This is real life – unfiltered, intense, and unapologetic.
Exposing the dark underbelly of mental health, conservatorship abuse, and institutional power – plus poetry about relationships, sexuality, and surviving the city – the stuff nobody wants to talk about at dinner.
Inside the Insane
by Erica Loberg
Inside the Insane is a first hand account of life inside a psychiatric crisis ward in Los Angeles, California. From patients suffering from chronic paranoid schizophrenia to bipolar disorder disease, to major depressive disorder, Inside the Insane takes the reader inside the walls of the mentally insane and manifests the realities of the human condition.
Erica provides detailed accounts of patients screaming in restraints, to being locked in seclusion, to suffering from over medication, in radical raw detail. She also takes a look at the mental health system in Los Angeles County and exposes the concealed world of how society treats the mentally ill. From locked institutions, to board and cares, to living on the streets in Skid Row, the horrific conditions surrounding the life of a person suffering from a mental illness is explicitly exposed.
About Erica
Erica Loberg is an author and poet from Los Angeles, CA, and a graduate of Columbia University with a BA in English. She is the author of several books, including the memoir Inside the Insane, the poetry collection Screaming at the Void, and her most recent release, Woke Off, alongside What Men Should Know About Women, What Women Should Know About Men, Diamonds from the Rough, Undressed, and I’m Not Playing. Erica was a longtime contributing writer for Psychology Today and Psych Central, and she writes regularly on her Substack, THE DTLA POET. Outside of writing, she enjoys working out, cold plunges, and cooking carne asada.
Subscribe
Subscribe to get my the latest stories in your inbox.
© 2026 all rights reserved. Designed with WordPress.
