It has been a week since my discharge from the Adult Unit at N Hospital. After a week of recuperation and stabilization at home I feel compelled to write you via the open forum of a letter on this blog. It may or may not get your attention directly but I feel certain it will be read by someone on the N staff. Perhaps that way it will eventually reach your eyes. If not, so be it.
Our encounter on Monday the 27th of August was extremely brief and not particularly noteworthy. While I have much to say that never got said then, I owe you nothing, and by the same token, expect nothing from you either. That said, to any of my readers who want to understand the intent: I write partly in my defense against what I feel were gross misunderstandings (leading to unnecessary trauma), and partly to record publicly – on record as it were – what really happened over the last 4-6 weeks.
Please, Dr W, or any other reader: Do not dismiss this letter out of hand as the peevish complaints of a disgruntled but troublesome patient. I understand how you might be tempted to do so, especially because you — or at least Dr P and L.H. APRN – claimed in their infinite wisdom to be able to detect signs of an Axis II Borderline Personality disorder (despite the concomitant presence of an Axis I psychosis ). I know that labelling me “borderline” was always just another way to dismiss me and my concerns as “mere,” that is to say as meaningless or manipulative, the “mere” attention-seeking of a manipulative PITA*.
Nevertheless, it ought to have been obvious, it ought to have been needless to say — but clearly was not — that no one could possibly know what my baseline personality was like from the past four weeks at N nor in fact from any of my past four stays there. What was clear to many early on, including me, was that this hospital stay at N abounded not in norms but in extremes, from start to finish, extremes I might add both on my part and on the part of hospital staff as well.
My friends and family know that I am not generally someone who has screaming fits or throws things or strips naked and parades around in public, all modesty thrown to the wind. So too, N staff: So far as I knew or had seen since 2010, they rarely became physical with patients and not once in all the times I had been there had physical contact devolved into anything even resembling a fight or violence. Instead, kindness, compassion and empathy were the primary tools. The best staff were as slow to lose their tempers or act on negative emotions as a live gecko was to do a cancan under the noonday desert sun.
I knew those things, and until August I believed it automatically made N a superior place, a sanctuary immune to the sorts of failings I’d found in so many other hospitals. That was why I insisted on N this time even though it meant waiting two and a half days at W Hospital Emergency Room, never moving off the gurney in the barren cubicle I was placed in, monitored by a camera not so subtly hidden in the large TV screen. I knew of no other hospital where I could be safe, both from myself under the influence of command hallucinations, and just as important, from any staff impulses towards the use of violence to achieve control or discipline.
How could I have known that from the first morning after I arrived, staff behavior was to be stunningly “un-N-like,” as erratic and extreme as my own would turn out to be. My entire stay was in fact characterized by physical assaults by staff, punishment and trauma that began the moment I woke up that first morning. I responded poorly to this, as anyone might, by regressing into more and more primitive behaviors. But how did “you,” that is to say, the N staff, respond to me? Not by taking a step back and seeing how things could change for the better. No, instead, you, they decided to blame the victim, to say, “She’s misbehaving, she’s ‘doing these things on purpose,’ she is volatile, unpleasant and emotionally unstable…” Et Voila! There I was, diagnosed, improperly but officially with “Borderline Personality Disorder!”
As many of my readers know, I have written extensively here, at wordpress.com, Wagblog, about psychiatric units and hospitals and have until now always held N in the highest esteem. N was always the gold standard, the touchstone against which all other hospitals in the state were measured. I believed that N had the right ideas, the right philosophy about patient care, hired the right people and trained them properly. I trusted that the hospital understood the critical importance of trauma-informed treatment. Ever since my 1st hospitalization at N in December 2010 -January 2011, when S. H. was director of nursing, I felt I’d found a truly safe place, an asylum in the best sense of the word, where troubled patients would never be brutalized by staff more bent on coercion and a lust for power than compassionate care.
I have been hospitalized at N four times now. The first three times bore out these high expectations, but this last time was unmitigated disaster, revealing how much things have changed, and how, under the auspices of the wrong leaders even N has been willing to permit a few “bad eggs” to damage patients with impunity, rather than take an honest look at burned out employees – including those at the highest levels, RNs and psychiatrists included –keeping them tenured out of a misplaced loyalty, refusing either to re-educate them or to remove them from direct patient contact.
