NOTE: THIS may be Dr Michael E Balkunas’s forgotten relative, also apparently an MD or he plays one on TV, I dunno! All I know is that the men look amazingly alike!  They could be cousins like the twins on that Patty Duke show many many eons ago…What is important to remember is that they DO share a certain number of aberrant genes, and I believe that one of theirs leads to sadism…

(Note that My GOOGLE Review (edited)  follows)

In May 2014, Michael E. Balkunas, MD, chief psychiatrist of the W-1 unit of the Hospital of Central Connecticut in New Britain, angered by my rejection of him because I could not speak (he refused me the use of any writing materials) decided to diagnose me with Borderline Personality Disorder despite having asked for in-put from my family and my outside psychiatrists who all stated that no such BPD or any PD symptoms ever existed. He did this despite my having been admitted with a decades-long Axis 1 diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia (and with PTSD since 2009 due to hospital brutality and abuses).

I believe he added the PD diagnosis in order to justify the implementation of an inhumane Behavioral Treatment Plan which resulted in four-point mechanical restraints and the use of a horrific  and freezing seclusion cell. As my Advance Directive stated clearly, even at the time, none of these modes of “treatment” in the past  ever led to anything but disaster.

At HOCC I was repeatedly secluded and even restrained, naked in a spread-eagle position, in 4-point leather cuffs for many hours, yet never was this because of any behavior indicating “imminent danger of causing serious bodily harm to self or others” as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid require. They did this to me always and only because I was too loud, or because I disrupted the unit “milieu.”

Before I was double-locked into one of W-1’s soundproof isolation cells, the nurses might have the male security guards strip me naked “for safety’s sake.” No matter how compliant I was, they always injected me with three “punishment drugs.” Even when I said I would take them orally or offered my arm, they could choose to push me onto my face on a bare mattress, forcibly hold me down until I couldn’t breathe, and administered them in my buttocks.

I informed the guards about CMS rules regarding appropriate uses of seclusion. To their credit they seemed taken aback, but in the end they were always willing to follow orders and to inflict pain in order to ensure my rapid compliance.

Dr. Balkunas insisted again and again on the diagnosis of BPD yet he never treated me with any modality but antipsychotic drugs and never wrote about my exhibiting any BPD symptoms in his notes. In fact his whole stated rationale for starting commitment procedures to the Connecticut Valley State Hospital was that “antipsychotic drugs take time to work.”

The staff of Nurses and Mental Health Technicians at New Britain General Hospital W-1 and most certainly Dr. Michael Edward Balkunas, Adult Psychiatry Unit Chief, must to be re-educated about the evils of employing punishment or torture in mental health care. They should be given, in addition, many hours of intensive in-service training on trauma-informed treatment. But frankly, as a penalty for the extraordinary and sadistic abuses they long inflicted (knowingly with impunity) upon the mentally ill taken into their care, they deserve nothing less than to summarily lose their jobs and their licenses to practice — for good.