“It’s Like Everyone’s Trying to Put Pills in You”: Pharmaceutical Violence and Harmful Mental Health Services Inside a California Juvenile Detention Center

Abstract

This article discusses how mental health staff at a California juvenile detention center coerced young women into taking pharmaceutical drugs. Current empirical work discusses the negative effects of consuming pharmaceutical grade drugs. Some work has addressed how incarcerated individuals are forcibly sedated with these medications. We use a legal violence framework, however, to show how legal proceedings allow medical staff at our site to coerce youth into invasive therapy and eventually into consuming pharmaceutical drugs. We call this multiple stage process pharmaceutical violence. Based on 24 months of ethnographic research, we describe the three phases of pharmaceutical violence and how it negatively affects the youth in our study. Our findings shed light on research related to mental health, legal violence and the experiences of incarcerated youth.