There were three separate instances of physical violence to which I was subjected between July 31 and August 27th . The very first morning after I had been admitted and placed on one to one for safety, I remember I sleepily turned over in bed and scrunched down again to catch a little more sleep when the person sitting with me suddenly insisted that I place my hands outside the covers where she could see them. This was a strange request, since they had been under the covers all night, right up until that second. Dumbfounded, and freezing cold, I resisted and ignored her, fairly certain that she would not make a federal case of the request once I fell asleep. Instead, she repeated herself, louder and louder. She actually approached the bed and tried to bully me verbally into putting my hands above the bedclothes, telling me that being on constant observation required that my hands be visible at all times. This was news to me. Never in my experience at N had anyone required such a thing. I continued to resist, though any impulse to sleep had left me by then. By this point, it was strictly on principle.
Well, she was intent on winning the battle and instead of negotiating a solution called in reinforcements in the persons of two male mental health workers. Unable to verbally force me to uncover myself, they initiated physical contact, attempting to pry my blanketed fingers away from the blanket in which I had wrapped myself. The female stood aside, but continued to threaten to deprive me of all coverings if I did not comply with her order. The tussle went on. I vehemently kicked at them whenever they laid hands on me, though I spoke not a word the entire time. At last, they gave in and left me alone. I never found out why. Perhaps they saw the brutality they were inflicting on me. Or perhaps they were called off. I do not know. All I know is that that particular rule was never again inflicted on me.
After they left, and a new sitter arrived, I lay in bed, breathing hard and feeling bitterly betrayed. What the F just happened? Dismayed and disappointed, I could scarcely believe I was really at N and not at the torture chamber in the south eastern part of the state again. The consequences of this betrayal left me physically and psychologically speechless. What had happened to “my” N? Try though I might to let myself talk, I remained mute for 8 days.
I won’t go into the long and involved story of the second assault, except to say that it involved poor judgment on the part of my social worker and evening nurse. OTOH, an assertion of power by another nurse assigned to me nearly twenty four hours later was overkill and an act of punishment and revenge. She can deny it left, right and silly, and maybe her RN superiors believe it, especially because they have a stake in it. But I know contempt and the smile of sweet revenge when I see it, and I knew the enjoyment in her smile that Wednesday. Assault #2, which involved a rather violent physical altercation and restraint, nevertheless had a bearing on assault #3. What follows is the story of that third assault on my person. In places I quote almost verbatim from my journal entries, which I wrote at the time. When I am not quoting, I assure you that the account is very similar to the journal’s “horse’s mouth” and merely states the same things I wrote there, but with better words and fewer punctuation marks.
I do not remember how it started. I suspect I had been screaming or yelling about something. All I know is that the RN Supervisor for the afternoon, a woman I will called D came into my room after my upset and just stood there. At one point in her obdurate silence, she accused me of an unprovoked attack on it the nurse, K, who had taken revenge on me the day before. She called K one of her “ best nurses.” Incensed at this I assured her she didn’t know the whole situation. When she said she knew enough, I told her to leave my room.
“I’m staying right here,” she said giving me a baleful look. I pointed out that I already had a 1: 1 and did not need a 2nd person in the room. She only continued glaring at me.
“Get out,” I screamed, “get out of here!”
No response. No reaction, except for a slight recoil from the loudness of my voice.
I threatened her then. I admit it and I am not proud of it. I threatened her. I took up a box of crayons and looked as if to hit her. Everyone cried out, “No, no, P!” And I put it down. But I continued to cry out, “Leave! Leave! Leave me alone!” She only stood her ground and stared.
That’s when I lost it. I picked up a chair and threatened to throw it at her. This is what she’d been waiting for. She could’ve laughed or made a calming gesture or simply backed away and let the mental health workers gently disarm me and all would’ve been well. But no, D liked to escalate rather than de-escalate, so she yelled out, “Escort her to the quiet room!” Before I could offer to walk there myself, Brad and someone else picked me up by the armpits not even allowing me to walk and dragged me. Because they didn’t even ask me if I would walk freely, under my own steam, I fought them, twining my legs around theirs as if to try and trip them. Then to add insult to injury they dragged the blue therapy chair out of the room instead of leaving it there for me to rock in and calm myself. Now, inside the tiny, now empty windowless cell, despite the bright mural painted on the walls, panic rose in me. I looked around, remembering how S H had assured me that no one would ever leave me alone in there unless I wanted them too. I begged D for someone to stay in there with me. S the mental health worker saw the panic and offered to, but D was furious and ordered her out.
