Kenna Says: Civil Rights Are Sacred

Civil Rights Are Not Optional

When The Guidance Center violated my civil rights, they didn’t just harm me in the moment. They showed me I wasn’t fully human to them.

Every time a clinician signs off on an illegal restraint, every time a therapist uses a psychiatric hold as a weapon, every time a leadership team at a mental health organization decides silence is easier than accountability — they reinforce a system where violence, both physical and emotional, is normalized. That is when trauma becomes inherent and invisible.

People like me — people with serious mental illness or any psychiatric diagnosis — are at particular risk. Our rights are the first ones to be treated as optional. We are easier to silence, easier to discredit, easier to write off as “difficult” or “non-compliant,” and easier to silence through hurt. That very vulnerability is exactly why civil rights protections exist — because without them, people like me are left open to violence that others would never accept as “normal.”

I wake up crying. I leave stores abruptly because I’m about to crash into sobbing, and then I have yet another rip roaring anxiety attack. I walk through the world terrified of the next “hit,” the next place where I will be crushed; the next time I am foolish enough to trust. I am wrung out by flashbacks and by the reality that my therapist — someone I trusted — not only failed to protect me, but actively participated in crushing me. And she will never apologize and never own that she harmed me. To her it was “normal,” no big deal, and the fact I say otherwise is not worth her time.

That is the harm of civil rights violations in mental health care. It is not about whether I left the hospital with broken bones. It is not about whether I got my dog back. It is about the state-sanctioned removal of dignity, autonomy, and safety — rights that are supposed to be inalienable. When those rights are stripped, the trauma is not accidental. It is built into the act itself. Civil rights violations are inherent harm, whether or not they are ever acknowledged.

The professionals who hurt me, who rubber-stamped violence against me, no longer even see it as violence. To them, it is normal. Routine. “Just paperwork.” That normalization is the real sickness.

So yes — I am angry. I am grieving, and traumatized. I see current trauma symptoms in myself that really worry me; one of those being my complete unwillingness to deal with anything medical right now. But my grief is not just about me and my therapist. It is about the fact that a clinic in Flagstaff, Arizona can break 20 civil rights laws before lunch and walk away believing they are “doing their best,” believing it is “normal,” believing “there is nothing wrong with it.”

Civil rights violations are not paperwork errors. They are violence. They are trauma. And until we start treating them as such, people like me — people with serious mental illness, people who are already vulnerable — will continue to be harmed, and left alone with the wreckage.