Tag Archives: torture

Podcast

DO YOU BELIEVE THIS WOMAN, THIS “LOVING MOTHER”?

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(I myself think she’s full of sh— and worse, but if anyone wants to discuss this with me, please read below, or find the podcast and listen to it, then come back and tell me what you think.)


Look for First Person, a New York Times podcast, and the February 16, 2023 broadcast, as I don’t know how to put it up here. The transcript is below, but it’s important as well to hear it, to hear the mothers voice etc.

You won’t be able to listen here, as this photo below is just a screenshot, but it shows you what to look for in your podcast offerings.

TRANSCRIPT

He Was ‘Losing His Mind Slowly, and I Watched It’

How do you help someone who doesn’t believe he is mentally ill?

Thursday, February 16th, 2023

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and emailtranscripts@nytimes.comwith any questions.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

From New York Times Opinion, I’m Lulu Garcia-Navarro. And this is “First Person.” Late last year, New York City Mayor Eric Adams made headlines.

Archived Recording (Eric Adams)

I want to talk to you about a crisis. We see all around us people with severe and untreated mental illness who live out in the open on the streets —

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

He directed emergency workers to transport more people to the hospital for psychiatric evaluations, whether they wanted to go or not.

Archived Recording (Eric Adams)

These New Yorkers and hundreds of others like them are in urgent need of treatment and often refuse it when offered. The very nature of their illnesses keeps them from realizing they need intervention and support.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

And on the other side of the country, this year California is rolling out a new court system to monitor people with serious mental illness and potentially compel them into treatment. These programs are extremely controversial. Opponents like disability rights groups say that forced treatment criminalizes mental illness, doesn’t work, and also doesn’t address the real issue — a lack of care and housing for the people who do want it.

And most importantly, they argue that it’s a violation of a mentally ill person’s civil rights. For caregivers like Kimberly, a mom in California, this is not an abstract debate. Her 22-year-old son has been cycling in and out of psychosis since he was a teenager. And as she’s watched him get sicker over the years, she’s wondered if the only way she’s going to save his life is by being in control of it.

And a note — because of the sensitive nature of this story, we’ll only be using Kimberly’s first name, and we won’t be naming her son at all to protect his privacy and medical history. Today on “First Person,” the case for involuntary treatment.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Kimberly, can you tell me about your son? What was your relationship like when he was little?

Kimberly

My son and I were really close. It was just him and I for quite some time. And he was, I would say, a very attached child. So we did everything together. He didn’t like to be without his mom — very kind, very loving, very enthusiastic. I was his constant play partner because he didn’t have any siblings. And so we just — we did everything together. And I tried to give him the childhood that I never had.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

How old were you when you had him?

Kimberly

I was 21. I got pregnant by accident. And growing up, I had a pretty traumatic childhood that was pretty chaotic. And so I didn’t plan on having children. And so I was not prepared at all.

I dropped out of college for a bit to raise him. And I struggled going back to work and going back to school at night and on weekends.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

A lot of sacrifices, it sounds like.

Kimberly

Yes.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

Before things got hard, what did a good day for the two of you look like?

Kimberly

We used to go to Disneyland a lot. I would pick him up if — on an early day, I would take Fridays off, and I would take him to Disneyland. And it was just him and I spending time together. He loved being outdoors.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

When did you get the first sign that something might be wrong?

Kimberly

When he was four years old, he would talk about suicide.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

At four?

Kimberly

Yes. And he would talk about his body image — how he didn’t like his forehead or he didn’t like how fat he appeared, which he didn’t. He was not at all.

He would get night terrors. So I don’t know if that was maybe a sign of — you know, that he could have been battling with something early on, or if it was just, as a young kid, having night terrors.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

How did you see him start to change as he went through elementary school?

Kimberly

He would still make friends easily. But he would have periods of some conflicts with his friends. And I would always try to resolve them. I was usually friends with his — the parents of his friends.

And then as he got a little bit older, I noticed that he was having more anxiety, not wanting to go to school, refusing to go to school. He was always a smart kid. I tried to start him reading early and doing exercises with him. So he was always on the, I would say, above — ahead of his class a little bit.

And then his grades just took a sharp decline in sixth grade. He would ditch school. I would drop him off at school, and he would walk back home. And I was getting notices of delinquency in the mail. One of the teachers had reached out to me, and she suggested getting him evaluated and seeing a psychologist, getting him into therapy.

And I did. And then he was diagnosed with ADHD. And he was also diagnosed with depression and anxiety.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

A lot of teenagers obviously struggle with school, anxiety, depression. When did it become apparent that this was actually something more serious?

Kimberly

It became apparent when he started getting more aggressive towards me, punching holes in walls at, like, 13, 14. He’d break things. And he was always a very loving kid and very kind. And so I knew that this was not his personality.

I didn’t know who — what to do or who to turn to. It becomes almost like that dark secret, the way that you’re made to feel a little bit when I reached out to the school. They made it sound like it was my bad parenting that was causing the issue, that I wasn’t strict enough, that I wasn’t disciplined enough.

And so I would try to discipline more and try to enforce more rules and consequences. And that backfired on me. And it only made him more unheard, misunderstood. And it got to the point where I became afraid of him.

He would throw things at me, throw furniture and things. And I could see in his eyes that he was not — he was not there. And looking back, I think that was — during that time, I think he was really just — really going through the process of losing his mind slowly. And I watched it.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

I’m thinking it must have been terrifying. I mean, you must have been at a loss.

Kimberly

Absolutely. Yes. I was terrified. I didn’t feel like I could share this with most people. It was something that I felt like I needed to hide. The more that I shared, the more it was shocking to other people. And I felt like an outsider.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

As Kimberly’s son entered high school, she spent more and more of her time trying to get him the help he needed.

Kimberly

Reading all of these books and trying to find out as much as I could that all said it was better to get a diagnosis early on because early intervention, early treatment was the most indication of success.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

But getting the right diagnosis wasn’t easy. Throughout his early teens, she was told he had OCD, oppositional defiance disorder, conduct disorder. And then he got a bipolar diagnosis. They tried medications, intensive therapy, inpatient treatment. None of it was working.

Kimberly

He would go missing. The psychiatrist, the treatment team, would need to call missing persons. Police would then go out searching for him and sometimes would find him, sometimes would not. And I would need to go out searching for him.

He started not to trust me. He didn’t understand why he needed to be into these programs. He didn’t believe in their diagnosis that he was mentally ill. He didn’t want to appear different from his peers. And it was such a devastating stigma to him.

He was ridiculed by his friends when he would tell them that he had this diagnosis. And so he would resist any type of treatment.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

So where did you turn next? Where did doctors say it might be good to send him?

Kimberly

His psychologist and his psychiatrist had recommended what’s called a locked facility, an out-of-state school, which was in Utah, because my son had proved that he could not maintain treatment. He needed that type of facility in order to stabilize.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

So walk me through the thought process of considering sending him to Utah. What was it like to make that choice?

Kimberly

It was horrible. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.

I did a lot of research on these facilities. And there was a lot of mixed reviews. There’s abuse that could go on at these facilities.

And it was extremely hard, you know, the decision to do this. But it was ultimately something I needed to do because he was more at risk staying here, because he was wandering the streets at night. I couldn’t keep him safe. And so they said for his safety, he needed to be in a facility like this.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

Did you talk to him about going, Kimberly? I mean, did you explain to him why you needed him to go to that facility?

Kimberly

I tried to as best I could, but his psychiatrist had told me I could not talk to him about it actually happening and when it was going to be, because he would run away. And he had told me as much. And he had done as much previously in other programs.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

How did you get him there?

Kimberly

They recommended a service that is normally hired for these type of situations, that they come in the middle of the night, around 3:00 AM. And they said that I needed to pack a bag for him. And I could not let him see that. And it was three big huge men that came in the middle of the night and woke him up. And they told him to get out of bed, get dressed. You’re coming with us, and you’re going to school in a different program, and say goodbye to your mom, and —

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

Wow.

Kimberly

He wouldn’t even look at me. He was so upset with me and so hurt. I was heartbroken. I think I cried for many days after that and wouldn’t leave the house. I knew that he was going to perceive it as — that I betrayed him. And he did.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

The facility Kimberly sent him to in Utah is one of the oldest of its kind in the country. It’s part of the so-called troubled teen industry — for-profit schools that offer the promise of stabilization and rehabilitation in a locked down environment. They flourish in Utah because it’s a parent’s right state, meaning that until a child is 18, their parents have the right to make all medical decisions for them.

That’s not the case in California, where Kimberly lives. Until very recently, these schools were largely unregulated. And there has been documented abuse at many of them. Kimberly’s son was 16 when she sent him to Utah. In the end, he’d be there for about nine months.

Kimberly

His experience there was very traumatic. He saw another kid get stabbed in the eye with a pencil. And when first coming into the program, they put him in a very dark room with just a desk to sit at and very minimal. They call it “destimulation” and what they explained to me as taking away all of your natural comforts and privileges that you may feel entitled to or may feel like you have and kind of breaking them down to the bare minimal necessities for behavior modification.

But he was taking medication regularly. He was able to see a psychiatrist regularly and a nurse. He was given therapy a few times a week and group therapy. He was able to finish school and get caught up.

And I think overall, as far as the treatment for it, I think he improved. And he learned a lot in a forced setting. But he held a lot of animosity and anger towards me for this.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

It sounds awful. I won’t lie.

Kimberly

Yes. It took a long time to repair our relationship and just made him more distrusting of the medications and of any type of professional help, therapy, psychiatrists — completely resistant to it. And he would not answer questions, would not verbalize information. And so I felt like I had to — I had to be his voice.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

But because he turned 18 and was now an adult, new medical and legal protections had kicked in. And they limited Kimberly’s involvement in her son’s care, even though she had a front row seat to how rapidly he was declining at home.

Kimberly

He was having suicidal thoughts. And he felt that he was losing his mind. He stopped caring about his safety, cutting himself. He hit his head against the wall. He thought people were staring at him and following him around.

He had mentioned he heard the TV talking to him. And he would just spend months locked away in his bedroom.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

Then on Christmas Eve, when Kimberly’s son was 20, he had a major psychotic episode. He became convinced that there were intruders in the house hurting his mom. He jumped out of a second floor window to get help and was brought to the hospital, where he was put on a psychiatric hold.

There, he received a diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder for the first time and, with it, a new type of medication.

Kimberly

It was the first time they had put him on a long-acting injection which — of an antipsychotic. And they recommended this because of his history of nonadherence to medication. And he started to improve a little bit.

Our relationship was getting better. He was home all the time. His cognition was coming back. He was able to spend time with me, engage.

But he gained 50 pounds in a matter of weeks on this medication, and he’d becomes swollen. And it made him very self-conscious about his image. He did not want to be associated with schizoaffective disorder.