“No, she is to stay in here alone!” She made everyone leave, and following them out, she slammed the door shut behind her.
I was horrified. All the memories of locked seclusion returned to me in an avalanche of terror. In my mind, memory told me it would make no difference if I went to the door to beg to be let out, or for a blanket or someone to talk to. Experience, all my long experience had taught me: there was to be no mercy no help nothing would change no one would respond no help nothing no matter what I did. I was and would be abandoned to my punishment until–well–until I had no idea how long it would last. No one told me a thing. Utterly terrified, instead of banging on the door and begging for release, I backed into the farthest corner. I wanted to meld with the wall, shrink back into the wall board as far away from the room as I could get. A howl climbed my throat. I tried to hold it back but I could not. When I screamed, I screamed not to anyone or for anyone but out of sheer mortal terror, the sort of terror that any animal must feels when its leg is smashed in a trap and knows his life is coming to an end. Screaming brought no relief though. Screaming brought nothing, it certainly brought no one into the room to help me. There was only thing I could think of that would that bring relief and that was to relieve myself. So I did, in the only way I could: I stripped off all my clothing and peed a huge puddle of urine on the floor. I had to. I do not know why. Removing my underwear I found inside the crotch a forbidden pencil. I’d not been allowed writing utensils for eight long days and just that afternoon I had used this pencil to sketch my first portrait since I’d been there. I wrapped the pencil in my clothing, knowing that if someone saw it they would confiscate it again.
Too late. A commotion behind the door and they were upon me, all of them, wrestling my naked body to the floor and prying the wad of clothing from me, smashing my glasses in the process so that one lens came out of the frame. In the melee, someone grabbed my medical bracelet right off my flailing wrist. They pinned me down. I knew what they had in mind. IM meds. But no one had offered me oral medication. “I want oral meds. I’ll take oral meds you can’t inject me, you haven’t even offered me oral meds.” I asked for Zyprexa. Not Haldol or Ativan but Zyprexa, the PRN I had on order.
They refused to get Dr. T, who signed off on the seclusion without ever seeing me, to change the emergency meds — which I didn’t really need but which were going to be ordered anyway, as a mater of course — to Zyprexa despite my psychiatric advance directive distinctly requesting no benzodiazepines of any sort. However, fearing any further confrontation, I swallowed the pills. Everyone got up and left except for the nurse supervisor. I stood up and surveyed the room. Urine ran everywhere.
“How can I stay here?” I asked her. “There’s pee all over the place.”
She surveyed the wet pads and floor. “Deal with it,” she said, and walked out, locking the door behind her again.
I was spent. There was nothing left in me to fight or scream or object. I simply lay down on the mat, amid the puddles of urine and curled up in a fetal position. Sleep never came; it was too cold for that. I just lay there, eyes open, my naked back to the window. 10 minutes passed. 15 minutes. I heard the mental health worker at the window ask the supervisor if she could let me out. “She is lying there calmly, I think she’s sleeping.”
“Give her another 10 minutes,” was the reply.
Another ten minutes went by and another.
The mental health worker kept asking if she could let me out. Finally, about an hour later, the door opened and S entered. I didn’t bother to turn over or look at her. I scarcely raised my head.
“P?”
In a dull voice, I answered the requisite questionnaire, as if that were adequate debriefing. Then two other staff members attempted to clothe me in hospital issue johnnies, one over my front, one to cover the back. I allowed them to do this but as soon as they let me go and I was free to proceed out of the erstwhile “Comfort,” now Terror Room, I ripped off the johnnie coat covering my naked backside, and walked half-exposed to my room, deliberate and uncaring. Who gave a fork? What could they do to me now? What could anyone do to me? Fork everyone! They were dead to me. I was dead to them. It was over. It was over. I was dead meat. Just meat. I didn’t give a fork about anything.
More than any other incident, this one was the last straw. Whatever repercussions I deserved for threatening the RN supervisor that evening, however evil I felt for being the devil, there remained in me enough human pride to resist such treatment, enough to say that even I did not deserve to be treated as harshly as D had treated me. Not only did she deliberately test me, she lost her temper and I was her victim. I have reason to believe that most of the staff members who witnessed what happened that night believed she went too far. Some would actually say so in as many words to me, though others were cagey and feared repercussions should it get back to her.
