you get the idea….no violence, just a scornful set of nurses and aides and a security guard willing to do anything he was asked…and chaos broke loose with terrible consequences.
Trio of Psychiatric Abuse Collages: encounter, restraint and seclusion
Category Archives: Art
New Art: Moth Whimsy – Butterfly Wolf!
Transformation into the Vermont Butterwolf!
Nude Schizophrenic in Restraints While Bored Nurse Looks On
Actually I “deserved” four-point restraints. I was “violent.”
But I want to explain what “deserving” restraints and being “violent” at New Britain General Hospital (Hospital of Central Connecticut) means in 2014.
I also want to tell you something else even more important: In Connecticut, the staff at almost every psychiatric unit or hospital will insist that “we only use seclusion and restraints when essential, when a patient is absolutely out of control and extremely violent, and cannot be controlled in any other way.”
Trust me, I know, because they have said this to me.
But what you need to know is that they are NOT talking about some 300 pound man hopped up on PCP, waving a machete. For one thing, that person, whom I believe to be largely mythical at least in ordinary psych units, or if real now largely confined to correctional and law enforcement settings, the person they are talking about, the rule, not the exception to the rule of the “extremely violent” person whom they claim must be restrained due to lack of any other method of control, is, to put it grammatically correctly, I.
And let me tell you about me. I will turn 62 years of age in November. I am 5 feet 3 inches tall, weigh, maybe 110 pounds on a good day, and have been consistently described as “poorly muscled.” I am also unable to use my left arm for much of anything, due to injuries sustained at the Institute of Living in 2013, including a small tear in my rotator cuff and possibly more than that– a fact the HOCC nurses/security guards knew and used to their advantage when subduing me. I also want you to know that I am a decades-long vegetarian on the principle of non-violence — to people as well as to animals. I have opposed the death penalty since I was a nine year old child (when I first learned of it) and do not even believe in the principle of prisons, or in treating our convicted “criminals” the way we do now.
Yet in every single hospital I have been in since 2000, and of course for years before then (“before they knew better”) I have been brutally secluded and restrained multiple times as “OOC” — out of control — and “violent.” In addition to either physically holding me down by brute force, one person to each limb and one to my torso (this was at the only 2 hospitals that did not actually resort to mechanical four-point restraints– compared to the dozen others that did), they would routinely inject me with one to three drugs as chemical restraints.
I am the rule, not the exception to it, of their supposedly “extremely violent mental patient” who is so OOC — out of control — that Connecticut hospitals refuse to eliminate the use of restraints and seclusion, because they “might need them.” I am the typical example of the person they claim they absolutely must have the right to resort to violence against, for their own safety and mine.
Okay, so am I truly violent? What did I do to deserve their brutality? Or should we say, their “protective measures?” Well, at HOCC, in the Emergency Department, this is what happened, and I kid you not: I came in by ambulance, involuntarily, in the sense that I did not want to go but was brought in by EMTs and given the “either the easy way or the hard way” choice by police. But I did not resist it or fight. I was not restrained in the ambulance. in fact, I was mute and merely handed them my med sheet and my detailed Advanced Directive, on the first 2 pages of which is the important information about my trauma history and the critical need to know points about how to deal with me.
When I arrived I was quickly shunted to the psychiatric crisis section and into a curtained off cubicle. No one took my cell phone from me, or the single book of my artwork that I had managed to bring with me. So I texted everyone I could for as long as I could. For a while I tried to obtain a crayon to communicate with, eventually and in desperation, writing with ketchup on the outer carton of my dinner container, begging for something to write with. Instead of helping me out, the head ER nurse penned me a note saying that I would not get anything to write with, that either I spoke out loud or she would not listen to me. How very odd and evil that she wrote this to me! She didn’t speak to me, she wrote it, as if I were deaf, even while saying that she knew I could speak and would not talk with me unless I did so… The idiocy of that act just sends sparks of rage through my brain even now. She later spied my art book next to me on the gurney, and suddenly rushed me, snatched it out from under my thigh and raced away with it, holding it triumphantly as if she had won a prize. I was incensed. Why hadn’t she just asked me for it? And how did I know what she was going to do with it? Would she keep it safe and sound? Actually, though, I mostly just reacted instinctively: Someone had stolen the only thing I had of my own in my possession, and she had simply snatched it away from me, without a word or even a polite request. So I did as anyone would do, I think. I raced up behind her and snatched it back! Well, that was a mistake. That was bad, that was bad bad bad. I heard people groan and swear. I was grabbed from behind by two security guards and the book was wrenched from me again.
