Juvenile Nightmares of a Normal Human Being

Due to a series of unfortunate circumstances, which I don’t care to discuss at this moment, I ended up in a juvenile mental health facility in Barbacena, MG, on February 13, 1996.

I was thirteen years old and had not been convicted of any crime and was not placed under state custody. I was just another kid who got lost in the system and at that moment I was sent to what was called by some as a last stop facility.

These facilities were similar to old people’s sanitariums. You couldn’t be expelled from them and you wouldn’t be transferred until you were deemed safe to be in public or your sentence came to an end. As I said, I was never formally charged with any crime.

My first days were spent in a small building in an even smaller room. The white concrete walls surrounded a white concrete floor and a blue mat I could lie on. I received two “meals” a day consisting of something that looked like canapés and a small cup of liquid, usually water.

The door itself faced a dimly lit corridor and at the end of that corridor was a CD player that played classical music on repeat. I spent my first days running in place, doing push-ups or exercising between naps, but after a few days the lack of significant calories took its toll and I didn’t have the energy to move as much. They monitored me with a security camera above the door that I couldn’t wait to climb.

Upon being released from this room, the facility director strapped me to a stretcher and took me to the building next door. I was supposed to be taken to the second floor, with the other violent offenders; but due to a mix-up in the paperwork, I was taken to the third floor with the sexual predators. The residents were between 13 and 20 years old. I was the youngest and smallest person there.

I spent my first nights in the common room with two staff members watching me. These Mental Health Technicians or MHTs were a kind of mix between guards and therapists. They were tasked with observing us between therapy sessions, school visits and bathroom breaks. Most MHTs were decent people, but some of them were not and the two in charge of my first night at the unit were terrible human beings. Son of a bitch number one was named Rafael and he was the typical cowboy. He wore tight jeans and cowboy boots and had a belt buckle the size of my head. Son of a bitch number two was an overweight Mexican woman named Anastácia, who spoke with a strong accent.

Rafael and Anastácia were supposed to check each room every fifteen minutes and mark their notes on a clipboard. Instead, they spent the night talking and laughing. If I said anything about the noise, Rafael or Anastácia would come and kick me. If I tried to get up and do something, they’d beat me a little and throw me into the quiet room, another white concrete room with a blue mat. I actually didn’t sleep the first few nights. I would sleep during the day and was punished for it.

The other residents teased me and started calling me sleepy. I would pass out during class and someone would lean into my ear and shout “wake up sleepyhead!” The good MHTs would punish this behavior, most of them didn’t. I was being terrorized morning and night. It was only a matter of time before I couldn’t take it anymore and, eventually, I snapped.

Anastácia ordered a pizza and brought it with her to the unit. Rafael went into the nurses’ station and she was alone on the floor. Two weeks of terrible food and little sleep had left me hungry. I hit Anastácia with a chair and ran down the corridor eating her pizza. She quickly recovered and came after me while screaming for Rafael. Not wanting to surrender without a fight. I threw a slice of pizza at Rafael and hit him as hard as I could in the groin and he went down; Anastácia threw me against the wall. I finally ended up in the quiet room with a split lip and a broken nose… and the tasty pizza still on my palate.

I was moved to my own room and the next months were uneventful. It was hell, but it was the kind of hell I got used to. Being able to sleep certainly made it more bearable. It was around this time that I was given a roommate named Vinícius. He was seventeen years old and over 2 meters tall. I, on the other hand, had grown a bit during this time and stood just above 1.70 meters. I had gone from a skinny boy to having a bit of muscle; after all, fighting as much as I fought in recent months with the damn MHTs, I gained a bit of a reputation as a fierce fighter. It was for this reason that I was paired with Vinícius. He wasn’t just a sex offender, he was a convicted rapist. Rafael told me this while laughing. Vinícius frowned.

As soon as Rafael left, I grabbed a makeshift knife I had left under my pillow and told Vinícius that if he so much as sneezed, I would kill him. He started crying and told me a story that almost made me feel sorry for him. Vinícius had a very religious family and attended an ultra-conservative church. He was gay and had a boyfriend from his youth group. When his boyfriend’s parents caught Vinícius on top of him having sex, the boy called it rape and Vinícius was expelled. He was a big gay teenager and he was crying because he thought I was going to hurt him.

For three weeks, Vinícius and I shared a room and at that point I began to feel something that resembled sanity. We became friends fast. We’d talk about cartoons and comics. He’d tell me about his favorite bands and I’d pretend I’d heard of them. For three weeks, each of us would run to our room when they told us to leave the common room for quiet time or sleep. For three weeks of the two years I spent in that hell, I had a genuine friend. And then, seeing this favorable situation for me, Rafael snapped with hatred.

Rafael hated me. He wanted Vinícius to hurt me and when he discovered I wasn’t being raped or injured, he decided to take it upon himself to do the dirty work. I woke up to Rafael throwing water in my face and dragging me out of bed. He pulled my pants as if trying to rip them off and I screamed. This woke Vinícius who grabbed Rafael by the throat with one hand and threw him against the gray painted wall while choking him. Rafael died almost instantly.

The commotion summoned another MHT named Rodrigo. I sat there on the floor in shock as Vinícius fought them, but in the end they beat Vinícius to death right in front of me. Something died in me that night and I haven’t really been well since. Some kind of shady lawyer came the next day and told me to sign papers saying Vinícius attacked me and Rafael died trying to save me. I refused and told the truth. When the little lawyer threatened to blame me for both deaths if I didn’t sign, I took the pen he wanted me to sign the papers with and stabbed him in the throat.