All I knew was that I’d been treated like an animal. What did that supervisor or anyone else expect in response? Did she really think I would become docile and obedient, chastened, a meek and compliant patient? Violence begets violence. It always does. From then on I was not the same. I was not better either, no. I grew markedly worse, and worst of all, no one could predict anything about my behavior. No one knew what would happen next, what I would do, when I would lash out or scream or throw things or push someone or even hurt myself…None of those behaviors were “me” or even close to my usual, or baseline, but I reiterate: what do you expect: treat a person like an animal, and you can pretty much count on getting animal behavior as a result.
Dr. W you do not know me. Dr P, for all his discharge summaries and “progress” notes (the pages of writing are all boilerplate, meaningless, and/or second or third hand information for the most part), he doesn’t know a damned thing about me. I tried to let L. H, APRN, know a little, but by the time she was involved in my treatment, you were all so intent on seeing in me this mythical borderline personality, instead of a person who had been acutely and brutally traumatized at your hospital, that it was useless for me to expect anything. For all L’s pretence of understanding, she had made up her mind about me before she met me. She was largely deaf and blind to everything I said that did not fit the tidy diagnostic picture: schizo-affective, with a concomitant borderline personality disorder. How convenient that you could chalk all the unit troubles up to my problem, rather than seeing it as something your hospital staff created! Blame the victim, why’ncha, instead of taking responsibility for a number of incredibly poor judgment calls on your own or your staff’s part?
Of course as many people have asked me, why do I care what you or Dr P or L H think? Well, I do not, in fact, give a flying femptogram… Mostly I care about the decent people there — the mental health workers and the nurses who did like me and made it obvious and treated me very well and made it clear they would welcome me back (though I can never return, not now.) About Dr P and LH and the others I could give a ratzass. But I do, or did care about N itself, once the gold standard, for me at any rate. It was the one place where I could tell other people, “Go to N – I know people will take care of you there, people will care about you there, that’s where people will treat you well.”
The even bigger tragedy is that if no one is safe from the hospital staff at N, then the likelihood is that no one is safe in any psychiatric unit or hospital in this state. Let’s face it. Not much progress, perhaps none at all, has been made since the Hartford Courant’s series of articles in 1998 called “Deadly Restraints.” My sense is, in fact, that since Mnanaged Care took over medicine, things are actually a great deal worse…Oh, sure, I was not four-pointed during the past stay at N, no they managed not to become that brutal, so far… but I was physically restrained and manhandled during all three incidents and I have been four-pointed at nearly every other hospital in the state up till 2010. So I would hardly say that that practice has gone by the wayside. In fact, in the Hospital Emergency Room back in July of this year, they threatened to four-point me just for making a nuisance of myself and being noisy…
So much for not using restraints. As for not using them as punishment? I believe that in every single case when I was subjected to four-point restraints from 1980-2010, they were used as punishment, as a convenience or in revenge… I state this categorically: that not in a single instance were four-point restraints ever truly necessary to keep me safe. They were only used because they were available and the culture on the unit permitted the employment of torture to control and discipline patients. Period.
Seclusion? This practice has only increased in usage so far as I can see. The difference is only that staffs are careful to call such barren quarters the Time-out Room, and are rarely apprised as to the legal definition of either seclusion or restraint. (BTW Time-out is a disciplinary measure used to train children to behave properly…since when did psychiatry decide that patients in adult units ought to be treated like misbehaving children and sent to time-out rooms? If you want to talk about empowering patients and not infantilizing them, you do not in the next sentence tell someone to go to the “time-out room” and stay “until I say you can leave.”).
What you, Dr W et al, think about me in the end is of little consequence. I know I do not have BPD and so do the people around me that matter to me. If I care about anything having to do with N it is not your opinion of me nor your judgment or your diagnosis, I care about N because while it could and should be, it is no longer a place I trust, a place where I can direct other people for safety and compassionate treatment. Because if I am not safe from myself at N, if I am not safe from the staff at N, and I mean by staff, the doctors and nurse supervisors as well as any “rogue” RN or MHW, then no one is safe at N and no one with mental illness is safe in any psychiatric hospital or unit in the state
That, Dr W, is by far the worst tragedy of all .
___________
*PITA = Pain In The Ass
WAGblog: Dum Spiro Spero 