Anti-Psychiatry Art – PSYCHOPOLY
Tag Archives: restraints
No comment necessary… this is VERMONT 2019
Injuries sustained at VPCH during unlawful restraint
They also broke my glasses.
Important Video about Psychiatric Torture
What are/were the most significant barriers to your recovery from “mental illness”?
The biggest barrier to my recovery from what had always been diagnosed as schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder was, I regret to say, the mental health system and psychiatry itself. Yes, for many decades I had been told I was ill and needed interventions like medications and the hospital for my “brittle psychosis”. I was told even that obvious brutalities, like 5-point restraints and seclusion in locked freezing cold cells, devoid of anything but a slab in the wall and a grate in the floor for drainage, were helpful treatments for my condition and not the torture and punishment that I felt them to be. No one or very few people treated me with kindness or any understanding or with the idea that there was hope for recovery, even though I had a genius level IQ and had shown some significant talents in many areas, and still did even when sick. They seemed bent on only one thing: coercion and control, and to prove that they were able to dominate me, and the other patients. If you dared to question their superiority or their information you would either be dismissed as delusional or worse, treated with more abuse.
Needless to say, I lived up to these expectations for many years, and i did not get better or even come near to recovering. In fact, before I took the drastic step of giving almost all I owned away and leaving my home, the state where I had lived for all my life and moving to another 100 miles away, by myself, knowing no one and nothing about it, I ended up again in the hospital and almost did not make it out. Not only did the guards there attempt to strangle me, but the doctor was convinced that I should be committed to the state’s one public facility that provided long term treatment…from which I might not leave for a long time.
Instead, I managed to play the game this sadistic doctor insisted on, and was finally discharged from a city hospital that had spent weeks doing nothing but torturing me, daily throwing me into their seclusion cell or shackling me in restraints …for no better reason than that I “disturbed the unit milieu”.
But discharged I was, with newly acquired PTSD from my treatment there, and within a week I was two states away, safe for the first time from these ministration that had inflicted on me nothing but damage.
It was here, in this northern state that I finally began to heal, with the help not of the mental health system but of a non-licensed therapist (she has a psychotherapist license from the UK) who taught me Marshall Rosenberg’s non-violent communication or NVC, and is the first person I felt sees me for who I really am, not “just another schizophrenic.” Even though I still take medications, I am slowly tapering off of them and doing well after decades on the massive doses I was told I absolutely could not survive without. Why? Because I’m proof of the fact that you can recover from life-long “mental illness” when given enough unconditional acceptance and understanding. When someone sees you and understands you and does not dismiss you, crazy as you might have been told you are, a lot of the craziness just falls away and you become another human being, no more and no less.
There is no normal, there is no abnormal. We are all just human beings trying to get along in society and often society is sicker than “we are” in its demands that we conform to some impossible standard. Maybe my experiences — hearing voices, thinking things that might be called delusions, etcetera — are not common but they are not outside the realm of human experience either. We should rejoice in our differences as in our similarities and look for common cause between us, not find reasons to fear what is Other in each other. Love really is what it’s all about. Maybe that sounds squishy and sentimental, but have you ever met someone diagnosed with schizophrenia who says they both love themselves and feel that they are adequately loved in the world by others?
Final presentation of “GOING SANE”
Would love your opinions and anyone to share
this if they can! The slide show i mean…below…
VERMONT PSYCHIATRIC CARE HOSPITAL: Today We Will Name Names of the LIARS…and tell all
First of all, I need to make clear that I name the guilty not the innocent here. But I mostly remember the guilty, I wonder why?
As the famed WWII poet Henry Read wrote in his poem, The Naming of Parts:
” Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But today,
Today we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all the neighboring gardens,
And today we have naming of parts.”
