Dear Kathryn Power,

In May 2014, mute and psychotic, I was taken to Hospital of Central Connecticut in New Britain’s Emergency Department by ambulance. My visiting nurse, in concurrence with my outside psychiatrist, had called 911, concerned about my safety and my ability to function because I had not spoken for weeks and was not taking adequate care of myself. I was not agitated, instead, I was unable to speak and slowed down rather than anything else.

More than a year has passed since then, so instead of relying on memory, I will paste here what I wrote shortly after my subsequent hospital stay, with edits for clarity and concision. Some has been taken from the secret journal I kept in that hospital, a journal which I was forced to scribble on pieces of torn-up brown paper waste basket liners, surreptitiously mailing them to a friend immediately the moment I finished writing. I  had to do it this way because a housekeeping staff member had told me that nurses instructed her to throw out everything in my room, including first class mail, each time they found a reason to seclude me, which was frequently (nearly every day in fact, and sometimes more than once a day.)

More on this follows.

But first let me tell you what happened in the Emergency Department. I came in by ambulance. I did not want to but was given “either the easy way or the hard way” choice by the police who came with the 911 call. I did not resist or fight, nor was I restrained in any way in the ambulance. As I said, I was mute, which had deeply concerned my Visiting Nurse, and mostly passive. I merely handed the EMTs my medication sheet and my detailed but clear Psychiatric Advanced Directive. This is critical as on page one and two are clearly typed vitally important information about my trauma history and how to deal with me in a crisis, including provisions for when I might be mute.

The first page of the ED chart states that availability of my Advance Directive is “unknown.” Nevertheless, the ED triage note states, with apparent disapproval and resentment, that “pt presents with detailed instructions on how to provide her care..” i.e. the psychiatric advance directive. This seems to have been immediately disregarded, as insulting to their knowledge…

ED Nurses note: “Seneilya… RN Assumed care of patient. Patient arrived via EMS after VNA called for increased anxiety. EMS reports patient refused to speak but wrote down, “Sunglasses block hate. I don’t want to hurt anybody.” [*sun-glasses are “hater-blockers” yes, but they block other people’s hatred. The RN never got my point and I was mute with no way to communicate the distinction…] “On admissions patient refused to speak to this RN. Patient pointed at her head when asked why she was here. Patient nodded “yes” when asked if she was hearing voices but refused to answer other questions. …(next sentence indecipherable)

Report given to Beth RN who assumed care of patient…”

At 15:19 Beth RN wrote the following:

“Pt not responding verbally to this nurse, this nurse looked through her art book and placed it back on her stretcher then pt picked it up and slammed it down on the stretcher and pointed her finger at the book. Unable to get pt to communicate. Pt pulled sheets over her head. Pt still in street clothes, will pt [sic] as is until examined by MD.”

What is not said here is that this nurse, “Beth” never asked me whether she might look at my art book. She just took it. She refused to allow me any other means of communication, except  speech. When I was unable to do this, she did not inquire as to why I did not speak nor apparently did she attempt to make inquiries from anyone else why this was so. If she had provided me with means to write I might have been able to tell her what had happened in the previous two weeks at home. Instead, she appeared to become angry and from then on refused to permit me any mode of communication other than the one she preferred.

I was later given a hospital gown and told to dress myself or I would be forcibly assisted in doing so.

Beth RN records what happened after a meal was given to me that I did not eat (it was not vegetarian).

“Pt ate nothing,” Beth RN reports, “[but she] wrote messages with ketchup and French fries, [saying] ‘I need a crayon.” [***] This nurse told pt she needs to speak because she can, pt threw everything on her table on the floor, food juice, etc. Pt then picked up fries from the floor and started eating them and gathered more and putting them in the bed with her and kicked the other food away in the OBS area.”

“Pt went to the BR, seen coming from the BR with paper towels then pt observed writing with her finger on a paper towel with something, first thinking it must be ketchup, then maybe jelly, then this nurse got up to check and pt found to be writing with her own feces, some paper was able to be removed, other paper with large piece of BM pt threw at this nurse. Pt moved to room 42 [seclusion] then pt got OOB and snuck around corner and tried to attack this nurse [?***] from behind, [public safety was able to get to pt first,***] pt to be medicated and restrained. Pt licking feces off fingers, would not let nurse wash her hands…”

In point of fact, fact I never attacked or even  tried to attack the nurse as you will see.

