I confess to being part of the problems we have with our hospitals in Bermuda.Hospital horror stories jumped ‘otta my mouth’ just like everyone else on this Island. We suffer, and share, “girl, I know what you’re talking about....” Our health touches deep. It determines everything we can, or cannot, do.We are traumatised by many, very real, bad hospital experiences; stuck in a negative spiral and our stories show how powerless we feel.These emotions even prevent the hospitals from making positive changes that work for all of us.We deep down long for positive change but choose to feel helpless. It’s even worse for the Mid-Atlantic Wellness Institute (MWI), formerly St Brendan’s.Since my brother with schizophrenia, Robert, died four years ago, I haven’t wanted to go any nearer to MWI than the Barn. I have been challenged with depression, and suicidal thoughts, since I was a teenager and consider myself lucky to have escaped treatment at St Brendan’s by a whisker.Psychiatric problems scare us. We would like them to stay out of sight and out of mind. However, as more people lose jobs, more and more people will need mental health services including our young people.This boogieman is going to get harder to hide. Further on from that, if we are judged by how we treat some of “the least of these” people with chronic mental health challenges then we, as a community, have nothing to brag about.I was jolted out of feeling like I had no control over what happens at our hospitals, by a man who talked to me at a party. I really liked him then I found out he is a psychiatrist at MWI (it was too late to put my guard up). This immediately brought up all of my horrible hospital memories and emotions anger, resentment, frustration, confusion and powerlessness.I didn’t run away, however, so, Michael Radford, chief of psychiatry at MWI began to share with me his vision for positive changes at the Devonshire facility.Yes, I thought he was crazy (this is Bermuda after all) even though I’d experienced positive changes in mental health services in Nova Scotia, Canada. I felt his frustration when he said: “We can’t even find anyone who will stand up and admit they have a family member with mental illness, never mind someone who actually has mental illness.”I actually found myself thinking, “I can do that. I’m a writer; writing is safe.” Ha! That was the beginning of an emotional roller coaster ride.I finally understood that I had to stop letting my negative emotions control me (not easy).I stopped telling horrible hospital stories and started suggesting to people that all these negative stories might prevent positive changes at the hospitals. I felt encouraged by people who sincerely agreed.But it still took another two months for the tape of horrible hospital experiences playing in my head for years to fade enough for me to start thinking about my family’s positive experiences at the hospitals.From other justice work (yes empowering people to work for better healthcare services is justice work) I know that change does not happen when ‘the powers that be’ tell us it has changed.Putting copies of the Patients’ Bill of Rights on hospital walls has not made people feel empowered. The name change, to Mid-Atlantic Wellness Institute, does not cause people to think of it as place for mental wellness.So people ask me what the solutions are to problems with our hospitals.I’m not sure. I’m only one person and we all have to share in seeing and working towards positive change. What I am sure of is that loving ourselves, each other and our Island as a whole, is part of it.All of our feelings need to come out especially our fear of bad things happening to us in the hospitals and be worked through to find our power. Then we can work together towards change.We are all humans inside and outside of the hospitals with good and bad in us; and we can embrace the freedom to change.Action starts with small steps, even if it is just the thoughts in our heads and the words we speak.Thankfully, I no longer feel alone in taking these steps. Writing this article is another step along the way to, hopefully, encouraging even more people to work towards positive changes in our health institutions.