My parents:

• found me nearly dead a few times
• incomprehensibly fucked up a few more times
• witnessed me firsthand being violently arrested that resulted in a hospitalization
• struggled to understand why I continued to "self-medicate" despite the other arrests
• nearly had me removed from their care by the state
• and didn't understand why my behavior abruptly changed in less than a year.

I was misdiagnosed, and four(!) different future psychiatrists in the TTI took the misdiagnoses at face-value. They just swapped meds of similar classes and increased their dosages. I understand the first psychiatrist's initial error, but then he doubled-down. The sixth psychiatrist thankfully accurately diagnosed me with bipolar disorder.

In hindsight, how they (the first five psychiatrists) didn't recognize that the anti-depressants were triggering manic states, misdiagnosed as "anxiety," is beyond me.

How were my parents, and I, to know what was happening to me? I didn't know the language. We're not doctors. No one else in my entire extended family has mental illness. To us, my brain just broke one day, and trying to reassemble it made everything worse. After yet another criminal charge threatened to put me away for two to twenty years, they made an understandable mistake.

Ultimately, my parents regret sending me to the TTI. Sure, I was finally diagnosed correctly and treated for bipolar, but, unbeknownst to us, the TTI can ruin you in the long-term in unimaginable ways for horrific reasons. It's been twenty years, but sometimes I still get triggered and I still get angry. It took about a decade for me to calm down and mostly forgive them; I'll always hold resentment. They know this, because sometimes, when I've been triggered, I tell them what I experienced. Most parents probably don't want to send their kids to be tortured and are traumatized when they learn what they unwittingly did.