I went through something similar when young. It's still difficult to talk or think about. The trauma and shame it left me with was immense. The worst thing is that now, the legacy of this time and the utter neglect and vindictiveness of all services has left a scar running through my life which makes things so hard, but if I struggle mentally people just want to push me back to those services. It's like escaping an abusive relationship and when you struggle with the aftermath people just tell you to go back to the abuser, for the rest of your life.
There used to be a poster on here who'd been through similar. When she posted about it people would get very angry and defensive of services. She was such a kind person, we got talking and stayed in touch. She killed herself after a few years. At her funeral there were so many messages from people far and wide that she'd helped and supported. She was intelligent, compassionate and if she'd been given a chance to heal would have helped so many others. Unlike those services which utterly failed her.
The utter horror, the abuse, of how people with complex trauma histories were/are treated ... it's a scandal, but not enough people care for the full horror to be in the public consciousness, or for those involved to be held accountable.
The done thing when I was attempting to get help was to label traumatised people as having Borderline Personality Disorder, even if they didn't really meet the criteria (many were actually undiagnosed autistic women) ... a sort of caricature, designating them as "untouchable", terrible people who were just attention seeking, manipulative troublemakers and absolutely shouldn't be engaged with. There's a whole vocabulary of gaslighting to go with this - for example, if there were some humane people in services who felt the person should be helped, the individual in question would be accused of intentionally "splitting" the team, and this was viewed as evidence of their terrible manipulative nature.
And yet it was widely known to services that these people were highly likely to have histories of CSA, for example, yet rather than have compassion this was almost treated as a shortcut to deciding "must be BPD" and into the untouchables box with them. (If you look at the supposed traits of BPD it's basically "this is how people behave and feel when they are deeply traumatised". But only a select few patients with precisely the right kind of trauma history, and whose "faces fit" would get a PTSD diagnosis.)
I read so many personal testimonies, blogs, mental health forums, carers accounts, stuff from the policing side, the odd academic study or book that actually covered this stuff... it helped to realise it wasn't me, it was the system, but then again it's unbelievably disempowering to realise what you've been up against. One of the things I read that stuck with me was a blog by a chap who cared for his wife (trauma history, labelled BPD), which gradually followed his utter disbelief and horror at the neglect, cruelty, and utter counter-productivity of services. At one point he was offered ongoing mental health support in his role as a carer, whilst his wife was still unable to access any help at all. He wrote, baffled, that it would be much more helpful all round if SHE could access the support instead!
I had hoped things were better in services by now. Perhaps now it is more a case of zero funding, and therefore neglect, rather than actual hostility from services.
Apologies for the long post.