And the nurse knows this, because she backtracks in the chart and says so, here” the Public Security was “able to get to pt first” so she knows full well that I never  ‘”tried to attack her” and they knew they had no right to restrain me. The chart alone makes it clear that I never did a thing. She would not have phrased it that way if I had attacked her, or even attempted to. No, if I had attacked her, she would said so. In those terms. Not in uncertain, vague terms. She never would  have said what amounts to, “Oops, patient attacked me, but the guards got to her first before she, um, tried to attack me, so really she just wanted to attack me, I think, but never really did, so…um, she never did even really try to attack me, I just assume she wanted to, but like, you know, I can’t really be sure, like, that she wanted to attack me she just looked really, really mean and she wasn’t saying a word, so I betcha she did, and I am really, really glad those guards stopped her from trying to attack me just in case she, like, might have wanted to try to attack me, you know?”

Now I want to tell my side of this story because they invented this story out of whole cloth. Yes, parts of it are true, but the chart puts them out of order and not the way Beth related it. This is important because the way she wrote it makes me seem like I spontaneously leapt off the gurney and attacked her out of the blue, which never happened. However, I was also privy to a conversation by the so called Public Safety officers, AKA Guards, who in front of me, in fact while they were holding me down (I was mute, mind you, so remember that they thought I was also deaf, or forgot I was not) decided to create this story in order to justify 4-pointing me, because they simply wanted an excuse to do so.

What really happened was that due to my need to communicate, I wrote my needs with ketchup on the paper box the meal came in. Then that too was taken away from me, and Beth came up to me, and instead of speaking to me, handed me a NOTE she had written (the irony of this is beyond belief!) saying, “I will not speak to you or give you anything to write with until you start speaking to me.” At this point, I was livid and also so desperate to write I had no choice but to use whatever I had at hand.

So, yes, I did do as she wrote in the chart: I went to the bathroom and had a bowel movement and took some feces back to my cubicle and I tried to write journal entries about what was happening to me on paper towels with my own fecal material. And no, this did not go over very well with Beth or anyone else. But I never attacked Beth or even tried to assault her. Instead, she snuck up on me and snatched my art book out from under me and raced away with it, holding it up in triumph as she did.

I was so furious that without even a thought as to possible consequences, I raced behind her intending only to grab my book back. That was all. I never assaulted her, I never so much as touched her. I wanted only to only grab the book back that she had not asked to take from me. Period. As she suggests when she says, “public safety was able to get to patient first.” Well, in fact I had never any intentions of “attacking Beth or anyone else and the guards knew it. But the fact is, I never touched or attacked anyone, they grabbed me and attacked me!

That was the point when they dragged me to “Room 42″. The two guards, holding me down, decided they wanted an excuse to four-point me, and though one of them cautioned that they really had no reason to do so, the other one told him not to worry, “we’ll find a reason.” And as I learned shortly thereafter from accusations of my having assaulted a nurse made by Dr. Michael E. Balkunas, they did so.

But just because an accusation is made doesn’t make it factual or true, as we all know, and just because Michael E Balkunas accused me of lying about it, and again when I later informed him about them stripping me and leaving me naked in the hospital seclusion room doesn’t mean he was correct either. He never asked me what did happen. He never tried to find out the real events of that evening, he simply designated me as manipulative and “volitional”  — a “borderline” — essentially a prime-time liar. He had already conceived an intense antipathy towards me, so by the time he finally came by to see me on the W-1 Psych Unit the next day, he had made the decision not to let me communicate by writing. Therefore, his intent right from the start was not to let me tell him what was going on. He decided, from the very first moments, not only not to recognize the desperation and extreme frustration this induced, but to see only violence and willfulness in me. His solution? Punishment and torture. Period.
But I am getting ahead of myself. Michael E.  Balkunas, MD, the director of New Britain Hospital’s W-1, claimed to have been there when the ED incident I describe happened, when the guards said that I just shot up off the gurney and spontaneously attacked Beth, the RN, from behind. But the record does not bear this out. In fact, he never saw me at all on the evening of May 12: all the orders were written by other physicians. Dr Balkunas’s name is not even mentioned until the afternoon of May 13 when it states only that he was at my bedside to evaluate me. Even then, from what I recall, I was so sedated after multiple forced medications, use of four-point restraints and seclusions, that I was unable to answer a single question. Since I could not speak, given the fact that Balkunas too refused me any writing implement the interview was as unproductive as could be imagined possible.