Remember, I was mute so I couldn’t say anything, but I tried to resist, tried to gesture that the book was mine and she had no right too take it from me. Instead of explaining that she would protect it and take care of my things, people started talking about how I had attacked the nurse, had assaulted her…She told them to put me in seclusion. The guards dragged me, resisting in panic, towards this hidden room, and I heard another nurse warn them of my medical history with a torn left rotator cuff. Hearing this, the guard on my left side, grabbed my shoulder and wrenched it higher until I let out a blood curdling scream, wordless but vocal. “Aha! I thought you could make sounds!” he said in triumph, wrenching me again until I sobbed in agony. Then they dumped me in the seclusion room, with only a hospital johnnie on me, and locked the door behind them.
Even though I had no words to speak my rage and panic, I screamed and screamed. They came through the door with needles, held me down and injected me. Then, when in a rage reaction, I disrobed, they decided to four-point restrain me. I heard a guard say, “we really have no reason to restrain her, you know.” But the other said, “It doesn’t matter, we will find a reason.” So they did . Terrified, I did not resist, because they held me down by the left shoulder causing me so much pain I was afraid they would hurt me permanently. I also hoped upon hope that if I didn’t resist, they would let me out quickly. Believe me, I had been through this routine enough to know what to try to do to minimize the consequences and the damage…
Fast forward to my being sent to the psych unit, about which I no longer had any choice, being labelled violent now and OOC as well as mute and schizophrenic (I hate that word but they used it). When the doctor who admitted me, Dr. Michael Balkunas, came to see me the next day, I was still mute. He asked me how I was and I gestured my need for a writing implement to answer his questions. He coldly told me that he would not speak with me if I would not talk out loud. Then he got up and walked out the door, with nothing more to say. I was by then so upset and outraged that I got up off the bed, which was the only furniture in the room, and slammed the door after him. I meant only to make a noise to express my frustration, but unfortunately it caught him in the shoulder. This was not intentional, not that I recall, though I confess I was so enraged by his dismissal of me, especially after the violence inflicted on me not once but twice the night before in the ER on his orders, that it is possible I wanted the door to make contact with him. What I know is that I most certainly did not intend to injure him. I only wanted him to know, before he walked away from me, that I was angry and “speaking” to him the only way I could. Dr. Balkunas’s reaction was itself swift and violent in the extreme, and extremely personal. Enraged, his face beet-red, he bellowed at the nurses to order guards to force me into “Seclusion! Seclusion! Restraints! Restraints!”
Before I could do anything or even assent to walk there, I was bodily dragged down the hall by my injured shoulder, to one of the most horrifying seclusion suites I have ever seen. A set of two cells, each lockable from the outside, completely barren and cold except for a concrete bed set into the concrete wall, with a plastic mattress on it. Nothing else. No commode, no bed pan, nothing but two obvious cameras in the ceiling, but no obvious way for me to communicate with anyone. They locked me in, locked the second door a room away, so I was thoroughly alone and soundproofed from the rest of the unit, and walked away. I panicked immediately, and urinated on the floor in my panic. I took off my clothes. I screamed — wanting someone to talk to me, I wanted warm dry clothing to wear, but there was no response. I screamed and screamed. Nothing. Not a word. I did not even understand at that time that there was an intercom they could hear me through. I thought I was completely alone and abandoned, but for the eye of the camera. So I did what I had to. I KNEW what would happen, I knew this because it was SOP. But I was freezing in there, with the A/C on full bore and at 110 pounds and a history of frost bite I cannot tolerate being cold. I also had NO inkling as to how long they would keep me there, one hour or sixteen. All I knew was that I could not tolerate the isolation, one, and I would not survive the freezing temperature, two.