He started to reject the injections. And by March, he completely refused.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

And by October, Kimberly had become the focus of his paranoia.

Kimberly

He started collecting knives to defend himself against the people that were out to get him. And I learned that I became one of those people that was out to hurt him. And so one night, he had showed up on my balcony, had come in. And he thought that I had stolen from him, and he had a knife. And he pulled a knife on me.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

So sorry, Kimberly.

Kimberly

I was trying to de-escalate him, and it wasn’t working. And he had a wild look about him. And no matter what I tried to calm him down, I wasn’t able to. My boyfriend was here at the time, and he was able to get him to put the knife down.

And then he had told me to call the police, and I did.

They said that they would arrest him and take him in, and if I wanted to press charges. And I said, no, absolutely not. He needs help.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

After the break, Kimberly begins to wonder if the only way to get her son treatment that works is to force it on him.

Kimberly

Every time I tried to get him help, they would ask me if I had a conservatorship. And I said, no, no, what’s that? And they said, well, the only way for you to be involved and for us to legally give you information about what’s going on is if you had a conservatorship.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

After Kimberly’s son pulled a knife on her, he was taken to the hospital and put on an involuntary 72-hour hold. But the moment that hold kicked in, the clock was ticking. She needed advice. So she turned to the leader of her support group, part of an organization called NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

Kimberly

She went through this. Both of her children, sons, had been through this. And so she was telling me, do not allow him to come home. In order to get him help that he needed, I needed to demand from the hospital — I had to say that he had no place to safely live — basically declare him as homeless so that they would keep him in the hospital a little bit longer than a 72-hour period to get stabilized. Otherwise, they were going to discharge him.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

What was it like to say that he couldn’t come home?

Kimberly

Oh, it was horrible. It was devastating because I basically had to abandon him. And to him, you know, it’s abandonment. When I put him involuntary into the hospital or when I had sent him to Utah, it’s being abandoned by the one person that loves you the most, who loves you unconditionally.

And so to say that you have no place to go to is devastating. In order to get him help, I have to relinquish him into the hands of other people.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

Kimberly, you did this because you’d gotten advice that it will force the hospital to provide more care beyond a 72-hour hold. Do they at that point?

Kimberly

No. I found out. They kept him over the 72 hours. I think they kept him for about four or five days. But then they said that they would not keep him and they would release him as homeless.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

And that’s what they did. After Kimberly’s son was discharged, he bounced in and out of short-term facilities, periodically disappearing and wandering the streets for days at a time. Kimberly was frantic. She knew that it was no longer safe for him to live at home. And as she tried to impress the severity of his situation onto his doctors, she kept running into roadblocks.

Kimberly

They will not let you speak to the doctor. You can only speak to a nurse assistant in the office. And oh, well he needs to opt in, in order for you to talk to the doctor, and if he’s already mistrusting, that I need to call the police to get him help.

And it’s not like they go up to him and ask him, hey, will you sign an authorization for the doctor to speak to your mom? That’s not going to happen. And so —

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

You’re stuck.

Kimberly

I’m stuck — nowhere to go, nowhere to turn to you.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

So she started looking into something that might give her the power to advocate for her son — what California calls an LPS conservatorship.

Kimberly

An LPS is a Lanterman-Petris-Short conservatorship. And it’s specifically for mental illness. One of the criterias for it is they have to prove grave disability. And the criteria is can’t provide food, clothing, or shelter. And it’s extremely, extremely hard to get.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

And that’s intentional. The LPS conservatorship system was created in the 1960s in response to the practice of locking people up in mental institutions indefinitely. Back then, the bar to subject someone to involuntary treatment was far too low.

So the LPS Act put strict safeguards in place. For one thing, these conservatorships aren’t permanent. And family members can’t request them. A patient has to be referred by a mental health professional. By the way, this is not the same kind of conservatorship that Britney Spears was under.

If a judge approves the LPS conservatorship, a guardian is appointed. Sometimes that’s a family member, sometimes not. But that person can decide where the conservatee lives, consent to medication on their behalf, make medical decisions, and in some cases force treatment.

Kimberly

I thought it would be able to help my son get treatment. When he went into psychosis, he didn’t think that he had this illness. He had what’s called anosognosia — is what I learned is a lack of insight. They don’t recognize it, because oftentimes, they’re in this period of they’re living in a different world that they see that’s very real to them that’s not actually really what’s going on.

And so I’m learning that this is possibly going to be the only way that I could save his life, to get him treatment, and to be able to bring him home, to stabilize him. This is what he needs in order for him to get help, because he is not going to — he’s going to reject it each time.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

How did you feel about that idea at the time? You’ve talked about how much forcing him to do things had caused damage to your relationship.

Kimberly

My opinion changed over time. As he was getting sick, and I realized — he was around 15 or 16 when he was telling me about the side effects of his medication and he didn’t want to take it. And I thought, he knows what his body is telling him. He knows what’s best. I’ll let him make those decisions.

But going through over the years and seeing him decline without medication, and seeing how bad it got where I’m fearing for my life and I don’t know when he’s going to decompensate so bad where he might kill me, he might kill everyone in our family, he might kill himself, he might kill some random person on the street, and I’m reading these stories in the news, and I’m looking at these mass — these mass murderings, these mass shootings, and I hear people say — like, sarcastically my neighbors will say, oh, their parents must be so proud of them, you know.

And I think to myself now going through it. And I’m like, no, we’re devastated. We’re trying to get help for your kid growing up over and over and being shut down everywhere you go and every turn you go to.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

Of course, mentally ill people don’t necessarily commit acts of violence.

Kimberly

Correct, yes. Most people with severe mental illness are not violent. But because of the system that we have, the lack of a behavioral health system that works, our system requires them to be violent, to commit a crime.

This is what I was told by the police. They showed up and they said, well, he’s not harming anybody right now. And he’s not in the process of killing anybody right now. So there’s nothing we can do. And they would take it to that extreme, that they would have to see him. They have to observe it in order for him to be hospitalized, to get the help that he needs, because they can’t be forced.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

So the only way he gets help is if it’s the worst-case scenario. He’s committing a crime against somebody else or he’s threatening his own life.

Kimberly

Correct.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

What I’m hearing you say is a big roadblock to him being conserved is this criteria for who counts as sick enough. And I guess I’m wondering in theory, does that high bar make sense to you as a safeguard? Because when we’re talking about a system evaluating so many people, it might not necessarily be a bad thing for the system to be slow and cautious when considering such an extreme option.

Kimberly

It’s a hypocrisy, because the medical research says that the earlier intervention happens and the earlier treatment happens, the more successful. And there’s also — there’s cognitive decline. The longer that someone goes into psychosis, it’s neurodegenerative. And so a lot of them revert backwards.

And I have seen that in my son. He is not the same. And each time, he loses more of his intellect, of his ability to function.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

You see this cautiousness in this case is harmful in some ways.

Kimberly

Yes, absolutely.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

Does the conservatorship actually seem like a possibility?

Kimberly

It seems impossible.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

And why hasn’t someone referred him yet?

Kimberly

[LAUGHS]: That’s a question that I constantly have been asking for the past few years. What I found out was that it comes down to funding.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

Like so much else in the American health care system, it’s a question of who pays. Psychiatric care beds have been disappearing for years. And it’s really expensive to keep people in the ones that do exist.

When a hospital refers someone for conservatorship, they are legally required to keep them until a judge can rule. That process can take months. And it can disincentivize hospitals from referring people in the first place. But money aside, it’s also an ethical question.

Kimberly, I’m thinking about this impossible situation that these mental health care systems put caregivers like yourself in. Speaking more broadly, though, when I hear the word “conservatorship,” I think of people being thrown into institutions indefinitely.

And the director of the Disability Rights Program at the ACLU has actually said, I believe, that conservatorship is America’s most extreme deprivation of civil rights aside from the death penalty. How does that sit with you, that criticism?

Kimberly

Before all of this, before I was as intimately involved, I used to think people should have the right to be in charge of their body, just like how I feel about abortion is that you should — a woman should have the right to decide what happens to their body. I should have the right to decide what — the medication that I take or the right to die, even.

But learning about this, what I now know as anosognosia, is that he didn’t think that he was ill, and knowing that my son is not in a compensatory state where he knows what is medically necessary for him and that he’s going to die — and so I know that is necessary for him, even if it’s temporary, just to stabilize him, so that he can survive, because I know that he’s not likely to survive without it.

And so it makes me angry because I feel like those that are against the forced treatment or the conservatorship are not intimately involved with what’s going on. They have no clue what it is like as a family member to go through this. It’s painful. It’s traumatic. Your whole life takes another course.

Like, all of the dreams that I had for my son — him being happy and just being able to live a normal life — those go out the window. Dreams for myself, for my own life, go out the window. I can’t take vacation like normal people can. I can’t leave him.

People don’t understand what it takes to take care of someone with this illness — through no fault of their own. They didn’t ask for this, and I certainly didn’t ask for this.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

This word you’ve used a couple of times, “anosognosia,” it’s kind of a controversial one so I want to pause here. It means that a person with a psychotic disorder doesn’t have insight into their illness. They think that they’re fine, even when they’re very clearly not.

And that part is not contested, but it also has come to mean something specific, which you alluded to, which is that mental illness is a neurological condition observable in the brain. And it’s become part of this argument for making it easier to treat people against their will. I mean, you could see how it’s a framework that could be abused. You don’t have to listen to what someone wants for themselves if you can dismiss their preferences as part of their illness. I mean, how would you respond to that concern?

Kimberly

The way I would have liken it to is if someone is out in public, and they are choking and they need CPR to survive, and — you’re not going to ask for permission if someone is not able to make that decision. You’re going to give them CPR.

And this is the way, the same way, that I look at it. No matter what rock bottom my son is going to hit — and he has hit it — he’s not going to ask for help. He thinks that the government’s trying to control him and his body. Or it could be CIA agents poisoning his food in the middle of the night. I mean, these are the things that he thinks. And so he’s not going to opt in for treatment. Some of the times, he has anosognosia and has no insight. And there are other times where he’ll have a moment of clarity. And that’s when — those moments of clarity, I could tell, because his memory starts to come back. He can have a relationship with me. He can have a conversation, even.

When he’s so psychotic that he can’t even speak, he can’t read, he can’t write, he jumps off of buildings, not thinking that he’s going to get hurt. It’s those kind of things where you know that the person is not competent enough to opt in for treatment when they clearly need it.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

How do you think about what your son wants? I mean —

Kimberly

I would never force anything on him if he didn’t want it except for when he’s in an acute psychotic moment where it’s clear that he is going to hurt himself or hurt somebody else. When I know that it’s heading that way, even if he wants to try different therapies, if he wants to go off of his medication — and I’m OK with that. But when I see another instance when he starts having severe decline, I’d be able to help him get treatment.

