‘I had no voice’: black mental health patients on surviving a care system they say is racialised

Tiwa, aged 22. She says there were so few staff in her hospital that ‘we would be the ones having to run into our friends’ rooms, help them, save them, and scream for staff’. Photograph: supplied

It has been more than four decades since Devon Marston, a 66-year-old community organiser and musician, was taken to a psychiatric hospital where he was restrained, injected and forced to take medication. He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

“Everything was said around me and about me, but no one asked me how I was doing,” he said. “I had no voice, and there was no one to say: ‘Don’t do that to him,’ or: ‘Listen to him, hear what he has to say.’”