Well, today we have the naming of the liars, and the guilty parties at VPCH, the Vermont State Hospital in Berlin, Vermont, those who either restrained me in 5-point restraints and kept me there for five hour because I could not speak, or colluded to lie about the incident these last two years in order to cover it up and not take responsibility for what happened. And now they have decided to accuse of trying to STAB them…,which is so beyond the beyond that I HAVE HAD ENOUGH!!!
First I will name the Unit D doctor. JOHN MALLOY Jr MD who worked on Unit D at VPCH and who was singlehandedly responsible for a large sheet of paper placed at the front of my chart from the third day I was in the hospital — that is from the the first day he met me, and after he had consulted with the Brattleboro Retreat’s doctor — against my express wishes — by phone only but had not received any official records. This paper had in HUGE LETTERS these words: HOW TO DEAL WITH BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER…now I do not and did not at any time have symptoms that would have made him think I had such a disorder, except that he had spoken with this monster psychiatrist, Marc McGee from the Brattleboro Retreat, who had diagnosed that secondary Axis II diagnosis within FIVE MINUTES of my — get this! — being forcibly brought into the Adult Low Stimulation Unit by two sheriffs who had not bothered to get a wheelchair but took me by the armpits and dragged me, trussed up like Hannibal Lecter, in leg irons and waist chain and handcuffs and full HOOD over my head and face, across a large parking lot down into the Retreat Basement and up to the second floor where they publicly hauled my helpless body down two long corridors to the ALSA unit before unshackling me…But did Marc McGee ask me why this angered me, I who had been completely compliant on the ride from Springfield and had been hooded the entire time to boot? NO he decided that I SHOULD NOT BE ANGRY so i must have Borderline Personality Disorder…Why? Because HE HATED ME, and his hatred of me meant that I could be abused by him with impunity…
But the thing is, he lied to me, and told me he had not diagnosed this, and it was only later when I found out that he HAD done so right then and there, that I threatened to sue him and to tell the Retreat CEO what he was in the habit of doing to patients he did not like, if he did not remove this designation from my official diagnosis. So he did, he did! When I left, it was not on my discharge summary!
But when Dr Malloy Jr spoke to Dr McGee, did Marc Mc Gee, who ran both Tyler 2 and Tyler 4 units at the Brattleboro Retreat inform him that I was not diagnosed with BPD? No, not at all, he told him the exact opposite, that I had a “long history of BPD” which is utter BULLSHIT and he knows it, Marc told John Malloy Jr that to cover up his own incompetence and John Malloy without bothering to do his own intake and history that VPCH requires him to do, and any thinking on his part, just took that as gospel.
Anyhow, I believe that nothing of what later happened at VPCH would have occurred if the staff had not been primed to abuse me by this sheet of paper that John Malloy Jr MD placed in my chart, instructing them to dismiss me as manipulative and devious and to treat me as a hated patient who needed to be disciplined.
That said, Today we have the naming of names, largely because I just heard from the Vermont Nursing Board that they will not take any measures against the nurse who instigated the Nov 18, 2015 incident of torture. And why? Because the nurse ANNETTE BRENNAN RN, who grabbed me, and had me restrained out of vengeance and kept me in restraints for 5 hours because “she is not to be released until she speaks aloud” (which never happened) was ANNETTE BRENNAN, and she and JENNIFER MANUKHANI RN both know that what they told the nursing board was nothing but a LIE, yet because the nursing board did not know this , and colluded with them, they got away with inventing after the fact something that is not in any part of any chart or debriefing or investigation by the Department of Adult Protective Services, when they investigated the same incident last year, no, nothing was mentioned but suddenly SUDDENLY both nurses manage to remember that I “tried to stab Annette Brennan”?!! Oh, what a load of absolute crap, and if the investigators were anything but idiots who wanted sinecures and not to have to bother to work, they would have done an investigation rather than sitting on their asses. They would have read through the incident in the chart enough to see this. I mean, NOWHERE NOWHERE is this rather critical “event” of my supposedly trying to stab a nurse with a pen ever mentioned (because it never happened) but suddenly it looms as THE ONLY AND PRIME reason why ANNETTE BRENNAN RN that fucking cunt was justified in restraining AND molesting me? Using Dr Joseph LASEK to write the order…
I would have said it took some nerve of those two LYING nurses to collude to make this up out of whole cloth, but they must have known the investigators would not even bother to look to see whether the chart says a word to corroborate this, no of course not. The whole thing was RIGGED to make me look like a assaultive FIEND from the first, when all I ever did was slam doors, NOTHING else, and ANNETTE BRENNAN RN had a hissy fit about it and GRABBED ME because she lost her temper, and Jennifer Mansukhani RN even at the time said, to HER, “WE DON’T GO HANDS ON HERE AT VPCH”, but she had and they did and they TORTURED ME for 5 hours that I cannot forget and will NEVER FORGIVE…
But they got away with LIEs, so I will name names. Annette Brennan, RN and Jennifer Mansukhani, RN TORTURED me and ANNETTE MOLESTED me a helpless patient in 5-point restraints on Unit D at the Vermont Psychiatric Care Hospital on November 18, 2015 with collusion by Drs Joseph Lasek and JOHN MALLOY Jr..