These are always the last resort for parents. When you’re so desperate to get help to save your child’s life, that involuntary treatment is always the last course of action that you take.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

How is your son today? Where is he?

Kimberly

He is in a residential facility. It’s supposed to be an enhanced one that they can dispense medication. But they have to opt in for it.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

When’s the next time you’re going to see him?

Kimberly

Today. I just saw him last night, and I’m going to see him today. I try to see him as much as possible.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

And what is that like? How are you two doing?

Kimberly

Yeah, it’s great right now because he’s been on medication. He was hospitalized in October, and then he came out, and he’s been on medication. And we’ve been having a great time.

I’ve been able to take off of work. I took a family leave of absence, and I’ve seen him almost every day. And I’ve learned to have a lot more empathy. I’ve realized how horrible it is and what it must be like to be him and in his brain and the constant just trauma that he goes through.

We have a really good relationship right now. And I’m scared of losing that because I know he’s decided not to take medication again. I’m seeing him start to change a little bit, become more withdrawn and inside of his head. And I’m scared. I’m scared of that.

And I’m exhausted of this fight. And I’m not looking forward to doing this for the rest of — to continue fighting like this. But I will do it because he’s my son. And I’m going to protect him at all costs when I know that he can’t do it on his own.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

He’s lucky to have you.

Kimberly

Thank you. I’m lucky to have him. I’m just — if I could take this away from him and take it on myself, I would do it in a heartbeat.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

“First Person” is a production of New York Times Opinion. If you want to reach us, you can at firstperson@nytimes.com. And please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts.

This episode was produced by Olivia Natt. It was edited by Anabel Bacon and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud and Isaac Jones. Original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker and Carole Sabouraud. Fact checking by Mary Marge Locker.

The rest of the “First Person” team includes Stephanie Joyce, Wyatt Orme, Rhiannon Corby, Sofia Alvarez Boyd, Derek Arthur and Jillian Weinberger. Special thanks to Kristina Samulewski, Shannon Busta, Allison Benedikt, Annie-Rose Strasser and Katie Kingsbury.

40:37 / 41:19

Abuse, Brattleboro Retreat, Health, Mental Health, patient abuse, Psychiatric Unit, SOUL MURDER

BRATTLEBORO RETREAT — how they torture and abuse patients

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Brattleboro Retreat Aftercare Summary

Please read both documents, noting how the first is measured and reasonable written by an impartial social worker, and how the second written By thd doctor who made no bones about how he hated my guts and tries to see BPD in everything, even my socializing and doing art! Jesus flicking christ!

 

 

T

Abuse, Acceptance, Amnesia, Health, PTSD

Trauma, And the Stories We Tell Ourselves

3 Comments

Psychiatric Take Down and Restraint

I wrote a version of this in a comment at Linda Lee/lady quixote’s Blog: http://ablogabouthealingfromPTSD.wordpress.com

Hi Linda,

Someone I met here in Brattleboro, really just an acquaintance, maybe 2 or 3years ago said, “get over it!” about the trauma I have experienced, and I found that enormously damaging just in itself. My “guide” Wendy, never tells me such things and she is fully committed to helping people who deal with great traumas. Another thing is that true is that global amnesia, such as I had and still have for a couple of weeks-long hospital stays in their entirety, (and I also have amnesia for other life experiences that were documented as having happened but are lost to my memory,)  this sort of global amnesia cannot be self-induced. You either can remember what happened or you cannot.

What I have found very helpful, and this may not be something you can or even choose to do, is this: I find that when my thoughts erupt or are triggered by something in the present, into a spasm of terrible memories, the resulting emotions and anger etc are so paralyzing and painful that I did consciously decide “I’m not going there, not until and unless it is safe for me to do so.” To that end, when I notice my thoughts turning bad, I immediately find anything to distract myself away from that terrible rut that trauma has clear-cut into my cortex. 

I know the emotions stem from the thoughts I think, and they constitute the story about them I tell myself. So if I try to tell a different story, like, for instance, “okay, that was my life then, but I am here now and if I  am happy now then all of my past including the trauma, has brought me here and I would not be here without it all, yes,  even the trauma.” BUT I fully confess that re-telling my story in a more positive way does not work when I am acutely triggered, so that is when distraction plays a huge role. 

In some sense, I understand that I cannot remain attached to my story of abuse and victimization, because in a  real way this will only lead me down that same trauma path, and even “attract further victimization and trauma”..But to explore these things requires a feeling of safety, which is not usually available, so I get relief from the thinking instead, by distractions and doing things with my mind that I love. Like studying or reading French, or listening to songs, because the verbal aspect of both tend to crowd out the insistent trauma memories. 

As Wendy says, it is a practice, like any spiritual practice, to know when your thoughts are headed down an unhelpful path way and to consciously decide not to “indulge” their wish to ruin your day! It does take a lot of practice to do this, and I would be the last to say it is easy. On the other hand, I know there is a safe place for them, for me to experience the memories and even triggers in security, and that is during my sessions with Wendy. She allows these to be as long as necessary for me to get through things, so they are usually 2-2.5 hours every time. But the thing is, knowing I can hold on and let things “in” in a safe place with her allows me to also decide NOT to let them in or to control me at other  times.

I hope this makes sense. It might not be your cuppa tea, and I dunno if you have a safe place/person with whom you could both process memories or at least let them out, but who also, by being a safe person, might allow you to go the distraction route. I myself have found it very helpful…and you know (I know you above all know!) how terribly I have been tormented by my memories of trauma.

The idea that even trauma memories are part of the story of our lives that we write or create and can de-create also helps me. Because I can decide, of, say, someone who brutalized me, well, in their story I was only a bit character, and they likely told and tell themselves something entirely different from my story about it. But I understand that these are all stories, all dramas, that are not really Truth…and if we can retell the story In such a way as to increase ours and the worlds happiness, that should be our aim. 

More to come about blame and being victimized but I have stuff to do and need to distract myself from the pain that even writing about trauma brings on. 

Love to all,

phoebe

Abuse, Health, Psychiatric Unit, restraints and seclusion

Just Saying: Restraints and Seclusion are ONLY used as punishment

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My response four years ago to an article in CT papers about the use of restraints and seclusion in CT hospitals.

“As someone who has been subjected to more use seclusion and four-point restraints over the past “decade of change” than in the two decades previous it boggles my mind that anyone would even dare to state that things are improving in CT mental health care institutions. During my nearly month-long captivity in the winter of 2013, the Institute of Living in Hartford regularly restrained me to a bed for as long as 19 hours at a time, without ever releasing me for so much as a bathroom break — I had to defecate in my clothing. I was not even released to eat. When I was not in four point restraints “for not following directions, I was in seclusion, which they called the “Quiet Room” and not seclusion, but by CMS definitions, it was seclusion as I was separated from the rest of the patient population by force, and was not permitted to leave the room I was isolated in.

The one time I did actually saunter away, walk down the hall to look out the window, and return to my non-seclusion Quiet Room, I was punished with immediate use of four point restraints, into which I was placed without a struggle, hoping that would make it easier to win my freedom. Alas, for me, there was no way to earn freedom from restraints I never “deserved.” The entire point was discipline, and that would last as long as the staff wanted me to be in shackles to learn my lesson. There was literally nothing I could do, –stay calm, sleep, quietly ask for release — nothing, until they were finally satisfied that I was submissive enough to obey their orders, some 6-19 hours later. But I had to cry Uncle, and submit to a set of degrading humiliating “debriefing questions” that assured them that I took responsibility for my own being restrained and that my behavior would henceforth conform to their norms.

I was surprised to see Natchaug Hospital being given good ratings of any sort. One of their chief psychiatrists on the Adult Unit, a longtime presence their Chief Idiot Emeritus psychiatrist you might say, Paul Pentz MD was so insouciant about this job as to be nearly incompetent, but probably hard to fire even for negligence. HIs name I have mentioned . He routinely did drive-by visits with his patients– a wave in the hallway might not be a completely standard morning meeting, but it happened often enough that peatients knew that would be all of this doctor they would see for the day. He routinely discharged patients with GAF scores at or around 60, the highest “global assessment of functioning” that one can have and still be rated “disabled” — not because he knew this level of functioning to be the case, but because it made him and his psychiatric ministrations at Natchaug look good. After all, if person comes in with a GAF in the 20s, and barely able to function, and you discharge him or her a week or two and some drive-by counseling sessions later with a GAF of 60, you must be doing a terrific job, esp for a 75 year old doctor not too keen on using anything like trauma-informed or patient-centered care. I had never left a hospital before Natchaug with a GAF higher than 40, but suddenly I rated a 60….by a doctor with whom I never spoke.

Natchaug Hospital, when the nursing director was Sharon B Hinton, APRN, was a decent place, because she made certain that abuses like restraints and seclusion rarely to almost never happened under her watch. I know, because I was there about three times during her administration. I also knew her when she was Hartford Hospital’s psychiatric Head Nurse at CB-3, where she and her never failing humanity and respect for the dignity of every patient made all the difference in the world. I might have come from an abusive hospital in the early 90s, like University of Connecticut’s Dempsey Hospital, which in those days four-pointed people to an iron bedstead, by shackling them spreadeagled to the four corners of the bed, a stress position that is not just tantamount to but is in fact torture. But I would be rescued by someone finding me a bed at Hartford Hospital, where Sharon would discover me arriving there in tears and tell me, unfailingly,”Its not you, Pam, you did nothing wrong, It is the hospital that treats you badly…We don’t have any problem with you, because we treat you well and you respond to it. When they treat you with cruelty, you respond badly…That’s very normal.”

But as to Natchaug…Bravo if they have done away with restraints completely. They had not done so when I was there last in 2012. Nor with seclusion, which was imposed in mostly a disciplinary and arbitrary fashion. Largely it was used to force medication on loud obstreperous patients or for angry fed-up senior nurses to take out their peeves on patients they didn’t particularly like (e.g. me). I still remember one APRN demanding that I be dragged to locked seclusion, and left there alone (despite all Sharon’s previous assurances that such would NEVER happen, that someone would ALWAYS remain in that room with me if I ever ended up there.. Alas, Sharon had left by then, so rogue nurses like D could have their way…) and when I peed on the floor in panic, and took off my clothes they rushed in to take them away from me, and inject me with punishment drugs, then made me stay for an hour alone on the pee-soaked mats, freezing cold, pretending to sleep and calm myself just to convince them I could leave and not bother anyone. I managed to do so, or at least the APRN D. got over her fit of pique and finally released me, but I was not really calm, and when they finally draped two johnnies over my naked body so I could decently traverse the distance to my room, I left, disrobing as I went…Who gave a damn about my flabby flat behind? I certainly did not. And it served them right if everyone got an eyeful…served them right..