I was to be admitted to W-1 on the basis of his judgments from that single brief evaluation, from which he drew the diagnosis that in addition to schizophrenia, I had a probable “borderline personality disorder.”  (He spoke to no one in my family nor my longtime nurse or doctor nor my friends…and he did not even hear from me, yet he drew this snap conclusion on what basis???? And yet it hideously affected my treatment at the hospital)

How could he possibly diagnose a personality disorder, seeing me in such traumatic circumstances and for a few minutes only? In point of fact, what likely happened was that he took a disliking to me, and diagnosed me with something that in his mind justified his later egregious treatment of me, and in particular   justified his disallowing me to write instead of speak. I cannot otherwise explain his behavior. Nor can I understand his astonishment at my response when I did not react well to these punitive ministrations. Why did he think I would respond positively? Why did he think that coercion would be beneficial? Did he truly think his “treatment” would be restorative? What I think happened is that he decided he did not like me, right from the moment he laid eyes on me — I may even have been naked in restraints, who knows?– and so he opted, as many men do, for  savage abuse and punishment.

But there are policies at W-1 that hurt everyone, not just me.

“I want to explain what “deserving” seclusion or restraints and being “violent” at New Britain General Hospital (Hospital of Central Connecticut on Grand Street in New Britain) 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 or four-point restraints when absolutely essential, when a patient is out of control and extremely violent, and cannot be controlled in any other way.” Trust me, I know. They have said this sort of thing to me in each and every single Connecticut Hospital I have ever stayed in, except for the “old” Hartford Hospital’s CB-2 psychiatric unit in the 1980s-early 1990s, when Sharon Hinton APRN was the head nurse. I do not recall ever hearing about any seclusion and four-point restraint policy. I know for a fact they had NO seclusion cell, and while I spent many admissions starting out in their “secure unit” what we got there was simply more attention, and more care, not more abusive control.

But what you need to know is that they are NOT talking about some 400-pound man hopped up on PCP, waving a machete. For one thing, that person, I believe is largely mythical, 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. I am the rule…The person they secluded or restrained almost without exception at hospitals like New Britain and Manchester and Middlesex and the Institute of Living was none other than me.

So let me tell you about me. I will turn 63 years of age in November. I am 5 feet, 3 inches tall, and until I moved to Vermont, I weighed, maybe 108 pounds on a good day, Furthermore, I have been consistently described as “poorly muscled.” Not only has my right shoulder been recently injured by staff encounters at New Britain’s hospital, but I before I was hospitalized at HOCC I was 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 NBGH/HOCC nurses/security guards knew (they stated it out loud) 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 — and have always believed in 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 as we do. Yet in many Connecticut  hospitals 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 holding me down by brute force, 2 people 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 half dozen others that did), they routinely injected me with two to three drugs as chemical restraints (really punishment drugs, as I frequently called them, without anyone correcting my perception) whether they were required or not.

I am the rule, not the exception, I am this supposedly “extremely violent mental patient” who is so O.O.C that Connecticut hospitals refuse to eliminate the use of restraints and seclusion, because they “might need them.” I am the typical person they claim they absolutely must have the right to resort to the use of violence, 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, on W-1 this is what happened.

Michael E Balkunas MD, head of W-1, wrote that “while in patient would often scream.” Yet he states with apparent resentment that I had brought items with me “such as a large advanced directive.” The nursing notes repeat this as if this is a bad thing, and then they proceed to disregard every item on it. Not only that but after Balkunas accuses me of behaving with “volition” (whatever this is meant to prove) he never actually adduce any further facts or observations to back up what he means, except that I brought with me the large psychiatric advance directive and a published book of art work I had done.