I spent the next six months in solitary confinement. I was placed in a quiet room with a magnetic door inside a small bathroom with a toilet and a dirty sink. A loud horn sounded three times a day and that door would open. I’d be given about three minutes to use the bathroom and then the door would close. If I tried to stay too long, several large men would forcibly remove me. My food was delivered through a small slot in the door and my only clothing was a paper gown they replaced at the beginning of each week. I spent six months in that room and the only human contact I had was when I tried to stay in the bathroom or when they beat me.

Six. Months.

On some days, they wouldn’t turn on the light in the morning and I’d sit there for hours in complete darkness. Sometimes they wouldn’t open the bathroom. By the second month, I was defecating and urinating in the corner and throwing it at anyone who came in and tried to clean. By the third month I lost all contact with reality. I don’t remember much of what happened after that, only that six calendar months passed between when I went in and when they finally moved me back to my old room.

My room had been stripped of any furniture. I had a mattress with no sheet or pillow and if I wanted to write anything or do schoolwork it was with a pencil they confiscated after I was done. I’d curl up in a fetal position at night, trying to stay as warm as I could. By the light of my open door, I could see the bloodstain on the carpet from where Vinícius had fallen face-first while they kept kicking him. Thinking about it enraged me wildly and I would howl or scream until several MHTs came in and held me down for a nurse to inject Thorazine into my hip.

The six months of isolation were followed by another three months with an MHT sitting by my door every day. Sometimes they’d talk to me, most of the time they didn’t say anything. I spent most of my days staring at the old bloodstain on the carpet. I don’t know if it was just a byproduct of losing my mind or if that hellish place was truly haunted, but after a few weeks alternating between crying and sleeping, screaming at the top of my lungs, I saw Vinícius standing over my bed.

“I didn’t die so you could succumb to the pressure in here.” Vinícius said as he leaned close to me. I should have been afraid, but I kept crying. The closer he got, the more sadness I felt. Eventually, he simply sat against the opposite wall and spent the rest of the night telling me about the other ghosts in the unit and how there weren’t as many sane ones as him. Eventually I calmed down. I didn’t see Vinícius every night, but on the nights I was especially scared, he would appear and calm me down.

Vinícius was not the only ghost I saw.

Sometimes I would wake up with sharp pains in my arms or legs and feeling hemorrhages. This resulted in me being restrained with handcuffs attached to the bed. It was when new ghosts kept appearing that I was moved to the common room at night for 24-hour observation. I kept dreaming of Rafael cutting me with a knife and sometimes I could swear I saw him when I had just woken up.

A new Mental Health Technician named Carlos was hired and given observation duty. I remember waking up one night to Carlos standing by my bed, praying a rosary. When I asked him about it, he said he was praying for my soul because he had seen dark spirits surrounding me. I was inclined to believe him and, during every shift Carlos worked, he prayed for me. The cuts and hemorrhage sensations became less frequent and I was finally sent back to my room. Carlos sprinkled holy water around the room and placed an ornate drawing of a cross on the wall made by his cousin. From that point on, I never saw Rafael or Vinícius in my room again.

I was reintroduced into the facility’s common environment in August 1997. At this point, I was nearly 1.82 meters tall and I was thin, perhaps gaunt. I was malnourished and almost completely non-communicative. I didn’t speak. I rarely answered questions. I would sit through the days until they blurred together. For the next five months, I would be visited once a day by the same creepy lawyer from before and the director. Each day, I would be offered the option of going home if I just signed the document agreeing with their Official Story. Every day for five months I said no. It was the last week of November when I finally couldn’t take it anymore and signed the document.

I wasn’t sent home immediately. I spent another month answering questions and telling the official story to the police officers who came to close the investigation. Every time I told the story the way I had been trained, I felt myself dying a little more inside. Vinícius died keeping me safe and, in his memory, I was further staining his name. On December 29, 1997, I received a plane ticket and an escort of adults back to my parents. After spending nearly two years in that God-forsaken place, I was sent home. My parents had no idea what I had been through, no one had told them. All they knew was that they handed me over to a psychiatric hospital for evaluation and that they got me back two years later, nearly catatonic and on more medication than would be needed to sedate an elephant.

That was seventeen years ago and I’m still here. I live a normal life. I have a wife and a son. I live in a nice neighborhood and I drive a decent vehicle. By all outward appearances I seem normal, but I’m not. I am a very disturbed individual and it is due in large part to the events I’ve described. If you spend enough time, you’ll find other stories like mine. Other survivors of this country’s mental health system also managed to make something that resembled normal. The rest succumbed to the horror that is life in these places and ended up dead or in prison after release.

There are about eight hundred thousand adolescents and young adults in long-term psychiatric care. Most are mentally ill. Even so, you have a few cases like me. Children who were sent by the recommendation of a school counselor who received two thousand reais for each referral and a judge who received the same. Why was I sent to the school counselor? What was my offense so grave that I was condemned without crime, to such a terrible fate? I cheated on the seventh-grade math test.

This can happen to anyone. All it takes: an individual who fills out a sworn statement alleging they are a danger to themselves or others and then they’ll end up on a seventy-two-hour hold. Make the slightest mistake during that period and you’ll go long-term. No matter how sane or rational you are. These places have a way of turning you into a monster. You’ll do things you never imagined possible and carry the blame for the rest of your life. Want horror? Want the kind of insane and terrifying story that keeps you awake at night? Visit one of these mental health treatment centers.

I still have nightmares about Rafael.