Well, how did it go yesterday? All in all, I would say it was a very successful meeting. Certainly it went better than I expected, and better than the disastrous meeting a year ago at Middlesex Hospital with Dr Grillo et al. I fear I irritated Dr Mucha a bit at least at first. Why? Because I think he felt defensive and tried to tell me how much he did on my behalf and my mobile facial features (I don’t hide my feelings behind a good psychiatrist poker face) let him know at once that I didn’t believe him. Why should I? One, it was completely self-serving for him to tell me — as if he had been some sort of knight in shining armor behind the scenes — how much good he had done for me, when he let them restrain me day after day for many many hours at a time, and keep me in what he himself acknowledged was on-going seclusion for the majority of the hospital stay. How dare he tell me how much he did for me, and then when I said they “tortured me” actually scoff, “Restraints aren’t torture!”

Ask my brother, Phil, an extremely humane psychiatrist who would disagree, and would rather die than be restrained, but I went one better. I quoted Juan Mendez the Special Rapporteur to the Human Rights Council at the UN who just this past March spoke/wrote specifically about psychiatric patients and how the use of solitary confinement of any duration and any use of restraints, forced medication and forced ECT is torture. He didn’t say tantamount to torture he said that are torture, period. And I would remind Dr Mucha and Mrs. Blair that until you have experienced these things — and I defy you to try any of these modes of your so-called treatment– you have no way of knowing. All you have to do is look at the expression on the face of the woman in the picture I did yesterday.

From the way I was treated, under Dr Mucha’s supposedly magnanimous supervision, at the IOL (depicted in that drawing) anyone could tell that the people “caring for me” did not consider that I was truly human or “felt” their torture in the same way they would have. Because if they had believed that, they never would have done what they did to me, unless they really did deliberately, maliciously want to torture me. I don’t know which it is. Dr Mucha and Mrs Blair say the Donnelly 2 South unit staff are good people who wanted to help me….So which is it? That they didn’t consider me a real person, just a diagnosis and not really human, so they thought I didn’t feel the torture (this despite my exquisitely lucid PAD that spells everything out in detail) they inflicted, or they were actually malevolent and wanted me to suffer? I tremble to have to choose between the two!

Either way, the torture was inflicted and despite numerous calls to Carmen Diaz, the patient advocate, (another name for the Hospital employee who works FOR the hospital not the patient, really) no one, not a soul, came to help me. I called outside sources too, but except for my advocate at the dept of Protection and Advocacy, who is not a lawyer and has little power besides that of complaint, there is not an agency or organization in this entire state of CT that can or would help me. Not a legal aid group or a lawyer besides the court appointed one to fight commitment that would even come in and talk to me about what was happening. I was ALL ALONE, yet Dr Mucha’s knickers got in a twist because I didn’t praise and thank him for all his work behind the scenes on my behalf.

Well, I am sorry, but 1) Dr Mucha is the Director of the IOL and he is IN CHARGE. He did not need to work behind the scenes. He could have spoken to Dr Taylor about her treatment of me at ANY time. If he thought she was not treating me well or using restraints in an unnecessary or wrong-headed way, he ought to have spoken out at once, openly. Period. 2) I needed someone on my side OPENLY. I needed someone to come to me and tell me that they were going to stop this nonsense and get me some real help that no one was going to restrain me again. That they knew my advance directive was meaningful and that things had GONE TOO FAR.

None of that happened. None of that happened. And while plenty apparently did behind my back, I am not responsible for what I was not told and did not know. Though I do appreciate it now that I do know. For instance that Bev, the voodoo princess, who I was terrified of, not because of her voodoo, but because she was dangerous to me as a staff member, having taken an intense dislike to me, indeed such a hatred of me that she was conspiring to kill me…she was removed from D2S unbeknownst to me for as long as I was there. Simply because I had expressed such intense fear of her. That was something I did not know about, but I am very grateful they heard me and did something for me in that regard. Took my fear seriously rather than tortured me with her presence. On the other hand, if only, if ONLY they had told me that she would not be back for the duration, I would have slept better! Why not tell me? For nights I slept fearfully, since I had no way of knowing she would not be on the night shift!

I wish Dr Mucha et al would look into the Open Dialogue method of dealing with psychosis. It will never be implemented in full in this country, and certainly not in hospitals. It is not a hospital-based method in any event. In fact, it is anti hospital and empties hospitals rather quickly. But some parts of it would be eye-opening, such as always including the patient in treatment planning, how that helps bring clarity to even the most disturbed person. How it involves their being NO secrets, nothing hidden, not even disagreements between treaters as to how to proceed. How wonderful it would have been for me to have actually heard Dr Mucha in conference with Dr Amy Taylor et al discussing the use of restraints or seclusion…Do you really think anything would have continued to happen, or that things would have proceeded apace if I had been included in those case conferences about me? I highly doubt it! Oh, if only I had been….I could have told them so much, but of course they didn’t even think to include me when talking about me! How stupid of them, how completely stupid. But I wasn’t a person, just an animal, just a diagnosis.

Anyhow, at the end of our meeting, which did go well after we got off the torture topic, Dr Mucha asked me if there was anything I wanted to end on. I thought a minute and said, “Well, you know, I want to go back to the subject of restraints and seclusion. You continue to use them because you won’t stop using them. You say it is a slow process, that it takes time. But it isn’t a slow process. You cannot stop using them as long as you allow their use at all. All it takes to stop using restraints and seclusion is to STOP USING THEM. Period. Once you don’t have the notion that, Oh, well, we can always use restraints on that unruly patient, so it’s okay, we don’t have to plan in advance about how to deal with her or him if things get out of hand…once you can’t resort to restraints at all, then you must think imaginatively in advance about how to deal with patients and you will find a way. You always do. Necessity is the mother of invention.”

So that is my challenge to the Institute of Living. Stop dillydallying around and pretending that you are reducing the use of restraints and seclusion. Don’t tell me that you are only using them in the geriatric population to reduce falls, because that is not true and that is not really the sort of thing that I am talking about and you know it. You don’t use seclusion and restraint to reduce falls for “an hour” anyway…THree times a week is not a reduction. Once a year is a reduction! But I want you to NEVER use restraints or seclusion again. I want you to understand that to restrain a patient or to use a show of force is to torture someone. Get this one thing straight, to deliberately frighten a patient with a “show of force” is an act of  terrorism and has no place in a hospital. (In a prison, maybe, though I would argue against treating any human being like that even in prisons…) And when you torture someone esp a patient who is already suffering and frightened, you make her or him worse, sicker and likely to be MORE violent and less predictable and traumatized, with the subsequent behavior that is known to result after trauma. NOTHING good comes from treating a patient with violence.

I don’t know if the IOL will listen to me, a nobody, a nothing worth less than the paper I am printed on. Not worth a red cent or a paper nickel. No lawyer gives a sh_ t about me, I am not worth their time or effort because I am not worth a stinking dollar. So why would the venerable IOL pay attention to anything I have to say? (I am not stupid for all that, but genius IQs are a dime a dozen, alas… and Mucha and Blair too are no slouches, even if they persist in the delusion that to treat patients with violence is acceptable, and not torture, really.)

LISTEN to ME, LISTEN TO ME! I know what I am talking about. if you don’t you will continue to cause more harm than good. If you do, you will break new ground and start a revolution that cannot but do good. That’s all I have to say.