I was WRONGLY locked up in a psychiatric hospital at 15 for a whole year - and I am still haunted by the trauma

I was 15 years old when they locked me up in a psychiatric hospital. 

I spent 353 days away from my teenage life, forced to spend up to 12 hours a day sitting on a chair and staring at a wall. 

The experience set me up for a lifetime of traumatic memories, which still haunt me now, at the age of 52. 

My disease? According to my doctors, I had major depressive disorder and was a risk to myself. 

This came as a shock to me, given that I did not feel depressed.

Six years after my year-long hospital admission, my suspicion that I was falsely imprisoned was validated. 

I learned that the ordeal was part of a money-making scheme dreamt up by the Texas hospital.

A subsequent legal investigation revealed that the hospital kept kids in the unit so it could collect insurance money.  School counselors were given financial rewards for sending kids like me to the psych unit.

Still, all these years later, now that I am happily married and have a job as a backpacking guide, I often wonder, how could this have happened to me?

The ordeal began in 1987, with a skateboard. 

My friend at school had broken his and, wanting to be a good friend, I offered him mine and bought a new one, in the hope it meant we could continue to skate together. 

Bizarrely, the school counselor thought my sudden burst of generosity was a sign of declining mental health. I was parting with my 'most prized possession,' she told my mother. 

I guess this out-of-character gesture wasn't helped by my 'skate punk' phase, which I entered around the time of my parents divorced several years earlier. Perhaps it was a response to my mom treating me like a reminder of her ex-husband and the life she wanted to leave behind, passing me from relative to relative.

Even so, my moods were nothing you wouldn't expect from a hormonal teenager.

Despite this, my guidance counselor somehow convinced my mother that I was at risk of suicide because I had given my skateboard to a friend after buying a new one. 

In just 24 hours, the whole thing had been blown completely out of proportion and I found myself being taken to a psychiatric hospital.

'It’s only for two weeks,' my mom said, giving me a hug. 'For an evaluation.'

On the first night, I was told to sleep in a tiny room with an adult roommate.

For three weeks, I'd have intermittent sessions with a doctor, lasting maybe 10 minutes at a time, for assessments. He assigned me a battery of personality tests.

Finally, I was diagnosed with major depressive disorder (MDD), and the doctor insisted I needed to stay in an 'adolescent long-term unit' at the same facility. 

The unit was far worse than I ever could have imagined, and a disturbing world to be thrust into.

With no access to the outside or even a phone, I was surrounded by a dozen teenagers, many of whom had been strapped to wheelchairs or beds for weeks or months at a time. 

I shared a room with a kid who slept with his hands and feet shackled to the bed and spent his days restrained in a wheelchair. 

Another kid, who I eventually became friends with, spent 333 days restrained to his bed.

The hospital also forbade us from speaking to each other privately. Even my roommate and I had to stay six feet apart.

We resorted to teaching each other sign language or tapping on the walls after lights out just to communicate. Even if we got discharged, we were not allowed to swap phone numbers or addresses. 

It was a trauma bond, and at times it felt like family.

Every aspect of our lives had to be approved by the doctors. Our clothing. The books we read. Our weekly visits with our parents. Everything was supervised. 

I was only permitted to be alone when I used the shared restroom.

Our doors had to be closed at all times if no one was in our room. I kept forgetting this on account of being 15, and I'd be given a disciplinary 'test mark.' This meant 30 minutes of 'chair' - being forced to sit in a chair, feet flat on the floor, staring at the wall. 

There were other tiny infractions that seemed to build up. One day, I went into my room and jumped on to my bed.

A voice coming from the hall scolded me: 'Banning, that's a test mark.' 

Jumping, apparently, was only for recreation time. 'We noticed your being needy lately, and jumping indoors at an inappropriate hour is attention seeking,' the staff member said. 

When I apologized, he said I was, 'being too compliant.'

In therapy sessions, I kept asking when I could go home and why I was here, to which doctors kept blaming my 'depression.'  

Eventually, I misbehaved enough that I was given 'permanent chair.' For up to 12 hours a day, I would have to sit in a chair in my room, feet on the floor and hands in my lap. No talking, no eye contact, no escape other than for 'school' and group therapy. 