This book of my art, by the way, was deliberately kept from me the entire time I was on the unit, because, I was told it would be extremely harmful for the other patients to see it. The nurses repeatedly reinforced this message: any glimpse of my art would hurt them. This was emphasized to me: I should feel guilty not only for having brought the book with me, but for having drawn the pictures at all. The RNs seemed to enjoy my feeling bad about this….

Balkunas further claims in the chart that he repeatedly “asked if patient would like to speak to him, please,” but what he fails to note is that he refused to permit me any possible mode of communication. He also peremptorily walked out on me when I could not utter a word. He notes that, yes, I threw my bed-clothes at him, but fails to mention that he would not acknowledge my gestures or try to figure out what I wanted to say. Instead, he stood up in disgust and turned on his heels and left.

I admit that having already been secluded, 4-point-restrained and forcibly sedated in the ED, and then called a liar by the doctor who was supposed to care for me, I was very upset at being unable to make him stay, to make him listen or attend to me. So I did the only thing I could do to make noise of any sort. 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. I scarcely recall doing it, 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 ED, 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 take me immediately to the seclusion cell.

“Seclusion! Seclusion! Restraints! Restraints!” he screamed. Before I could do anything or even consent to walk there, I was bodily dragged down the hall by my injured shoulder to one of the most horrifying seclusion cells I have ever seen. There were two cells, actually, each lockable from the outside, completely barren and cold except for a concrete slab of a bench set into the wall, with a plastic mattress on it. Nothing else. No commode, no bedpan, nothing but two cameras in the ceiling, but no obvious way for me to communicate with anyone. They locked me in, locked the second door across the other room, so I was thoroughly alone and soundproofed from the rest of the unit, and then turned their backs and walked away.

I panicked immediately. I 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. Nada. Zilch. Not a word. I did not even understand at that time that there was an intercom somewhere that 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, yes, I knew, what would happen, I knew this because it was SOP. It was what always happened to me in Connecticut’s torture-chamber hospitals. But I was freezing in there with the A/C on full bore and at 108 pounds and a history of frostbite I could not tolerate being cold. Furthermore, with neither a watch nor any clock on the wall, I had no inkling as to how long they would keep me there. It might be two hours or twenty, or it might be three days. All I knew was that I could not tolerate the isolation, one, and two, I could not survive the freezing temperature.

So I took the flimsy 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. This was a futile endeavor of course, because I couldn’t keep pulling on it without eventually letting go and then I’d breathe again. I didn’t want to die. I just wanted it to look outwardly as if I were strangling myself so someone would come in to check on me. Then finally I thought I would be able to explain that I was freezing cold and just please please please would someone give me a blanket?

Well, would that anyone were so reasonable! But no such luck…

Oh, yes, the intercom did crackle to life eventually and someone interrupted. “Pamela, take that away from your neck. Now.” I gestured to indicate I was freezing. The voice spoke again, “If you don’t remove that from your neck, we will restrain you.” I answered silently but clearly, “I need something for warmth!”   No doubt you can guess that this was a battle I was destined to lose…as it was designed to be.

Eventually, but not so quickly as to show that they had any truly serious concerns about my safety, guards and nurses entered the room, along with a gurney. Grabbing me, injuring my right shoulder as well as my left in the process, they hoisted me onto the gurney. Without even covering my nude body, they locked me into leather restraint cuffs, wresting me into a painful and illegal spread-eagle position, despite my groans of pain and protest. Then to cap it off, they refused me a blanket. Someone tossed a small towel over my private parts and that was all. I was summarily injected with three punishment drugs and an aide was positioned at the door. Then the goon squad trooped out.

I screamed in rage for at least ten minutes. The aide just looked away, pointedly ignoring me. When I finally quieted, I tried to signal my desperate need for water and for warmth, but the aide pretended she did not understand me. But she did understand me and when she finally acknowledged my requests, which I mimed with difficulty from the restraints, she refused, stating that a blanket was unsafe, a pillow unnecessary and that it was my own screaming that had made me thirsty.