Natchaug’s biggest problem was and probably still is a lack of staff cohesiveness and bad morale between the staff nurses and the well-educated techs/mental health workers who were all very dedicated college grads but were treated like grunts…The MHW’s did most of the important patient contact, but were not trusted to write patient notes, or the notes they wrote were never read, or accorded any import. This was not just despicable but very unfortunate in more than one instance during my stay, as the notes they took personally might have saved me from some terrible misunderstandings and outrageous misdiagnoses that harmed me terribly..

Most places use techs who are trained by shadowing for a day or two, which means, badly trained, if at all…

You have to take all such in-hospital diagnoses with such a heavy grain of salt, you know, even when they are labeled with the words, “THIS IS A LEGAL DOCUMENT.” Because they get so much of fact-checkable, factual material garbled that you cannot believe a word it says. And as for diagnosis, well it is all of it opinion, one, and two, it depends largely upon whether you are a likable patient or a disliked one, what they finally say about you on any given day. No one should have that sort of power over another human being, frankly. And the idea that they can brand one for life with certain psychiatric diagnoses just sickens me.

Be that as it may, my recent last experience was beyond the beyond, at Hospital of Central Connecticut, The old New Britain General…and I expect to go back to talk to someone there about it. I always do And I have much to say to them, after the pain and rawness have worn off a little. They considered it SOP to strip me naked and leave me alone in a freezing seclusion cell without any access to human contact, unless they chose to speak to me over a loudspeaker hidden in the ceiling. If not, I was utterly abandoned, no contact or even view of another human being for as long as they wanted to keep me secluded. They also restrained me, having male security guards four-point me stark naked to the bed, before they had the decency to cover me with a light sheet, even though I begged for a blanket for warmth. (A nurse manager came in and shivered, saying “Brrr its cold in here!” but did they relent and let me have a blanket…No, clearly I was not human, didn’t need warmth.)

This is just the tip of the SR iceberg in CT in the current years, Remember this is happening right now, not ten years ago, or before the so-called reforms. Nothing is getting better. Things are worse than ever, And when you are a patient in these hospitals, you have no help, no recourse, anything and everything can be done to you and you have no way to refuse or say “no”. No one will help you, or offer assistance. They can just grab you and seclude you or restrain you without your having the power to stop them or any recourse to make them pause and reconsider. You are powerless to stop anything…And so they get away with it every time. And once it is done, who will fight for you? What lawyer will take your case if the guards hurt your shoulder rotator cuff, or bruise you up, or degrade or humiliate you? No one….so you are deprived of your human and civil rights, completely, but the hospital knows that no one cares enough to fight for you, so they get away with it each and every time, and they know this when they do it. They have nothing to worry about,….You are just another mental patient, a nobody, a nothing.

That’s what you are if you are diagnosed with schizophrenia and hospitalized in CT hospitals in 2014. A nobody that the hospitals can abuse with impunity and will. Just wait and see if any of this changes…I doubt it highly. They have no motivation to change. They don’t think they are doing anything wrong now.”

Abuse, Health, Psychiatric Unit, Seclusion and Restraints

What are/were the most significant barriers to your recovery from “mental illness”?

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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?

Art, Health

Psychiatrie Macht Frei…(huh?) Art Work

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All i can say is everything in this picture was as deliberate as i know how to make it, without planning it at all, and it contains symbolism both public and private. With reference to my signature quotation, (see below)  it makes use of what the negative spaces  offered me without leaving any in the end.

“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

(for those who are not familiar with WWII, over the gates over Auschwitz, the notorious concentration camp where Jews and many other despised groups were taken to be tortured and killed, were emblazoned the words: ARBEIT MACHT FREI, or “work will set you free,” which was of course a lie and a horrible joke, because it was only meant to kill you at what was not a labor camp but just a death camp. )

PSYCHIATRIE  MACHT  FREI?

Psychiatrie Macht Frei? Mixed media anti-psychiatry picture, 24"by 19"
Psychiatrie Macht Frei? Mixed media anti-psychiatry picture, 24″by 19″

Psychiatrie Macht Frei? Mixed media anti-psychiatry picture, 24″by 19″

Health, Health Care Reform, Psychiatry, Seclusion and Restraints

Open Letter to Kathryn Power of SAMHSA

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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

Health, Mental Illness, Torture

Tortured and Thrown into the Hole. A nd Why I tell you: DO NOT APPLY FOR SOCIAL SECURITY DISABILITY PAYMENT

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Ankle swollen and discolored from hours in 4-point punitive restraints the night before discharge/escape
Ankle swollen and discolored from hours in 4-point punitive restraints the night before discharge/escape

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The above is are just some bruises of many I received during my month-long course of “psychiatric treatment” at the Hartford Hospital’s Institute of Living, on the unit called Donnelly 2 South in January through Feb 2013. In  Connecticut, the Institute of Living, first known as the Retreat, and once quite famous as a posh sanatarium for the rich and famous though this is no longer true, was first made famous by  Clifford Beers, I believe, who wrote about similiar torture he underwent there just a hundred years ago in the book, A Mind That Found itself.
 (I WANT TO MAKE IT CLEAR THAT THIS WAS FROM 2013)

After burning my face with cigars and cigarettes, in response to command hallucinations, I spent the last month in Connecticut’s well-known Institute of Living (yeah the dangerous 6th month was JANUARY not February but nobody thought to check my math) being beaten up and trussed like a pig in four-point restraints almost daily for many many hours. Why did they deal me this sort of treatment? Why? Because “You do not follow directions”.

I DID NOT FOLLOW DIRECTIONS so they beat me up (despite my policy of non-resistance) and tied me, shackled me with leather and metal cuffs  to a bed for dozens upon dozens of hours.! Time after time I had to defecate in my own clothing, because they would not even give me bathroom breaks.  Get that? I was disobedient, so they shackled me to a bed as an excuse for treatment!

After this experience, I LOST ALL FAITH in the ability of any institution to do anyone any good who has a mental illness or sickness of the mind, or any emotional disorder or whatever you wish to call it. I GIVE UP! I will kill myself if anyone ever tries to send me back to such a cesspit of a place. I do not care if it is appointed like the Taj Mahal. NO ONE who works there is uncontaminated by the evil infecting such places. I may be the devil but I never wanted to be evil while they are ALL EVIL EVERY SINGLE ONE. I have NEVER been to a hospital where the people are kind and well meaning and where the treatment is actually kind and decent. Once in a while a single person, such as the Middlesex Hospital occupational therapist  Christobelle Payne, may stand out in memory as being a rare human being of warmth and dignity and  caring, but otherwise, they all to a one fail the test of being decent human specimens and all fail royally to be even normally humanly responsive to suffering persons. They are in it for the money and a cushy job, and don’t you forget it if you go into a psycho hospital, DO not expect to get well there. Expect deadening dulling drugs that never worked and the research tells so, and directions (ie ORDERS) that you HAVE To follow or ELSE.

Get out of there as quickly as possible, because your life depends on it. I am serious. DO NOT LINGER expecting care and treatment or to feel better no matter how helpful you might want it to be.

Furthermore. if you are a young person, do not listen to the sweet seductive advice that some may give you that you woul do well to go for “disability” and social security payments. THAT Is a load of total crapola and the worst thing anyone could tell anyone under the age of 40. Too many young people are being 1) told as children that they have Oppositional Defiant Disorder or ADHD, both of which are adults’ and psychiatrists’ ways of saying, “You don’t as we tell you to huh? Okay, then, we will label you mentally ill in retaliation!” But that is not the worst because they then “medicate” you young children or adolescents with Ritalin or SSRIs and if those cause the anticipated problems of irritability and anger management problems, and outburts and moodswings (!!!), then “add on” atypical antipsychotic drugs (and who would not think to themselves, in momentary awe and self-pity, “OOOh, I must really be Mentally Ill if I take an ANTI-PSYCHOTIC drug, right???”)

The thing is, they will justify these drugs with another label, a label imposed because you now have an IATROGENIC or doctor-induced, medication-caused illness,  like some version of “bipolar”, or if they really dislike you, the untreatable Borderline Personality Disorder, which only means largely that you are youngish, female and emotional and angry and don’t shut up when they want you do. (Test: Do they want you in DBT classes? Then you have the BPD diagnosis, trust me. Dialectical behavioral therapy is FOR “borderlines” no matter how hard they argue that it is open all…)

NEITHER of these labels reflect your or anyone else’s REALITY, mind you, they are ONLY labels, and neither Bipolar nor borderline have ever ever been shown to be real bona fide physiological illnesses or even (for all the talk) genetic diseases. What is a “real mental illness” anyway? No one agrees on the diagnosis, in any one person, and no one can find any chemical test or neurotransmitter than it out of balance or even an anatomic difference between the ill and the well. They only have the person’s words and the doctors opinions… If you disagree, prove what you what to argue. Do not tell me, well Manic depression “runs in the family” because that is horseshit. Messiness and not making beds can seem to run in a family, you know why? Because NO ONE breaks the cycle and teaches the kids the value of neatness and making beds every morning. It matter where and how and WITH whom you grow up, and the myths you grow up with matter just as much. The notion that  Manic-depression runs in your family is only that. A MYTH. but that doesn’t mean you cannot induce it or see it and make it real in your kids or yourself if you try hard enough.Lord knows teenaged angst these days is frequently dx’d as bipolar so jump on that bandwagon by bringing your child to a psychiatrist and they will be happy to oblige!

But do not think that your label of “Borderline” is something elevated and “nearly psychotic” as if that itself is anything superior to other MIs. Trust me, when someone else calls you Borderline it is shorthand for MANIPULATIVE, DRAMATIC, attention-seeking, devious, lying…if you like those words, go ahead and claim the diagnosis for yourself, but i doubt you will. So why do you vaunt it, and flaunt it? Do you not understand that the hospital and therapists actually hate your guts? Get a hold of your chart and READ IT. it is YOUR right and it might open your eyes to what those people REALLY think of you…It won’t be pretty or nice at all, but it will be instructive, and maybe you won’t want to be Mentally Ill with Borderline Personality Disorder any longer, hey?

Another few words as to young people going for social Security Diabilty: Someone asked me about this and my response is unequivocal. It is the very same trap that Welfare was for young mothers with too many children years ago…It had positives to it, but it ended up trapping many and many generations in poverty of the most extreme sport for, well, generations. Speaking just for myself, IF anyone had had the time to find out where my talents lay, in art and writing, and had been able to provide the community and home supports for me that I truly needed, rather than funding my rent and hospital stays largely, plus a visiting nurses visit to bring me medications. I might have blossomed and never ended up recurrently in the hospital for decades. I mean this from the depths of my broken heart. I was always an extraordinarily talented and intelligent person, and everyone knew it. At the same time, I had very real problems. But no one ever said, LET’S NOT FOCUS ON YOUR PROBLEMS. LET’S SEE HOW FAR YOUR STRENGTHS CAN TAKE YOU!