Despite every attempt at being on my best behavior after that, I stayed on the chair until the day I left. 

Group therapy often felt like a way to humiliate us even further. Each session lasted an hour, but sometimes we were subjected to six a day as staff said we had 'a lot to work through'. 

During one of these sessions, the staff forced a 14-year-old girl to admit, in front of me and at least a dozen other people, that she had a crush on me. She cried.  

It was the opposite of therapy. 

School, meanwhile, involved a teacher from my district visiting for a few hours several days a week, while the rest of the week was spent in a bedroom-sized 'classroom' with all of the other kids and one teacher. 

My dad visited only twice throughout my year-long stay, despite the fact that his insurance was paying for it. My mother visited every week, but it was under the watchful eye of a staff member. 

We had just 15 minutes, but if at any point I asked my mom to pull me out of the hospital, staff would shut down the visit immediately. 

Oddly, the only way anyone seemed to get discharged was if their insurance ran out. There were kids stuck in the unit for three years because their parents' policies kept paying for it. 

At some point, I realized that if my dad's insurance was going to run out, I would have to play the part of the good little patient.  

I tried to talk about anything that make it sound like I was making progress. Whether it was my parents' divorce or girl trouble, I needed something, anything, to talk about.  

Finally, 353 days after being dropped off at the hospital, my father's insurance decided I didn't need to be there any longer. Instead of going home with either of my parents, I was sent to a halfway house for six months.

'It’ll help you transition back to the outside world,' my therapist said.

Again, I was surrounded by kids by age, but at least I was allowed to befriend them and attend public school. I loved my time there, and it became a rewarding experience. 

But after I left and moved back in with my mother, I started to realize the damage that had been done. 

The outside world seemed impossible to tolerate. Nothing made sense anymore. People laughed and shouted. They argued and yelled at one another. Music and lights were everywhere. Something as simple as walking into a grocery store left me feeling like I’d fall to pieces. 

At school, I started fantasizing about killing myself. I grew bitter and resentful. All that was left were the memories of my friends screaming and crying while the staff pinned them down and tied them to their beds.

My anger and fear drove me inward, away from people and the world. I felt myself unraveling. The hospital ruined me, and I didn't understand why. 

And then, several years later, I learned the truth of what had happened to me. 

One day, while mom and I were out to lunch, she told me what happened after she visited us at the hospital.

Once we all went back to the unit, the doctors would tell the parents that their child would likely die by suicide if they were to take them home.

My mom told me: 'I would die, honey. You’re my little boy.' Within a couple of weeks, I'd discovered that two friends from the hospital were suing the company that owned it for insurance fraud. 

A lawyer told me that the state of Texas had fined the company for paying bribes and kickbacks to school counselors who referred patients to the practice. 

I joined the lawsuit with more than 60 other former patients. Everything was settled out of court, though the company eventually had to pay a $379million fine, one of the largest ever for healthcare fraud. 

A few years later, the doctors sued us and our lawyer back for libel, though that suit was dismissed - not before I was saddled with such a massive bill that I had to file for bankruptcy. 

During our lawsuit against the hospital, our lawyer took me and a friend to Bellevue Hospital in New York City to meet with a doctor to potentially be an expert witness in our case.

After speaking with him for several hours, he looked at me and asked: 'Do you want to know what I think?'

He said: 'You suffer from PTSD and you need treatment for it. What you went through in the hospital is horrific. That was not therapy.'  

I was 39 when I finally decided to give therapy a try. I had just moved back to my home state of California and was having frequent flashbacks to my time in the hospital. I interviewed a slew of therapists before finding one I liked, and I've been with her for 13 years.

I still don't like therapy, but I know I need it. I think of it like going to the gym. I don't enjoy the process, but I enjoy the results. 

Now, at 52 and as a father, I have an obligation to people other than myself to be as good and healthy a person as I can be. 

There's still some core identity that I have inside of me that is somehow convinced that what happened in the hospital is my fault. And I have to fight that urge every day. 

- 

The Chair and the Valley: A Memoir of Trauma, Healing, and the Outdoors by Banning Lyon is now.