So I took the urine-wet johnnie I had taken off and I rolled it into a rope and tied it around my neck. I pulled on it as if to strangle myself. It was useless of course, because I couldn’t keep pulling it without letting go and then I would breathe. And I didn’t want to die, I just wanted it to LOOK as if I were strangling myself so someone would come in and I could explain that I was COLD! Well, finally the intercom crackled to life and someone said, “Pamela, take that away from your neck now.” I gestured something that clearly indicated, “I’m freezing cold!” The voice spoke again, “If you don’t remove that from your neck, we will restrain you.” I answered silently but in clear gestures, “I need something warm to wear!” Well, this was a battle I was destined to lose, of course. And eventually but not so quickly as to indicate that they were seriously concerned about my safety, guards and nurses entered the room, along with a gurney, and they did as they had threatened, injuring me in the process. They grabbed me and hoisted me onto the gurney and locked me into leather restraint cuffs, in a painful and illegal spread-eagle position, despite my groans of pain and protest, then they refused even to cover me with a blanket. Someone threw a small towel over my lower torso and that was all. They they positioned an aide at the door and trooped out. I screamed my lungs out, and gestured my desperate need for water and warmth, but the aide simply ignored me, saying she wasn’t permitted to talk to me, and couldn’t get me what I needed. That was how violent I was. And that is how the most violent patients are treated and why they MUST be restrained, for their own safety and the safety of others…Right? NOT! ALL the other times I was secluded it was because i was disturbing the peace of the unit. I was loud and complaining, or simply “agitated” because i walked the halls too much.
That was it. That is the rule not the exception, and if you read my posts about my incarceration at the Hartford Hospital Institute of Living in the winter of 2013 you will get a similar picture. I am not the 300 pound crazed man on PCP wielding a weapon, no, I am a small, elderly woman who is non-compliant with the unit milieu and wants only to be warm…that is about it. But each and every hospital claimed that I had to be restrained, that they had NO alternative, that I was so violent that they had no choice, even though it often took only one or two people to do so, because I didn’t resist or say a word, just lay there while they pinioned me to the bed. Now you tell me that restraints and seclusion are necessary ‘modalities of treatment” that cannot be done away with because they might be needed in an emergency. Emergency schmergency. I am that emergency and they were and are NEVER needed, EVER.
Hospital Seclusion Room…plus
When I was at New Britain General Hospital in the spring of 2014, the security guards stripped me naked and left me in the freezing and barren seclusion room…This is a depiction of a younger woman largely because no one gives a damn about what happens to a 61 year old woman anywhere..but the seclusion room is pretty danged accurate.
New Art: Papier Mache Goose and Turtle Painting
Sad Bald Woman: New Art
Terrified Patient in Restraints
AUDIO Interview with Pamela Spiro Wagner: WNPR on Connecticut Hospitals’ Use of Restraints and Seclusion
(***SEE PAMELA’S COMMENTS AT BOTTOM OF PAGE…)
Connecticut Hospitals Responding to Psychiatric Restraint Numbers
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View SlideshowPamela Spiro Wagner and her art.Davis Dunavin WNPR
“They don’t want you to get out. They pull [restraints] as tight as possible to the sides of the bed.”
Pamela Spiro Wagner
Pamela Spiro Wagner
Pamela Spiro Wagner’s apartment is full of art she’s made while in psychiatric care. One piece dominates the room. It looks like a painting at first. It shows a threadbare seclusion room and a restraining bed.
“That’s made of Vogue magazines. If you look at it, you’ll see there’s a little label of Prada leather on the leather restraints, which was done on purpose,” Wagner said. She made it while alone in a hospital seclusion room. The magazines were the only art supplies she had.
Wagner has schizophrenia. She’s been in and out of Connecticut hospitals for decades, and she knows what it’s like to be restrained. “They use leather, or rubber, or plastic, or whatever restraints that they wrap around your wrists, usually tight because they don’t want you to get out. They pull them as tight as possible to the sides of the bed,” she said.
Wagner was put in four-point restraints. That means each limb is bolted to the bed, and she said she’s stayed there for nearly a day at a time. “I would just scream from the base of my lungs,” she said, “like the screams that if you had any heart, your heart would break if you heard me scream.”
