I have a new iteration on my concept of collecting soil samples from mass-institutionalization-era psychiatric asylums and hospitals in the country. It’s to take the soil from each location and fill pill capsules with it or press it into tablets. I don’t think I have to explain why that would be so meaningful, but I will.

First, medication changed psychiatry for better and for worse. Even the safest carry risks, and many folks aren’t on the safest ones. They’re on the ones pharmaceutical companies sell as the best and sometimes only treatment options.

Second, medication ushered in an era of biomedical treatment that often reduces those with mental-health diagnoses and lived experience to bodies in need of long-term pharmaceutical intervention at the exclusion of all other treatment modalities and without regard for life-limiting side effects, such as metabolic disorder, which exacerbates or may even be a root cause of mental-health issues.

Third, the medications my mother was given between the 1950s and early 1970s debilitated her. They weren’t much better than the earlier insulin shock therapy and electroshock therapy she received. This reason is especially personal for me, but of course my mother was just one of many who was harmed by these early treatments. She wasn’t the only one by any means. Her being a psychiatric nurse offered no protection against the treatment du jour, including pill, injection, and electrical current.

Fourth, some classes of medications are considered to be internal straitjackets that moved control of the patient from the external (chains, restraints, isolation) to the internal (blunting, sedation, lack of drive and motivation).

Fifth, our lands are chemical now, altered, as much a product of the Anthropocene as the medications themselves—and as much as we, as humans, are both products and victims of this human-shaped era. We can’t heal the land with a pill, and the land can’t serve as medicine in a desecrated state, one we brought it to by treating it as something to extract from, to inject into, to contaminate, and to abandon like we’ve abandoned so many people, especially those relegated to state lands where asylums were erected.

I say this as someone who takes a low dose of lithium carbonate daily. I’m not against medicine. I see its utility in the short-term during periods of crisis and in the long-term in some cases, like mine—but only as part of holistic treatments and the subjectification of those with lived experience.

I do think what we’ve done, especially since the late 1800s, to people with mental-health labels and lived experience, other forms of disabilities, and to those who challenged social norms—all folks who ended up in asylums and psychiatric hospitals—is a hard pill to swallow.

I can’t think of a better way than institutional soils displayed as contaminated medicine to say:

Give us back this land. (Cleanse this land.) Return us to this earth. (Cleanse this earth.) Heal us alongside this soil. (Cleanse this soil.) These bodies are the earth. (The earth is a body.) The earth doesn’t forget. (We haven’t forgotten.)