You know, I still cannot socialize  or be away from home for long, and I cannot tolerate any 4- hour work day, far less an 8-hour work day…I do not have ordinary or “normal” stamina in any fashion. Narcolepsy is partly to blame and probably the mental issues and whatever else is at fault, I cannot say. But an extreme lack of stamina that eating well and exercise daily does nothing to help is a FACT of my existence. Nevertheless, I do not believe that I had to stay on Disability and “relief” all my life and be a leech on society…No, i just had no one from the ADA or any social services (god forbid a family member or friend) looking at my individual needs and assessing what I could do to earn a living and helping me, in deep and truly helpful way.,..I believe that my life might have been very different and more productive had the AMERICAN system not dumped me onto antipsychotic drugs and social security and essentially thrown me away…

But it will do it to you too, and you are assenting to it, if you go for disability at at young age. DO NOT DO IT. You will NEVER get free from those checks. NO ONE EVER DOES, unless they marry or get rich some other way…It is the worse decision you will ever make. I know that some living situations demand a check for rent, but don’t assent to their demands, make a radical decision to take charge of your own life, CHALLENGE the psychiatrist’s diagnosis. How long have they known you for anyhow???? Challenge the pills, or at least the dosage. DO YOU FUNCTION BETTER NOW???? that is the only question that matters. If not, the pills do not help. PERIOD.  NEVER take any pill on  a “For the rest of my life basis!”

Oh, I am so angry and broken at the moment that I cannot speak more. But if I can later on, I will say more to explain. At the moment, I have to attend to too many PHYSICAL bruises and to find a way back to sanity on my own, having  been driven to the brink of near extinction by one of the best known hospitals in this state. At the moment I am both rigid with rage and so confused and broken that I scarcely know how to continue, or whether I even want to. Why bother? Why bother? How can people be such  monsters, and in such monstrously powerful places and ways. I hurt so deeply and feel I will never trust an single person ever again when they say, “Come let us help you. You need our help.”  YOUR help? Like being raped, I need your F—ing help!

GO jump in a lake of snot is what I should say to all of you so called helpers. I’d rather die. Go F— yourself.

Abuse, Health

READ THIS, Michael Edward Balkunas, MD of Hospital of Central Connecticut in New Britain, CT, Before You Throw Another Psychiatric Patient Into Your Supermax Seclusion Cells!

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Hospital Seclusion Room
Hospital Seclusion Room (Supermax Cell at New Britain General Hospital)

This is from the Special Rapporteur to the UNITED NATIONS CONVENTION ON TORTURE 2013:

As the previous Special Rapporteur stated: “Torture, as the most serious violation of the human right to personal integrity and dignity, presupposes a situation of powerlessness, whereby the victim is under the total control of another person.”14 Deprivation of legal capacity, when a person’s exercise of decision-making is taken away and given to others, is one such circumstance, along with deprivation of liberty in prisons or other places (A/63/175, para. 50).

32. The mandate has recognized that medical treatments of an intrusive and irreversible nature, when lacking a therapeutic purpose, may constitute torture or ill-treatment when enforced or administered without the free and informed consent of the person concerned (ibid., paras. 40, 47). This is particularly the case when intrusive and irreversible, non- consensual treatments are performed on patients from marginalized groups, such as persons with disabilities, notwithstanding claims of good intentions or medical necessity. For example, the mandate has held that the discriminatory character of forced psychiatric interventions, when committed against persons with psychosocial disabilities, satisfies both intent and purpose required under the article 1 of the Convention against Torture, notwithstanding claims of “good intentions” by medical professionals .

Medical care that causes severe suffering for no justifiable reason can be considered cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, and if there is State involvement and specific intent, it is torture.

63. The mandate has previously declared that there can be no therapeutic justification for the use of solitary confinement and prolonged restraint of persons with disabilities in psychiatric institutions; both prolonged seclusion and restraint may constitute torture and ill-treatment (A/63/175, paras. 55-56). The Special Rapporteur has addressed the issue of solitary confinement and stated that its imposition, of any duration, on persons with mental disabilities is cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment (A/66/268, paras. 67-68, 78). Moreover, any restraint on people with mental disabilities for even a short period of time may constitute torture and ill-treatment.78 It is essential that an absolute ban on all coercive and non-consensual measures, including restraint and solitary confinement of people with psychological or intellectual disabilities, should apply in all places of deprivation of liberty, including in psychiatric and social care institutions. The environment of patient powerlessness and abusive treatment of persons with disabilities in which restraint and seclusion is used can lead to other non-consensual

Domestic legislation allowing forced interventions

64. The mandate continues to receive reports of the systematic use of forced interventions worldwide. Both this mandate and United Nations treaty bodies have established that involuntary treatment and other psychiatric interventions in health-care facilities are forms of torture and ill-treatment.79 Forced interventions, often wrongfully justified by theories of incapacity and therapeutic necessity inconsistent with the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, are legitimized under national laws, and may enjoy wide public support as being in the alleged “best interest” of the person concerned. Nevertheless, to the extent that they inflict severe pain and suffering, they violate the absolute prohibition of torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment (A/63/175, paras. 38, 40, 41). Concern for the autonomy and dignity of persons with disabilities leads the Special Rapporteur to urge revision of domestic legislation allowing for forced interventions.treatment, such as forced medication and electroshock procedures.

JUST THOUGHT YOU SHOULD KNOW,  MICHAEL EDWARD BALKUNAS, MD, YOU MOTHERFUCKER…BUT THEN YOU ALREADY KNOW THIS, BECAUSE YOU DO WHAT YOU DO TO PATIENTS DELIBERATELY AND WITH PURPOSE!

Health, Mental Illness, Psychiatry

Solitary Confinement is Torture and You, Michael E. Balkunas, MD, Can Go Fork Yourself!

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This is from the New York Times today:

To the Editor:

Re “When Cell Door Opens, Tough Tactics and Risk” (“Locked In” series, front page, July 29):

The events leading to Charles Jason Toll’s death highlight the dangers of prison procedures, especially for vulnerable inmates who suffer from mental illness. Particularly concerning is Mr. Toll’s solitary confinement, a disciplinary technique repeatedly identified as ineffective and counterproductive, and even as torture.

The Justice Department has found that solitary confinement of mentally ill people violates their rights under the Eighth Amendment and the Americans With Disabilities Act.

Solitary confinement worsens psychological symptoms and can trigger outbursts tied to the person’s feelings of hopelessness and loss of a sense of self through extreme social isolation and sensory deprivation.

Providing mentally ill people with appropriate and compassionate mental health care, including integration of psychiatric, psychological and psychoanalytically oriented treatments, is crucial in restoring a person’s identity, alleviating feelings of loss and distress and reducing violence.

Mr. Toll’s solitary confinement, suffering and death were avoidable, and again show that the mentally ill are more likely victims of violence, not the perpetrators.

SUSAN McNAMARA
Middletown, Conn., July 30, 2014

The writer is a psychiatrist.

_____________________________

When I was a patient in May and June 2014 at New Britain’s Hospital of Central Connecticut, Dr Michael Edward Balkunas regularly imprisoned me in a horrific seclusion cell, without a single amenity but a concrete built-in bed and rubberized mattress, for nothing more than making too much noise for the approved hospital milieu. In fact, several nurses took it upon themselves, with Dr Balkunas approval, to do the same. This became literally routine. I was NOT, as is required by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, in IMMINENT danger of causing severe harm to myself or others. No, I was loud, disruptive and uncooperative, and I was rude. Period.

My first reaction when the double doors locked behind me was immediately to start screaming, at the top of my lungs, from the base of my lungs. But screaming brought no one. Okay, they did soon come in at me with three IM injections, but they came back every time with IM injections anyway, because as I took to calling it, these were part of the drill, they were “punishment injections.” I was pushed onto my stomach and shoved into the mattress so I couldn’t breathe and injected whether I liked it or not. I tried to say, “STOP! I will take the injections, just don’t hold me down.”

But sometimes they didn’t listen to me, and held me down anyway, and I got scared that they would kill me, because it didn’t matter that I didn’t struggle. There were four of them to the one of me, and they expected me to fight and so they forced my face into the mattress and held me tight, hard, and with all their weight….until I felt my breath go out of me. Did they have any idea that I was NOT struggling, that I felt I was going to die? Did they have any idea that they were killing me?

I don’t know. I don’t know. All I know is that I felt in mortal danger when they wouldn’t let me just accept the injections on my own, in my arm, but insisted on giving them to me by force in the buttocks, even when I said I would take them voluntarily.

Then they would leave and lock the double doors. And I would scream, and NO ONE would respond, even though I eventually learned that they could not only hear me through the intercom hidden somewhere in the ceiling, they could also talk to me. They wouldn’t but they could have. When screaming brought no one, I would strip and urinate on the floor, and I would defecate too as much as i could, and smear everything on the walls and floor. I would even eat it and paint it on my body. I didn’t care, I DIDN’T CARE! I just wanted someone to come in and help me.

Several times I washed and colored my hair with urine, thoroughly. But no one came back for hours. The urine, which completely soaked my hair, had time to dry completely. Not that they cared or noticed. If they had, they said nothing. It was nothing to them. Only Barbara RN asked me what was in my hair, and insisted that she wash it out when finally they released me. I went with her to the shower-tub room and allowed her to do so, but only one other person was kind enough to notice and do that. Everyone else just released me and expected me to somehow be reformed and “better” after my hours of punishment.

Of course that wasn’t the case. I got worse, much worse. I started defecating in my bedroom, at any hour,for any reason, any time I was frustrated or angry. They decided I had “borderline personality disorder,” that I was simply manipulating them. They failed to see that they had traumatized and broken me. They failed to see their continuing role in my behaviors…which were getting worse and worse the more they punished me. Every time they secluded me, or four-pointed me, I regressed more.

Dr Balkunas actually decided to commit me to the State Hospital claiming it would help me “get better.” But really he was just in punishment mode. You could tell, because he wasn’t using any of the methods that you are supposed to use for REAL borderline patients….If he really believed I was BPD he wouldn’t have kept at it. But he knew from my brother, a psychiatrist too, and my own psychiatrist, that I do not have BPD, so that was bogus and just an excuse to torture me. He didn’t really think I had BPD. He just needed an excuse to use solitary confinement and he knew that schizophrenia was NOT a good reason. A very BAD reason in fact, so he invented a secondary diagnosis to use. But the thing is, there are other therapies you are supposed to use in BPD, and he never bothered to treat me with anything but punishment and then threw up his hands and said, Well, the antipsychotic drugs take time to work, so you will go to the SH until they do.