“Restraint is Pretty Traumatic”
Patricia Rehmer, Commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services, said the department has cut down on restraint since receiving a federal grant in 2008. “We know,” she said. “The literature is clear; the clients are clear. Seclusion and restraint is usually a pretty traumatic event. If we had our way, there would be no seclusion and restraint. We’d love to get to zero, but that’s not always possible.”
The Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services oversees state hospitals in Bridgeport, New Haven, Hartford, and Middletown. Rehmer said that because patients stay longer at state hospitals, doctors and nurses have more time to work with them on ways to avoid restraint. “Frankly, there are differences between our hospitals, our hospital beds, and general hospital beds, for example,” she said.
Read C-HIT Report: State Restrains Psychiatric Patients at High Rate
Restraining or secluding patients used to be commonplace in psychiatric facilities, but ten years after a series of deaths nationwide, there’s been a push to lessen the time patients spend restrained. Federal data released earlier this month showed that Connecticut’s rates of restraint are still high compared to most of the country – more than double the national average. The state ranks eleventh nationwide, and third for use of restraints among the elderly.
Connecticut Institutions Adapt
Bridgeport Hospital topped the list statewide. The hospital has a large geriatric unit, and the numbers were high for elderly patients.
“We realized about a year and a half ago that we were really having a problem,” said Ryan O’Connell, Bridgeport Hospital’s vice president of performance and risk management. He pointed out that the numbers only go up to the middle of 2013, and said that the hospital started changing its practices since then. “It was much more common for us to go to some type of restraint,” he said.
O’Connell said the image of the barren room and four leather straps is all wrong at Bridgeport. They’re mostly trying to keep patients with dementia from wandering off and into danger. “I think it’s really important,” he said, “that nobody thinks that we were tying people down [by their] hands and feet.”
Bridgeport is moving toward something called comfort rooms, with colorful wallpaper, toys, games, or comfortable furniture. They’re becoming common alternatives in a lot of institutions, like Connecticut Valley Hospital in Middletown — a state hospital that cut back on using restraints by about 88 percent in the past decade.
In 2002, a patient died after being restrained at CVH. The hospital conducted investigations after the death, but Director Charles Dike said they’d already decided to make a change before it happened. “Our target is to make sure we use it as sparingly as possible, only when it is absolutely necessary, and that we discontinue it as quickly as possible,” he said.
CVH started using comfort rooms years ago. Dike said that instead of putting a patient in restraints, they try to encourage a patient to spend a little time alone doing something relaxing. He said, “If somebody says to me, when I’m not doing so well, I like to go into my room and play music, and that helps me calm down…” He said that nurses will remember, and bring it up if the patient starts to lose control.
Dike doesn’t expect to stop using restraints. He said there will always be outliers — patients who come straight from emergency rooms and prisons.
Ellen Blair is the nurse director at Hartford’s Institute of Living, which is part of the Hartford Hospital system. Figures for 2013 show Hartford Hospital restrains patients at a little over the state average, but she said they’ve cut back since then thanks to new training programs and more comfort rooms.
Blair said that when a patient does go into restraints, they’re looked after. “I personally go and make sure I know that patient,” she said. “We all talk about it at least every couple of hours, because we don’t want to keep it going any longer than we have to.” She said patients aren’t left alone, and that restraint is only used as a last resort when patients are dangerous to themselves or others.
“Every day,” Blair said, “we come here thinking, okay, we’re going to have a good day. We’re going to prevent people from getting agitated and having to go to that level.” Restraint, however, remains a last resort these hospitals said they don’t plan to take off the table entirely.
AVENGING ANGEL: NEW ART
Lots to say about the situation I am in up here in Vermont, where my assistant, the person hired to help me and make sure things go okay turned out to be a common criminal. But I am too tired and worn out by having to deal with the mess left in her wake to write about it. Suffice it to say that she stole my debit/credit card number and racked up multiple charges, was apparently drinking even in the mornings without my knowing it, and driving me at the same time. She had a hand bag full of narcotics not all of them prescribed to her, but even if they had been, what was she doing, taking narcotics and drinking and driving?!
