors. I questioned them. I challenged them. Because when you’ve been labeled, when you’ve been criminalized for reaching without glasses, when you’ve been called a N word in a place that’s supposed to heal you — you learn to advocate for yourself.

I’m not a criminal. I’m not crazy. I’m a woman who survived systems that were built to break me.

And I didn’t break.

That’s the butterfly.

Cathryn M. Murray

Salem, Oregon | August 1, 2026