Bastard! He gave up on me without even trying to help…so-called saintly doctor. Just a bastard! Because torture doesn’t work to make me better, he decides that I am the one at fault????? Well GO FUCK HIM UP THE ASS WITH A BROKEN GLASS JAR!

Health, Institute Of Living, Seclusion and Restraints, Trauma

My Challenge to the IOL: Stop Using Restraints and Seclusion NOW

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Well, how did it go yesterday? All in all, I would say it was a very successful meeting. Certainly it went better than I expected, and better than the disastrous meeting a year ago at Middlesex Hospital with Dr Grillo et al. I fear I irritated Dr Mucha a bit at least at first. Why? Because I think he felt defensive and tried to tell me how much he did on my behalf and my mobile facial features (I don’t hide my feelings behind a good psychiatrist poker face) let him know at once that I didn’t believe him. Why should I? One, it was completely self-serving for him to tell me — as if he had been some sort of knight in shining armor behind the scenes — how much good he had done for me, when he let them restrain me day after day for many many hours at a time, and keep me in what he himself acknowledged was on-going seclusion for the majority of the hospital stay. How dare he tell me how much he did for me, and then when I said they “tortured me” actually scoff, “Restraints aren’t torture!”

Ask my brother, Phil, an extremely humane psychiatrist who would disagree, and would rather die than be restrained, but I went one better. I quoted Juan Mendez the Special Rapporteur to the Human Rights Council at the UN who just this past March spoke/wrote specifically about psychiatric patients and how the use of solitary confinement of any duration and any use of restraints, forced medication and forced ECT is torture. He didn’t say tantamount to torture he said that are torture, period. And I would remind Dr Mucha and Mrs. Blair that until you have experienced these things — and I defy you to try any of these modes of your so-called treatment– you have no way of knowing. All you have to do is look at the expression on the face of the woman in the picture I did yesterday.

From the way I was treated, under Dr Mucha’s supposedly magnanimous supervision, at the IOL (depicted in that drawing) anyone could tell that the people “caring for me” did not consider that I was truly human or “felt” their torture in the same way they would have. Because if they had believed that, they never would have done what they did to me, unless they really did deliberately, maliciously want to torture me. I don’t know which it is. Dr Mucha and Mrs Blair say the Donnelly 2 South unit staff are good people who wanted to help me….So which is it? That they didn’t consider me a real person, just a diagnosis and not really human, so they thought I didn’t feel the torture (this despite my exquisitely lucid PAD that spells everything out in detail) they inflicted, or they were actually malevolent and wanted me to suffer? I tremble to have to choose between the two!

Either way, the torture was inflicted and despite numerous calls to Carmen Diaz, the patient advocate, (another name for the Hospital employee who works FOR the hospital not the patient, really) no one, not a soul, came to help me. I called outside sources too, but except for my advocate at the dept of Protection and Advocacy, who is not a lawyer and has little power besides that of complaint, there is not an agency or organization in this entire state of CT that can or would help me. Not a legal aid group or a lawyer besides the court appointed one to fight commitment that would even come in and talk to me about what was happening. I was ALL ALONE, yet Dr Mucha’s knickers got in a twist because I didn’t praise and thank him for all his work behind the scenes on my behalf.

Well, I am sorry, but 1) Dr Mucha is the Director of the IOL and he is IN CHARGE. He did not need to work behind the scenes. He could have spoken to Dr Taylor about her treatment of me at ANY time. If he thought she was not treating me well or using restraints in an unnecessary or wrong-headed way, he ought to have spoken out at once, openly. Period. 2) I needed someone on my side OPENLY. I needed someone to come to me and tell me that they were going to stop this nonsense and get me some real help that no one was going to restrain me again. That they knew my advance directive was meaningful and that things had GONE TOO FAR.

None of that happened. None of that happened. And while plenty apparently did behind my back, I am not responsible for what I was not told and did not know. Though I do appreciate it now that I do know. For instance that Bev, the voodoo princess, who I was terrified of, not because of her voodoo, but because she was dangerous to me as a staff member, having taken an intense dislike to me, indeed such a hatred of me that she was conspiring to kill me…she was removed from D2S unbeknownst to me for as long as I was there. Simply because I had expressed such intense fear of her. That was something I did not know about, but I am very grateful they heard me and did something for me in that regard. Took my fear seriously rather than tortured me with her presence. On the other hand, if only, if ONLY they had told me that she would not be back for the duration, I would have slept better! Why not tell me? For nights I slept fearfully, since I had no way of knowing she would not be on the night shift!

I wish Dr Mucha et al would look into the Open Dialogue method of dealing with psychosis. It will never be implemented in full in this country, and certainly not in hospitals. It is not a hospital-based method in any event. In fact, it is anti hospital and empties hospitals rather quickly. But some parts of it would be eye-opening, such as always including the patient in treatment planning, how that helps bring clarity to even the most disturbed person. How it involves their being NO secrets, nothing hidden, not even disagreements between treaters as to how to proceed. How wonderful it would have been for me to have actually heard Dr Mucha in conference with Dr Amy Taylor et al discussing the use of restraints or seclusion…Do you really think anything would have continued to happen, or that things would have proceeded apace if I had been included in those case conferences about me? I highly doubt it! Oh, if only I had been….I could have told them so much, but of course they didn’t even think to include me when talking about me! How stupid of them, how completely stupid. But I wasn’t a person, just an animal, just a diagnosis.

Anyhow, at the end of our meeting, which did go well after we got off the torture topic, Dr Mucha asked me if there was anything I wanted to end on. I thought a minute and said, “Well, you know, I want to go back to the subject of restraints and seclusion. You continue to use them because you won’t stop using them. You say it is a slow process, that it takes time. But it isn’t a slow process. You cannot stop using them as long as you allow their use at all. All it takes to stop using restraints and seclusion is to STOP USING THEM. Period. Once you don’t have the notion that, Oh, well, we can always use restraints on that unruly patient, so it’s okay, we don’t have to plan in advance about how to deal with her or him if things get out of hand…once you can’t resort to restraints at all, then you must think imaginatively in advance about how to deal with patients and you will find a way. You always do. Necessity is the mother of invention.”

So that is my challenge to the Institute of Living. Stop dillydallying around and pretending that you are reducing the use of restraints and seclusion. Don’t tell me that you are only using them in the geriatric population to reduce falls, because that is not true and that is not really the sort of thing that I am talking about and you know it. You don’t use seclusion and restraint to reduce falls for “an hour” anyway…THree times a week is not a reduction. Once a year is a reduction! But I want you to NEVER use restraints or seclusion again. I want you to understand that to restrain a patient or to use a show of force is to torture someone. Get this one thing straight, to deliberately frighten a patient with a “show of force” is an act of  terrorism and has no place in a hospital. (In a prison, maybe, though I would argue against treating any human being like that even in prisons…) And when you torture someone esp a patient who is already suffering and frightened, you make her or him worse, sicker and likely to be MORE violent and less predictable and traumatized, with the subsequent behavior that is known to result after trauma. NOTHING good comes from treating a patient with violence.

I don’t know if the IOL will listen to me, a nobody, a nothing worth less than the paper I am printed on. Not worth a red cent or a paper nickel. No lawyer gives a sh_ t about me, I am not worth their time or effort because I am not worth a stinking dollar. So why would the venerable IOL pay attention to anything I have to say? (I am not stupid for all that, but genius IQs are a dime a dozen, alas… and Mucha and Blair too are no slouches, even if they persist in the delusion that to treat patients with violence is acceptable, and not torture, really.)

LISTEN to ME, LISTEN TO ME! I know what I am talking about. if you don’t you will continue to cause more harm than good. If you do, you will break new ground and start a revolution that cannot but do good. That’s all I have to say.

Art, Institute Of Living

In 4-point Restraints for Disobeying the Rules at the Institute of Living, 2013

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Look at the Caption and the Sign on the wall, both are important! This really happened...
PSYCHIATRIC PATIENT IN FOUR-POINT RESTRAINTS

A study in perspective...The tin foil on the wall didn't come out as well as I wanted it to, but the rest is okay..I hope...
A study in perspective…The tin foil on the wall didn’t come out as well as I wanted it to, but the rest is okay..I hope…

Study in pencil of plastic container of doodads
Study in pencil of plastic container of doodads

Study in pencil of plastic container of doodads
Study in pencil of plastic container of doodads

Bearing the Elephants is a spontaneous inkblot drawing...The black spots were inkssplotches that stimulated the drawing.
Bearing the Elephants is a spontaneous drawing…The black spots were inksplotches that stimulated the drawing. I think if you click on the drawing you may get more information…

So that is all I have to post today as I have too many errands to do before my meeting at the Institute of Living. Wish me luck everyone! I don’t expect much from them, I must say. Not much at all, after all, no one is going to acknowledge any wrong doing, much less apologize or even want to improve the situation. Not as at Natchaug where at least they gave lipservice, though it turned out to be lip service ONLY…to wanting to make Natchaug a better place. (Yeah, it turns out they — THe MFs at Natchaug Hospital who said they wanted me to speak — were just stringing me along, never did have any intentions of having me back to speak to the Medical staff, just mollifying and mollycoddling me as I sort of thought they were…Dr Deborah Weidner, the Natchaug Hospital CMO, is a politician as much as a psychiatrist and has to be, right? NO…but that is another subject altogether. I won’t be going back to Natchaug ever again either , not as a patient, as was understood. They don’t have a doctor who will see me, so why would I care about helping them improve? I did care. I do care about all their other patients and I care about their Mental Health Workers, who were the one group that really did do their jobs…and most of the nurses too…But the problem is the Admin of Natchaug doesn’t care, and the senior nursing staff is burned out and problematic…But I am not going to go there. Because THEY DON’T CARE that I care!)

Anyhow, as I said, I have errands to do and I guess I should maybe wash before I go to the IOL, seeing as how I haven’t done so since my trip to NC…It might be  a good idea, though a real drag. I hate it…I hate the very idea of getting under the running water and getting wet is such a hassle. But gotta keep up the appearance for today! After that, who gives a damn…

Okay, so thats it for now. I’m outta here. Thanks for all the FB support, guys. I will let you know how it goes.

Health, Institute Of Living, Mental Health, Seclusion and Restraints

Open Letter to the Director of the Institute of Living, Dr Theodore Mucha, and Ms Ellen Blair, Director of Nursing

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Dear Dr Mucha and Ms Blair,

Forgive me if I must read this instead of simply speaking extemporaneously, but while I may seem collected to you, inside I’m shaking. Indeed, every time I recall what I recall, or reread the nursing notes about what was done to me this past winter here at the IOL, I start crying. I need to stay in control in order to retain some credibility and so I have written this out in advance in order to make sure that happens.

