Shattered Remnants

By Suzan Digh

For many LGBTQIA+ people, coming out is not easy. For some, it is horrific. This story (told in poetry/vignettes) explores the experiences of a girl who was put into psychiatric care shortly after coming out as lesbian. This "care" started with psychiatric medication and ended with her involuntary psychiatric hospitalization where she was treated with electroconvulsive (shock) therapy - with parental consent - at the age of 16. She is in Canada, where medical care is free.

This experience was fundamental in shaping the subsequent decade of her life, and the choices she made. The poems and vignettes in this book primarily come from the notes/journals she kept throughout. It was pretty close to a decade after shock therapy (ECT) ended before she overcame the shattering this treatment caused: firstly as a direct result of the medical interventions themselves and secondly as a result of her unhealthy choices in coping mechanisms (sex, drugs and alcohol). 

Electroconvulsive therapy is a dark thing. Psychological trauma is a very dark thing. The story is intended to be cathartic, but the wade through the darkness is... well.. dark. The author wants the story to be shared, spread, known - if it helps even one LGBTQIA+ person to know that hope exists outside the trauma... it is a success.

• Language: English
• Publisher: SD Publishing
• Release date: Oct 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781998061204

Book preview

Shattered Remnants

Copyright © 2023 Suzan Digh

Cover Art © 2023 Suzan Digh

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-998061-20-4

Can I include here the opposite of a dedication?

I say, simply: I oppose.

Author’s Note

This story is about a 15 year old girl whose parents discovered she was lesbian.

In order to cure her (Fix her? Make her straight? Keep her from going to Hell?), she was put into psychiatric care. This care started with medication and ended with her involuntary (under parental consent) placement into the psychiatric unit of the hospital at the age of 16. They are in Canada, so this medical care is free.

During her stay in this psychiatric unit, the girl was provided with a collection of medications (mood stabilizers, anti-depressants, and anti-psychotics — and all the medications that are required to offset the side-effects from these) and a course of electro-convulsive therapy (ECT) — more commonly known as shock treatment.

She was in this care for about 4 months, and celebrated the morning of her 17th birthday lying on the ECT table. The poems/vignettes in this book primarily come from the notes/journals she kept. She did not regain basic self-awareness until sometime in the months after her 17th birthday, and it was much, much longer before she was sufficiently recovered from her treatment to even think about, let alone talk about her experiences. She has few clear or distinct recollections from this period as the entire decade following the ECT ended up blurred — but she is fully aware of the impacts this experience had on her mental health and how it drove many of the less-than-healthy choices she made in the subsequent years.

This bulk of this collection was written in, or about, the decade that followed this psychiatric treatment.   It was very fortunate that:

she kept a journal since about age 11,

these journals were not destroyed as part of the therapy and,

she held on to these journals during the subsequent decades while avoiding thinking about her childhood experiences and, finally,

she was able to overcome the brand new adult struggles she had developed as coping mechanisms.

She is sharing this story now because she wants to finally — finally — destroy the decades of journals.

She wants to piece together her shattered remnants.

The papers

Dug out from a large soft blue thirty-year-old Rubbermaid:

two decades of papers, documents, letters, diaries, rantings, ravings, tears…

(I mourn the gap)

Folder after folder after folder, mostly tan, some random red, one pastel blue, and one green. Many with penciled tabs, so worn and faded that interpreting them requires an