Tomorrow I will post the entire event as I wrote it to the Board, which refused to permit me to testify or to interview me. I wrote it in utter and complete honesty…But they never wanted honesty, they only want to LIE and DECEIVE AND FUCK ME OVER….but REVENGE IS MINE saith the lord as they will learn, and you had better know it!
I also plan to post the pages of my chart and the APS report…I don’t care anymore about MY privacy. FUCK those liars!
TAKING THE MASK OFF INTERVIEWS PAMELA SPIRO WAGNER
Please listen to this. You will find Cortland Pfeffers intro fascinating, and of course pamela as usual has much to say!
Here is a little new art to entice, just a small drawing i did while at fhe hostel in Boston during the Hearing Voices Congress. I hope to post that power point soon.
Torture in hospitals continues to this day
Just want to keep people aware that these things are absolutely continuing to this day. They have not stopped persecuting psychiatic patients just because YOU dont hear about it. Every single thing in this post has happened to me within the last five years, and is still happening to others. Remember, and dont forget it! Your relatives may not talk about it, but it is happening to someone.
Art in Progress
I did this chair tonight with drawing Vine charcoal I made in the grill. I peeled wild grape vine then roasted the pieces in wired-together tin box pierced with a nail to let out the gases, for an hour..Inside after that was nice black vine charcoal!
The Second piece is my drawing in progress of which I will try to post a few stages..I have not come anywhere near to finishing it! Nor do Have any idea what it will look like when done!
Slide Show on Restraints and Seclusion
Do You Work in In-Patient Psychiatry? This is For YOU…
All art copyright of Pamela Spiro Wagner
Rep. Donahue’s Article About ED care in Vermont
Counterpoint Summer 2016 please see this important article that just came out in the Vermont paper. It is very important! Thanks, pam
Restraint Chair Use at RRMC
Please note that i am reposting this frorm a week ago as it got accidentally deleted, but i cannot repost the comments. Anyone who wishes to recomment is welcome to.
It all started when i bodily “escorted” the nurse,KJ out of my bathroom, where I had situated my mattress, and had her leave my lunch on the table outside. I had been vocalizing loudly and softly virtually only the three words, “oswall wistofi matootam” for days uncontrollably, and over the past hour i had screamed at the top of my lungs from my room, which the nurse had to have heard but made no response. When she simply left my lunch at the table, i felt utterly ignored and abandoned, and in a rage of certainty that she was plotting against me, picked up the cup of coffee and threw it straight at her. With unusual accuracy, it found its target in her center. My next lob hit only the wall.