Things were even worse than that, but as I said, I am exhausted and cannot go into it all now. Needless to say, she has been fired and is gone, is out of here…But she has left a mess and misery in her wake all around. What a mess maker! And I think she was the one who was stealing from me all the while last winter when I had people staying with me to prevent a hospitalization…Why did I once trust her implicitly? Where do I find these people and WHY do I trust them at all?
I should have known something was wrong when I saw her handbag full of Percocet and Xanax and VIcodin and fentanyl patches etc. It was ridiculous…and then to have her buy a case of beer? But I thought “well, a beer once in a while is harmless.”…I didn’t know she was drinking at breakfast and also while driving…I am such a dimwit!
Curling Ocean Waves in Red Room: Painting in Gouache
Not sure what to make of this painting, but I enjoyed doing it…What do you think? It is 8 by 12 inches, approximately, in gouache on Ampersand board (essentially gessoed masonite).
Rocking Away a Tidal Wave of Troubles: a Painting
I was told by Marc and Steffie, with whom I am staying, that the sea or water represents the unconscious in some schools of thought. Which certainly makes sense to me, given how I titled this very small painting. I painted the blackbird in the stormy sky last, and can see that as a sort of link between the world of life and death, like Van Gogh’s black birds in the fields in his final paintings. But also the notion that the rocking chair can calm the stormy waters, indeed the raging tidal wave of waters outside the room, so that they become only waves but not so disturbing inside, seems to me significant. So, two questions for the pychologically or analytically minded: Why is the room red, one, and why is the chair empty? (I am serious. If you have any ideas or suggestions, I would be curious and eager for your and any interpretation. No need, just interested.)
In any event, in my sleeplessness last niight, I panicked, because I “knew” I couldn’t paint. so I put aside my decent ampersand boards, coated this bit of matboard with black to “ruin” it first, then just went to town, painting the first thing that came to mind. The chair was in the living room, but the rest was purely my imagination. If I knew what I was doing, I confess I would have painted the chair last, ON TOP of the background, but of course, I had no idea what I was doing, so I had to paint it and repaint it as ideas came to me…Hence the messiness! Hope you enjoy!
Peony Painting
Artwork in Progress and Red Rum Updated
CLick to enlarge
Pencil Art done under Barbaric Conditions at Hospital of Central CT: Brutal Aversive Conditioning.
CLICK ON THE PICTURES TO ENLARGE THEM.
There were few rewards for behavior that toed the line at New Britain General Hospital (HOCC). Mostly it was punishment. If I was found with even a stub of a forbidden pencil, I was carried off to the Supermax seclusion cell, stripped naked and left alone.
At that point, being teeth-chatteringly blue with cold, I would swat a nurse in such a way that she would feel assaulted and bring on the goon squad of “I want to hurt someone today” guards to put me in four point restraints.
Why would I induce this? Because then they would at least cover me up afterwards with the mercy of a sheet, for modesty not warmth mind you, and I would beg for a blanket in vain. But at least my body would be protected from head to toe from the blasts of the A/C up full bore, and I could rest after I had had screamed out my lungs and my despair for a lonely twenty minutes or more.
No one cared, no one heard or paid any attention. The doors were double, and the cell was utterly soundproof. NO one ever even knew I was locked in there. When my screaming was too heart-wrenching for the softer ones of the staff down the hall in the room where they had retired to, they simply turned down the monitor and intercom so they didn’t have to listen.
I know, because I heard when the telephone rang, telling the person sitting outside the inner door they could turn it back on now (after I had quieted down). This was brutality of the nth degree. But they always called it treatment for safety, though I mentioned the CMS regs to the security guards one day as they were inflicting their usual pain in order to bring me to the room, and they stopped in their tracks.
“You’re kidding,” one said, “Its true that the only legal reason for seclusion is Imminent Danger to self or others?” (I had been brought there for disturbing the peace…)
I nodded, Look it up. She looked gravely at the others. but proceeded o do what she had been ordered to do anyway. And I proceeded to behave in a wildly immodest and terrified fashion likewise…knowing I would be left alone and freezing for at least two to three hours, no matter how fast I calmed myself.
They didn’t care. it was PROTOCOL…
New Poem: About Mutism
PHILOMELA* edited after months of mutism
I haven’t spoken out loud in several weeks
bullied into a frightened by myself silence.