Thank you for meeting with me today. Ever since I was discharged from the IOL in February, I have felt the need to come back here to speak to someone. Yet because of trauma-induced amnesia, it is only now that I have acquired my records and learned the details of what happened that I’m finally able to do so. But at the same time, I wonder why I bother, since it is not as if I expect you to do anything or say anything that will make a difference. You won’t. You can’t. No one ever does, not even when faced with the reality of the most egregious abuses.

 Before I say anything further, I want you to know that I believe that I have been harmed by the treatment I received on Donnelly 2 South, and that what the staff did to me was not only unethical and cruel but that it crossed the line into illegality more than once. I was told to assure you that I do not intend to sue or cause trouble. I do not, not at the moment. However, if I don’t feel that I have been properly heard at this meeting I may in fact file a formal complaint with the Department of Justice. For now, I just want you to listen carefully and hear what I have to say.  When I am through, if you are so inclined, perhaps we might discuss ways in which things might have gone differently and how they might change in the future, for others even if it is no longer possible for me.

Please understand that I know I was a difficult patient. I was loud and upset and hard for some staff to deal with. That is precisely why my Psychiatric Advance Directive was written out the way it was, and why I made my medical and psychiatric history online so available. When ill, I am frightened and paranoid, which makes me easily roused to irritability and hostility. I know this, from a distance as it were. But knowing this now does not mean i was in control of my behavior. I am by nature neither temperamental nor prone to temper eruptions or throwing things. In addition, I am extremely modest, hardly one to disrobe or urinate in public. My friends and family have at times variously labeled me  “stoic” and “peacemaker,” which should tell you a lot. But that I did all these things on Donnelly 2 South both horrifies me and concerns me because these behaviors point to something going on distinct from psychosis: they point to abuse and trauma.

Let me make it very clear that I have behaved in such outrageous ways before, yes, but only in response to extreme circumstances – as when i was subjected over and over to restraints and seclusion in a horrific and sadistic fashion at Manchester and Middlesex hospitals in 2009 and 2010. It is too bad that when Amy Taylor took it upon herself to violate my HIPPAA privacy rights and investigate my previous admissions, without asking my permission (which I never would have granted) she failed to make the connection between their abuse, and my subsequent behaviors there…It turns out all she drew as a conclusion was that if those hospitals could use restraints and seclusion ad libitum, well then, so could she. It didn’t seem to matter to her that in 2009 and 2010 those measures not only didn’t work, they made things worse when Dr Taylor followed their examples, the same results ensued, just as my PAD predicted.

I was admitted to Donnelly 2 South, and I came in with the very detailed Psychiatric Advanced Directiveas as I said. I made it very clear that my online electronic medical record  was available. It included documents such as my narcolepsy diagnostic consult and special documentation proving my need for a higher than usual dosage of Ritalin, written by my former sleep specialist who was also my psychiatrist from 2000-2009. Included as well was a letter she wrote to my present psychiatrist, Dr Angela Cappiello, explicitly stating her conviction that I do not have a personality disorder, borderline or otherwise, and never did.

According to Dr Sanjay Banerjee he read every page of documents that I brought with me. That is what he told me. Moreover, when he spoke with Dr Cappiello, he brushed off my concerns about anyone misperceiving me as having a personality disorder. My brother, Philip Spiro, MD, himself a psychiatrist brought the same matter to the fore again when in discussion with Laurie Denenberg, but her response was much the same: ““Personality disorders are not a part of the picture here. We intend to honor her PAD. We are glad that she has had the foresight to prepare such an document.“ If this was so, then how did it come to pass that Amy Taylor wrote on my discharge summary that I have a “long history of Borderline personality disorder” and herself diagnosed “Personality disorder NOS with borderline traits”? I was being treated for four weeks for an active psychotic disorder. She would have no way of knowing whether or not I had any personality disorder, given the axis I diagnosis and you know it. She did too.

Dr Mucha and Ms Blair, you were not there on the unit or in the quiet room with me, so were you even aware of what happened half the time? Did you know for example, that on Februrary 6, I walked away from the quiet room, strolled down the hall, looked out the window and slowly retraced my steps back to the quiet room. But when I arrived I I was confronted by a cohort of staff who proceeded to 4-point me, even though I was quiet and put up no resistance? Not wanting to give them any reason or justification, I passively lay down on the bed and placed my own limbs out for the restraint cuffs, saying, (I quote my journal entry made later that evening): “For shame. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. I am not and never was a danger to myself or others.” Their response was “ You refuse to follow directions so we do not know what you will do. This is not punishment, Pamela, this is what your behavior brings on every time.”

Were you aware that they always restrained me, spread-eagled, so tightly I couldn‘’t move a muscle? That they never permitted bathroom breaks or even let my hands free to eat? That I would fall asleep rapidly after three injections  –whether calm or not, it was a routine punishment needle in the buttocks: Haldol, Ativan and Benadryl ——and they would invent reasons to maintain me in restraints even after asleep for hours? Or when I woke, groggy and hardly dangerous to anyone, they would grill me with questions that I could not answer, and they would use my inability to respond as reason not to release me?

Later in the evening on Jan 6th, for the second time that day, they restrained me, for throwing half a graham cracker at the wall. Then, as usual, they left me like that for six hours, even after I fell asleep. In point of fact, I could never earn my way to release from restraints by good behavior or quietly, calmly asking for release. Of course not, because I hadn’t done anything to earn my way into them in the first place. They always refused to release me, ALWAYS, until I literally cried, “Uncle” when they told me to.

 

As to those vaunted ““shows of force“” what did you expect? Presented with a cohort of threatening staff personnel I saw one thing: an impending assault.  I know they anticipated my panic; it said as much in my chart. Isn’t that the point of a planned “show of Force” – to induce fear and panic? Why else do it? So why should it be any surprise, when I defended myself as they grabbed me? When they stuffed me into a body bag and were trying to tighten the straps, surely you can understand why anyone would bite the hand of an attacker whose digits came near. It was a matter of life and death!

 

But none of it should have happened. My PAD explained in exquisite detail exactly what to do and what I respond to better than fear tactics and force. in fact, It is beyond me, knowing that one of the admission diagnoses I came in with was PTSD, how you  Dr Mucha, could possibly approve in advance, the emergency abrogation of my PAD and a “just in case they are needed” use of restraints and seclusion. Why not counsel the person asking for this advance “right to restrain” to do all in his power NOT to restrain me and to work with the PAD instead?

 

Here’s what SAMHSA the substance abuse and mental health services administration publication has to say on seclusion and trauma:

 

 “Studies suggest that restraints and seclusion can be harmful and is often re-traumatizing for an individual who has suffered previous trauma…

 

“Further, 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 that staff members are attempting to control or eliminate.

 

I have been traumatized, and not just by hospitals. I was date-raped three times in my twenties and experienced traumatic domestic abuse by a long-term roommate. The cover sheet on the PAD made very clear that due to these trauma issues, I could not tolerate being secluded or restrained without serious consequences: regression and serious worsening of symptoms. Unfortunately, as soon as the staff saw fit to use physical methods of coercion and control on me, read punishment, from the first time a staff member grabbed me, all bets were off as to how I would behave. I certainly ceased improving, and my symptoms went downhill. Did they really think they were being kind and compassionate? Violence begets violence….

I tried to get help even when on the unit, at least I tried when I was free to make calls or leave my seclusion, err, forced-voluntary time-out two-week-long stay in the quiet room last winter. I made I do not know how many, but many, calls to the patient advocate office, but the sole time anyone made contact was when Carmen Diaz came to hand me some paperwork – I believe I was actually in 4 point restraints at the time — papers  I could not read about the forced medication hearing. I needed her advocacy, but she never responded to my panicked calls in any way that was helpful to me. I wanted her help, but she never came by to ask me what I needed. She was less than useful, the fact that I had to go through her, and her refusal to respond contributed to my ongoing panic and desperate feelings of aloneness and depression. No wonder Dr Banerjee tried to force me into ECT.

 

And where did the ECT discussion come from? My PAD states in no uncertain terms that  I would refuse ECT under any and every circumstance. My brother would be my conservator if Banerjee had sought to go down that road, and he would never have made any decision to counter my wishes on that subject. If Banerjee really read my PAD, he would have known that, and you too. Because he implicated you, you know. He told me that “Dr Mucha and I have made the decision to force me to have ECT.” Oh, I know, the chart talks about having “discussed the possibility of ECT with me” but that is not how it went down. I recorded the conversation in my journal directly after it happened and Dr Banerjee presented it as a discussion that you and he had, and a decision that you and he had come to, not one that I was privy to. And he presented it as one that I had no choice in.

Nevertheless, let me ask you this: regarding ECT and my so-called depression, were you fully cognizant that Banerjee had stopped my 75mg of the antidepressant Zoloft during the first or second week I was there? “Do you really need that?” he had asked, “You don’t seem depressed to me.” Obedient, and in any event glad to get off any medication at any time, I shook my head, assenting to the change. I remembered having trouble getting down even to 50mg quickly at Natchaug the summer before, I dared not mention this and frankly believed it had been a fluke, the opposite of the placebo effect in a sense…So I went along with Banerjee’s decision to summarily cut the Zoloft and hoped for the best. At least, I thought, if things go haywire, it will not be due to self-fulfilling prophecy, a doctor looking for symptoms he expects to find and conveniently finding them. And at least he will know the reason.

A week later, instead of reinstating the Zoloft, Banerjee blamed my sudden “depression” on my refusal of Lamictal, a drug I had not taken in months. Now he was applying to force me to take ECT, something I was terrified of, and to have calculated brain damage.

It was this threat, and the brutality with which the decision was handed down, that started the downhill course of my IOL stay.

The very next day, all hell broke loose. When I entered the conference room, I pushed some important notes I needed Dr B and Laurie to read across the table in front of them. They refused, claiming that I threw the papers at them. Instead, Dr B proceeded to berate me, and told me how he had consulted with other hospitals and providers and had read my records against my instructions and Advance Directive, thus violating my HIPPAA rights. Moreover, he threatened me with a behavioral treatment plan that would not permit me to do art or writing unless I “behaved.” I hit the roof, telling him I would sue the hospital and complain to JCAHO, then summarily left, slamming the door, an act that stemmed from feelings of utter impotence, because I couldn’t actually say in words anything more effective.

It could have ended there. I could have been left alone, to cool down and calm myself. But no, Dr Banerjee had to write for stat meds again, and even though I was on the phone and trying to find someone to talk to, to calm myself, I had to be physically dragged off the chair I sat on, away from the phone and brought to the floor in a physical struggle (because they had attacked first, ie physically grabbed me, I defended myself, instinctually). They could have waited for me to finish the call. They could have waited to see if I calmed myself. I was NOT hurting anyone or even threatening anyone or myself  with harm. ALL that I had done, in terms of physical threats, was to throw a lightweight chair at the wall. And that, it was clear to everyone, was intended not as a threat to anyone. Furthermore, it was done and over with. I had left that area and gone to my room. I had then come back and now sat on the chair by the phone, speaking to my interlocutor on the other end. There was no need to pick a fight or encourage a struggle. A wait-and-see policy could have successfully guided the situation to a better resolution not only for the situation at hand but for the entire hospital stay. As the poem by Dylan Thomas goes: “After the first death, there is other.” Once they decided to use restraints, there was no going back. The first time broke everything, So they used them again, and again and more and more freely and without justification but for convenience and punishment.