In certainty of repercussion, i slammed my door and waited. Soon the usual code was called, but instead of burly men bursting in the door, i heard them packing up the sitting area for quite some time, and it knew it took them some several minutes to prepare an injection of my medications. But my terror only increased, so i grabbed a chair to defend my self. Finally they opened the door. KJ in an oh so nice voice said, “pam, i have medication for you.” And they quickly grabbed the chair and four men upended me and laid me on the floor near the bed frame, which was covered in my artwork and books. It took quite some time for the staff to methodically pack up all items they feared, apparently, might go flying at them afterwards ( though if proper protocol had been followed from tHe first, nothing would have).
This proper protocol, by the way, had been developed by another nurse and i after much discussion of my detailed advanced directive and my intense horror of locked seclusion and mechanical restraints, both of which i have experienced in abundance and usually for discipline or convenience, almost never for any truly emergent reason. That said, i believe the first nurse, KJ had lost her temper with me, and decided not to follow this protocol on the unit because she wanted to punish me, as will be demonstrated by what followed.
Having brought the two IM medications with her, which the protocol for agitation we had worked out calls for, she eventually called for the men to deposit me on the bed frame so she could inject them, one in each leg. She did so. Then, instead of having them keep me in a protective hold for as long as i needed to calm myself and potentially fall asleep, which usually took little more than 10-15 minutes, she said, she was having everyone leave and locking me alone in my emptied room. I screamed aloud at this. “I have an advanced directive! You cannot do that!” I pleaded but they forced the door closed against me and locked it.
I screamed to no avail and then started hitting my head in terror against the door in an effort to get them to open it. This worked in a short time, and three aides were sent in. We sat on the bed frame and they actually held my limbs, i thought in such a way as to comfort me. Little did i understand the truth, because even as i very quickly calmed down, soon through the door, the same angry nurse pushed a big prison-issue restraint chair. She yelled at me, “now you are going to have to sit in this!!!
I yelled back, “No!!! No restraints. My advance directive says so!”
I want to interrupt here to quote the government’s own research. SAMHSA’s issue brief #1 March 2010 on promoting alternatives to the use of seclusion and restraints says:
“…the use of seclusion and restraint has often been perceived as therapeutic to consumers. This misconception has been challenged and refuted. Increasing research has identifed the role of trauma in mental and addiction disorders. Research into trauma and trauma-informed care identify common themes about the impact of trauma and how traumatic life experiences can impede an individual’s ability to manage his or her own behaviors or engage in appropriate behaviors in the community.
“Also, there is a common misconception that seclusion and restraint are used only when absolutely necessary as crisis response techniques. In fact, seclusion and restraint are most commonly used to address loud, disruptive, noncompliant behavior and generally originate from a power struggle between consumer and staff. The decision to apply seclusion or restraint techniques is often arbitrary, idiosyncratic, and generally avoidable . Moreover, some studies indicate that seclusion and restraint use leads to an increase in the behaviors staff members are attempting to control or eliminate.”
But they grabbed me and forced me into that chair and despite my struggles and terrified screams of protest they forced nine straps around my body, yes, 9-point restraints because K— J—-, RN, was still angry with me and refused to utilise our calming no-restraints, no seclusion protocol. This protocol had not only helped me but had also since then, so i was told, been used to calm and help other agitated patients without seclusion cells or mechanical restraints after i insisted that the unit staff start doing their “best to avoid restraints” with everyone, not just for me because my A.D insists on it.
Once strapped in to that horrendous chair, i screamed at the nurse, “You are just punishing me!” And calmly, she answered back, “Well, you threw hot coffee at me, what do you expect but punishment!?”
Then she walked out of the room, leaving two aides in the room to tighten the straps so tight that i could not move and felt the circulation in one hand go dead.
In horror, i shrieked for help. I pleaded for anyone to help me, for god’s sake. What the hell were they doing to me?!? Please just help me, someone!!? It upset the other patients to hear this just outside my room. I even begged them to put me in regular 4-point restraints on a bed where at least i could relax and fall asleep. Why hadn’t the nurse not brought me to the seclusion room to begin with, where the walls and door were all were padded if she was not going to follow the protocol?