The experience of mechanical four-point restraints – leather cuffs that are tightened around the wrists and ankles to shackle a patient to a bed – or being isolated by force in a freezing seclusion cell has to be universally terrifying and traumatizing. Nevertheless, both cell and/or four-point restraints are quickly employed to curb loudness and “undesirable behaviors” at the Hospital of Central Connecticut on Grand Street in New Britain. I know this because I was subjected to both seclusion and 4-point restraints multiple times in May and June of 2014, despite being admitted with a previous diagnosis of chronic paranoid schizophrenia, and documented PTSD, triggered by precisely these methods of “behavioral control.”

Bizarrely, Dr. Michael E. Balkunas wrote on my chart, “Patient mis-perceives her treatment as traumatic.” Well, maybe so, but I think it is nearly by definition traumatic to be forced to defecate in one’s own clothing while shackled to a bed for 19 hours nearly daily, which is what they did at Hartford Hospital’s Institute of Living in the winter of 2013. This was after I was told to lie down and place my own limbs in the leather cuffs (“as a consequence but not a punishment”) for walking away from the very same “Side Room” that I had just been assured was “not a seclusion room unless you call it a seclusion room.”

Again, maybe I mis-perceived being grabbed and held face-down and nearly suffocated numerous times by staff at Yale New Haven Psychiatric Hospital in August 2013, where they would twice or three times a day forcibly inject into my buttocks 10 milligrams of Haldol, a known drug of torture. Maybe this was just kindliness that I misunderstood as traumatic, maybe it was merely a “psychotic mis-perception” on my part? Maybe—and then again, maybe not.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that in the ED of New Britain’s HOCC, a security guard in May 2014, grabbed me by my left shoulder immediately after he was warned by the nurse that it was my left shoulder that had a rotator cuff tear.

My New Britain chart records that I was admitted to that hospital, (and to the IOL and others) with a detailed Psychiatric Advance Directive, the first page of which states that seclusion, 4-point restraints and forced medication invariably result in regression to “primitive states and severe worsening of symptoms.” My PAD also makes several concrete suggestions how better to deal with me when I am upset and in crisis. Even though I spent many hours on this document, Psychiatric Advance Directives are virtually worthless in Connecticut and doctors can and do ignore them freely.

Perhaps because of this, HOCC staff literally forced me (“escorted me”) to seclusion and/or restrained me multiple times. They even had male guards strip me naked “for safety’s sake,” and even though I put up no resistance, they had the same male guards four- point me, separating my limbs into a spread-eagle position – a visual rape they clearly enjoyed — while still naked and shackled me into leather restraint cuffs without even covering me first.

Is it any wonder that what resulted was someone who would wash her hair with her own urine, defecate on the floor of her 24-hour-videotaped bedroom and smear feces on the wall? Yet the esteemed Dr. Balkunas, the director of W-1, the general psychiatry unit at HOCC claimed that my trauma was imaginary. Why? Because treatment cannot be traumatic, so he contends. He simply never got the connection between my later horrendous decompensation and this so-called “therapy.” Maybe he never appreciated that he was torturing me, like a person who ripped the wings off butterflies as a child. Someone like that would not have understood how those creatures suffer either.

I moved to Vermont shortly after being released from New Britain Hospital. No hospital in Vermont has felt the need to seclude or restrain me in any such fashion. In fact they do not diagnose me as having any personality disorder either. I have now moved from the Central Vermont Medical Center to Meadowview Recovery Residence in Brattleboro, where they offer residential and unmistakably kind, non-coercive treatment for both schizophrenia, and for the PTSD that resulted from this horrific treatment.

My grave concern however is that there are people still being tortured in HOCC’s W-1 unit for General Psychiatry, on Grand Street in New Britain. I did not leave Connecticut just to forget about this. Justice must be served in order for change to happen.

I tried to file a complaint through the ADA with the Department of Justice about HOCC’s ED and their refusal to provide me a means to communicate but I never heard back from them, although it is just possible they called my cell phone which has ceased to function…

I beg of you to respond to this email. Please help, and please do something to change New Britain’s HOCC use of torture, and the situation at W-1 in particular. Although I am somewhat constrained in Vermont at present, I would assist in any fashion I possibly can.

Thank you,

Pamela Spiro Wagner