Back to Feb 6, after sleeping for six hours, I was taken out of restraints just in time for a visit from Dr Cappiello. Observed by my 1:1 staff member, I could barely whisper and dared not tell my outside psychiatrist the full extent of the abuse that had been happening. Nevertheless, she took one look at Dr Taylor’s behavioral treatment plan posted on my wall, and told me that it would be impossible for anyone, even someone who was well, to follow it to the T. She was so worried about me, and about my ability to complete the requirements, even for a “mere 24 hours,” that she intervened. The next day was the single day that Dr Taylor planned to be out of town, so Dr Cappiello asked Dr Mehendru to evaluate me for discharge, telling her that she feared a power struggle had been set up that I could never win.

 

When Dr Mehendru came to see me, at first I was angry, as the chart indicates, thinking she was just another Taylor flunky, preparing to use more restraints and seclusion, But when she asked if I would like to go home, I took one look at her, saw sincerity in her eyes, and burst into a smile, ready to say yes to anything. Miraculously “cured,” I left the IOL that very same day, less than 12 hours after being released from 4-point restraints and not 4 hours out of seclusion.

 

However, I was not well.  And within two weeks time, I was back in the hospital, this time to be admitted to Yale New Haven Psychiatric Hospital, via their emergency room. Over the next 3 weeks I experienced an entirely different kind of care. At Yale I did not find a staff ready to fight or try to seclude or restrain me. This staff did not need their day to be hassle-free with drugged and cowed patients. Instead, they were trained to remain tolerant, calm and compassionate in the face of sometimes very trying circumstances. It worked. Even when I screamed and yelled and swore, they countered with compassion, and lo, I calmed, no brutality needed, not even IM medication. They had no need or use for cruelty at YNHPH. I felt they sincerely wanted only to understand and help me heal.

 

Appreciating the shock and trauma of my IOL stay, each staff member I dealt with did everything in his or her power to prove that hospitals do not have to be brutal or abusive. At the IOL they pretend to use “best practices” but in truth it consists only of coercion and control. Treatment at Yale was in fact the “best practice” possible, and it consisted mostly of being consistent. Consistent in being patient-centered, trauma-informed care, consistent in being not cruel and uncaring, consistent in being humane to each and every patient, consistent in extending a compassionate hand and heart to every patient and reacting in a different and more constructive fashion than did the staff at the IOL (or at Middlesex or Manchester etc).

And you know, though I was still the same person with the same problems, loud and angry at times, even “violent” to property in my frustration, and still psychotic, they never responded with a show of force. Why would they? At Yale it would be absolutely anathema to deliberately frighten a patient. What would be the purpose in that, they would think….  They also never showed up at my door with forced medication or pushed me into a seclusion room or strapped me down in punitive 4-point restraints, or any of the other ill-advised responses that my PAD  explains are the worst things to do to anyone who is struggling, scared and paranoid. In point of fact, Yale Psychiatric Hospital’s Washington Square unit does not have a seclusion room. They also have a “restraints-free” policy, so they didn’t use those at all either.

The IOL on the other hand with its “We only use restraints and seclusion if we have to“” policy, restrained me countless times, and for many more hours than was even legal. When I woke up that last morning I spent there, the room opposite me was occupied by yet another person in restraints! That is because, you know, once you allow a staff to use restraints a little, it only takes a little to use them a lot.  And once you sanction the use of restraints and seclusion at all, it is only time before someone abuses them and abuse becomes the norm.

 

Some final points:

CMS regulations on use of Restraint and Seclusion

 

 

Restraint or seclusion may only be imposed to ensure the immediate physical safety of the patient, a staff member, or others and must be discontinued at the earliest possible time.

 

(ii) Seclusion is the involuntary confinement of a patient alone in a room or area from which the patient is physically prevented from leaving. Seclusion may only be used for the management of violent or self- destructive behavior. This means that IOL’s definition of seclusion as being “kept alone in a room to which the door is locked” is wrong. I protested that I had been secluded all along, for a good two weeks before they instituted formal seclusion. I was not violent or self-destructive, and certainly not imminently dangerous to self or others…NEVER was anyone in immediate physical danger.) Yet you allowed them to abuse me and seclude me because I was loud and made people uncomfortable…Instead of dealing with me, you let them torture and punish me. WHY? WHY? Why? I want an answer to this question.

“The highest price of all is the price paid by the people who are restrained: their recovery is stalled by a practice that can disempower them, break their spirit, and reignite a sense of helplessness and hopelessness…” from Recovery Innovations

 

Worst of all, using restraints doesn’t work to make either the patient calmer and safer or the unit a calmer safer environment to work in for staff. In truth, things only go from bad to worse once you restrain an unruly patient…Violence only begets more violence…Moreover, when I was at Natchaug Hospital, i was told by one of their mental health workers that she had wanted to experience the process of being four-pointed herself so she could identify with patients. She was told no, because as the aide informed me, hospital administrators feared it would be too traumatizing.

 

Where do we go from here? Well, I will never return to the IOL; inflexible IOL policies have no safeguards in place to properly protect patients. I came prepared, Dr Banerjee said so. And yet it did me no good, because all the preparations and advance directives in the world do me no good when staff is given carte blanche by their own director to ignore them.

So where we go from here is largely up to you. You can simply ignore what I have written, tear these sheets up, justify all staff behaviors and throw away my complaint as meaningless information. After all, Dr Mucha, you are retiring in a few days, so you can leave all this behind without a care in the world. Ms Blair, even you don’t need to believe my words, you can simply trust the superficial, documented words on the chart, and if necessary, the lies of staff as to what happened. What you don’t know won’t hurt you. But lies they are, and lies they always were, even as they told me what they were going to write in order to get away with restraining me as punishment. The problem is that not everyone was so clever as to cover her footprints, so once or twice the truth was written down and not corrected later. I will show you those pages if you wish to see the evidence I have.

The problem for you is not that I am going to sue you for malpractice, No lawyer is going to take my case on a contingency basis. No one in this country or anywhere in the world cares about a mental patient who was tortured in an abusive hospital situation but didn’t die. I would be worth money dead, yes, but not alive…Your staff knew this and that is why they knew they could get away with it…No, the problem for you is strictly moral, one of conscience. But if you can live with it, then I cannot change a thing.

The IOL could change, it could adopt a philosophy of patient-centered, trauma-informed care, as Yale has done, but that would require changes that would involve every aspect the unit. I doubt IOL administration has the ethical or moral fiber or the political will to do it.  I think you choose to remain a brutal, backwards and controlling institution because it feels easier and you believe it is cheaper, though both notions are mistaken. Sometimes it just feels easier to think mistaken thoughts than to challenge them and learn to think in new ways, absorb new paradigms. This is unfortunate because in the end the IOL would save money and patients would heal with less trauma, if you implemented changes that actually worked rather than resorting to the old ways of cruelty, coercion and abuse.

That is all I have the time and energy to say, for now.

Global Warming, Obama, Prisons, Vision, Writing

Prison Abuse: A letter etc.

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Edited from a letter to a friend: 


I sent the following message to the White House website — the Office of Public Liaison. It is the beginning of a snail mail campaign (insofar as I am able), geared directly at President Obama asking for a prison and “juvy” reform agenda. So far as I can tell, he has nothing  of the sort at this point and we need one.

 

This is the very least I can do as I have decided that while I write this blog and books on behalf of my own issues around schizophrenia and mental illness, my political writings and action will be on behalf of a prisoner I am acquainted with who is sentenced to “life without hope of parole.” (I ask you is there a more fiendish mode of inducing despair, desolation and desperation in a soul than such a sentence?)



But my question  submitted on the form available was as follows: “Is there any Obama agenda for humanizing juvenile detention centers and for prison reform?  Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and other foreign-soil prison abuses  did not come out of nowhere. Abuse and yes, torture of prisoners in “juvy” and US prisons are practices both brutal and common that serve no purpose except to create more violent convicts. Most will one day be released – to no one’s benefit, least of all  society’s. NO ONE CARES about them. They have been forgotten, lost, abandoned. PLEASE help.”



 

I was limited to 500 words so this had to be very carefully crafted and I wanted to get in some of the most important points. I dunno now about the comment about Abu Ghraib, but it seemed to me to be the important name to cite — an accurate reference for all that, according to my source– to draw attention then to the equation with US maximum/moderate  security prisons.

 

Anyhow, I don’t expect much of an answer (though the website implies the promise of something along those lines) but it was mostly to introduce the subject, into which I plan to go in greater detail in later letters.  


 


Towards the same ends, I am reading Christian Parenti’s 1999 book on US prisons and the “correctional system” in general, Lockdown America. I have had the book for years but have never been able to read it, though I wanted to. Now, suddenly, due to interest in this prisoner’s plight, I am slowly plowing through it. I admit it is difficult to get myself to sit down and read, but I really want to and so I persist.

 

My eyes, I think, continue to rebel. I have found that recently I have had to continually wipe my glasses clean in order to see better, or felt that I had to, without real relief. I am not sure what is going on, though. I believe I can still see 3-D okay. I just feel as if there is a scrim of something, a veil between me and the world…But it is more that than anything, and my usual narcoleptic sleepiness that prevents me from reading. Certainly not lack of interest and dedication. Still it remains very frustrating to me that getting through an entire book takes such a long time while writing is so easy (This is due in large part to my antipsychotic medication, Abilify, which I strongly believe facilitates putting words on paper, if insuring nothing at all about the quality of their ordering).

 

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Anyhow, truth to tell? The times are grave…I am attempting to work on a poem about Obama as Messiah and the concomitant end of the world. At the same time, I want to move to higher ground as I wrote in the earlier post, as soon as I get a spot in some other complex out of the Valley. That, however, could take years, I am told, as I am low on the waiting list, being disabled not a senior (I’m 56 and need to be 62 to be so classified, though the cut-off may be 65 by now)…

 

I do not know if the six years till then will be soon enough, and too, why continue to live if there will be social chaos and a catastrophic flood, famine and widespread panic, the predictable breakdown in all civil order…? I’d rather die, and by my own hand than survive to have to worry about being murdered by –

Argh, you don’t need to hear this, I think. But people are already  filling my head if not the halls with screaming and gnashing of teeth. I fear I may need to barricade the door…