In the end, it took two hours and two episodes in that terrible chair before they freed me.
That evening, as a response to the trauma, i defecated on the rug in the dining area, and painted with feces on the wall.
Surely this is no way to treat an animal, let alone a troubled psychiatric patient, especially not when there is already a calming,non-violent protocol set up to deal with her when she is agitated?
I say, chairs like this need to be trashed. Once a hospital orders one — and where do they get them? From prison suppliers!) they will use it. They say they use it for emergencies only, but as i have shown, once they have such a chair, it will be used abusively–always, always, always.
The only way to end seclusion and restraints is to stop it now and. For good. The more hospitals dilly-dally saying, soon, we will when we can, they will never stop. There will always been someone to say, no, what about this or that. But abuse is abuse and restraints are abusive by definition. Stop the use of a restraint chair and bed and all use of mechanical restraints by stopping. And then you will find a way to deal with problems arising that work better.
The painting i did below depicts the chair they held me in, minus the waist strap but with the toe restraints.
“There is no negative space, only the shapely void. Hold your hands out, cup the air. To see the emptiness you hold is to know that space loves the world.” P. Wagner
Pamela Spiro Wagner
rutland regional medical center
Rutland vt 05701
802-747-1855 until i can use my cell phone
I’m still here…
So sorry to every one for disappearing so unexpectedly. I was sent to Brattleboro Memorial Hospital Emergency Room on December 31, 2015, largely because MRR was short on staff, and there i was brutalized for 6 days before Rutland Regional Medical Center took me in, on their state hospital PICU unit.
In the ER not only did they restrain me as i have depicted, but they injected me with 15mg of Haldol and much more over the course of those 6 days, despite my advanced directive, signed by four people and notarized, that explicitly states that under no circumstances am i to be given Haldol!
The ER doctor admitted that he violated, knowingly, my advanced directive. Due to facebook supporters calling the local newpaper in outrage, the newspaper called not the hospital–that would have violated my privacy, so they claimed, even though i had alerted the paper myself to their treatment of me! No, the newspaper, the Brattleboro Reformer, called my twin sister, Carolyn Spiro MD and asked her if this treatment of me, her sister, and her twin, was proper, and her amswer was, Absolutely!!!!
So you see where she stands on the issue of the torture of both psychiatric patients and her own twin sister! I have had nothing to do with her for years because of this.
Meanwhile, i have many many good words to say about the Rutland Regional Medical Center PICU but i don’t have enough time on my iPad tonight to say them all. So i will just end with this other artwork. I hope tomorrow i can tell you more about RRMC where they are trying, in a very small constricted place, to do things right, at least in terms of seclusion and restraints.
Trauma Art
I was left alone like this, offered neither food nor water and given only an apple when I begged for one, for three days and two night at John Dempsey Hospital in the 1980s at University of Connecticut Health Center, in Farmington Connecticut. If anyone remembers having been through this, Please get in touch with me! ( If anyone know whether Jim or Don Steadman, the aides, are still alive, please let me know…or have them get in touch too. I believe they would remember attending to me while the doctor kept me trussed up like this…)
Oil Painting, Maybe unfinished…..
Art from State Hospital Vermont, November, 2015
“treatments” (you may have to scroll way down to see the next two)
Google Review of Michael E Balkunas, Unit Chief of W-1, Adult Psychiatry, Hospital of Central Connecticut
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.
CONNECTICUT, YOU DROVE ME AWAY, IN FEAR FOR MY LIFE, BUT…
(you’ll need adobe flashplayer to watch this youtube video…)
PRESIDENT OBAMA LECTURES DR MICHAEL E. BALKUNAS ON THE MISTREATMENT OF PSYCHIATRIC PATIENTS
I think everyone who can play this file will find it both instructive and illuminating and actually very very …”interesting”…So go ahead, Mikey. LlSTEN TO YOUR PRESIDENT!!!!! Tee hee.
WAGblog: Dum Spiro Spero 