I also wonder about that anonymous piece of paper and why we had to sign it. My intake was about 6 hours, give or take - I'm guessing at it because I got into that cell in the a.m. sometime and by the time I got out they had just finished serving up the liverwurst slab on plain bread for evening meal - and I kept telling them if I was going to be admitted with or without my consent, just fucking DO IT! why do I have to sign this? I don't want to be here so why do I have to put my name to it if it's not my choice... There was never an answer for that question and so we just kept going round and round about the drug list and "what got me there" or whatever. I never read the papers either, and have always wanted to see all that shit and whatever other 'files' they kept on me.
I also want to touch on how little control anyone has, who goes to see a counselor of any kind, over what that person writes down about them. Not saying all counselors are sketchy, but I would suggest requesting they don't write what you are saying down, but summarize at the end and allow you to see it...
My parents had taken me to a couple of psych's before going to the program - since our fucked-up family dynamics were not on trial, but as the only one rebelling against them, I was - and only in a Girls' Rap a while later, some shit was brought out to surprise me with, from some documentation they had gotten FROM THE FREAKIN PSYCHIATRIST, and it wasn't even what I was talking about to that fucker! I went 4 times, 3 without speaking a word, and the 4th I tried to verbalize something about what was happening. That shithead was obviously not even listening anyway, to have taken what I said and twisted it like he did... I am glad it was the only thing I said, 'cause right after it came out, I had that sense of futility you get when you are talking to a brick wall, so I stopped... didn't stop him from writing some shit down that later I got blind-sided with... The part that galled me was that they took what HE wrote for truth, not what I said, like that guy was god for being the doctor and my thoughts were negligible as the 'patient'. Fuck. I remember how livid I was trying to defend my own truth against what they said I did, and of course that was the story the group kept. Same as when they used to dredge up shit later on to confront you with and twisted it around. I used to cringe listening to something someone was confronting another person on and I'd think 'that wasn't what they said/did' but you couldn't say that or the rabid pack would turn slavering on you... Wow.