Though what does “speechless” mean
in these days of text-to-speech software,
with its choice of Vikki or Samantha or Victoria voices,
Or when I’m possessed of a blogging platform
and writing fluency enough to speak my mind to my heart’s content?
Still, being mute is not a manner of speaking.
i tell you I could speak, I can talk. Nothing physical impedes
my tongue, or locks my lips,
except my brain’s hallucinated snarls, like Jerry Mahoney
and Charlie McCarthy thrown into surrounding shadows
ordering up this stoppage, blockage, blockade.
Now, like that fire-fangled bird at the end of the mind
feathered unlucky, tarred, locked in golden cage
my voice remains only a memento
of everything that I wanted
to say, but couldn’t get out, I couldn’t get out, I couldn’t get it out…
*In the Greek myth, Philomela is raped and has her tongue cut out by Tereus, the husband of her sister Procne. Rendered mute, Philomela weaves a tapestry detailing the crime to inform her sister, who, enraged, takes revenge on Tereus. At the end of the story, both Procne and Philomela are transformed into birds. Some versions have Philomela become a nightingale, the female of which does not sing. In other versions she becomes a swallow, which is a non-singing bird.
Red Rum in Red Room (or Why is that Cat Scared of Me?): a painting by Pamwagg
Yes I actually managed to paint this picture — in gouache, not oils, true, but I did it, I picked up paints and brushes and from start to finish made a complete painting. This is a big step for me. True, I did the running shoes picture a bit earlier but that was really just a sketch. I have been drawing for so long, and so scared of painting that it feels really BIG that I did this, good or bad a picture though it might be. Sooooo, what’ja think? (By the way, it is a self-portrait – not flattering but hey…)
BARACK OBAMA SNUBBED HIS PORTRAIT. DO YOU HATE IT AS MUCH AS HE DID?
I am serious. I sent this portrait of Barack Obama to the White House in January 2014, and only just received a small form card, saying nothing personal, only that the “gift was received” from the American people, thank you very much…and Obama and Michelle’s signatures scrawled on the bottom, as if that means anything to me. He clearly didn’t send it to me personally to thank me for any portrait. WTF. I spent HOURS drawing that very closely detailed portrait, first in graphite, then I had to copy it, before I hand painted the background and certain details over the copy. I am really really upset. EVERYONE i know here loved that portrait and encouraged me to send it to Obama, but I was worried that he wouldn’t like it or perhaps it would be destroyed by the Secret Service because of looking for anthrax or something stupid like that under the swarovski crystal that are glued on the background. Like i said, WTF. I am never sending anyone important any of my artwork again. The wealthy and important clearly don’t get the rules of common courtesy, do they?
Impromptu Starbucks Sketch (Hey TexasTom, If you are brave enough, so can I be…!)
The next one is a work in progress, about four point restraints and abject terror, if I can accomplish what I want to do in my usual pencil painting… SO far so good, but we will see.
Horse Drawing
First Poem in my New Book (unpublished so far)
TO THE READER
Last line inspired by Helen Vendler
who may be sitting as I am
in a green recliner with a cup of tea
staring out through the porch
to a darkened streetlamp outside the diner,
with a book in her lap, mine, I hope
the only one I feel I should have to mention
if I mention a book in a poem I write;
to the reader, the nitpicker, the one
who may be wondering why
on p. 47 there are two ands, one
right after another, and whose fault that is;
and to the reader, who may be tired
after a long ride home on the bus
after dark and a meal not worth mentioning
who picks up my book but finds his eyes
closing before he has opened the cover,
I say: Forgive me
I am only a writer sitting in a green recliner
with a cup of tea, I can’t explain
those two ands or the mysterious
streetlamp or warm the feet of a tired
reader in his bed. I can only put music on
and tell him stories to make movies
turn in his head, to let him wake
with the sudden understanding that poetry
may be all it takes to make a life—
well, my life at any rate, and maybe his,
and maybe the nitpicker’s and yours, too,
staring through the porch to the streetlamp
where what happens so mysteriously is poetry—
and the whole night is wrapped
in the words spoken by two strangers
meeting there, or not spoken, which is poetry too,
and all of us who listen are waiting
for the music of what is to happen.
