Tag Archives: Yale New Haven Psychiatric Hospital

Health, Trauma

Trauma and Connection: You Need Not Be Alone

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When Monica Cassani posted this video (see below) on her wonderful blog, BEYOND MEDS.com today, I was not sure I would watch it, mostly because I often do not have the patience to watch videos, no matter who recommends them. (Sorry about yesterday’s recommendation, an hourlong one no less, but it is vitally important to me and my topic…I still highly recommend it, if you cannot read Anatomy of an Epidemic…). Nevertheless, something about a video on treating trauma, perhaps the face of McElheran on Youtube, perhaps just my mood at the beginning of this day, impelled me to click on the little triangle that started it playing. I was pulled in almost at once. In fact, I was soon in tears, because McElheran may speak to us all, but most importantly she spoke to me…her words on trauma included me, personally, for once.

That she did so, moved me beyond words, because at that moment she validated my own manifold experiences of trauma, which were mostly NOT of potentially mortal events, even if I may have believed them to be so (when paranoid or psychotic). I will embed the video here, so you can watch it now, and come back to my blog post afterwards if you so choose. Or watch it whenever you like. It is — truly! — only 16 minutes long, and very compelling, so do not worry that it will take a lot of time.

Something about what she talks about reminds me that “Nothing human is alien to me…” We are all capable of everything, and anything, given the proper circumstances. Her compassion for human behavior is astonishing and moving beyond words.

I need to say this because no one who “knows me” thinks I am “capable” of things like calling people such vile names as those I called the aides and nurses regularly at YNHPH, or of stripping and defecating and smearing feces without even thinking or considering the consequences… But those are important words: “without thinking” and “without considering the consequences” because they indicate that I was behaving wildly impulsively, as indeed I was. Think about the situation: Six to eight people, some of them security guards (self-professed former police officers) had just violently and brutally assaulted me, thrown me onto a bed, held me down (causing physical pain to the point that I screamed in reaction) and pulled down my pants, giving me three intramuscular injections into the buttocks, then holding me down some more until they felt “safe” to let go…(One of them actually telling me they would press charges for my kicking her in the stomach while she was restraining my knees!)

Once i was freed, I made a dash to get out of the room, wanting to “do laps” around the “square” hallway that gave the Washington Square 2 unit its name. No deal. They physically prevented me from leaving the small single room, that had nothing in it but a hospital bed and tray table. I recoiled, enraged and manically in need of doing something, anything! Suddenly, I felt my bowels engage, roil, want “to go.” But the bathroom was down the hall…No matter, what the F—! Who gives a shit, in fact.

Without thinking a second thought about it, I simply pulled down my pants, squatted, and unloaded on the floor, to not so silent on-lookers astonishment and incredibility. Then I removed my clothing altogether. But another WTF moment seized me, then. The steaming pile of sh-t was there, and suddenly I “knew” what to do with it…and I did not give a sh-t that this meant using my hands or getting it all over me or anything. I just didn’t give a flying femtogram. I do not know why. I didn’t even smell anything. I just picked up handsful of the feces and smeared it across the walls. But not blindly and wildly, no, I was writing something, I remember now, I wrote something on the walls with it, though I do not know what any longer. And I do not think anyone took the time to read it. I do not believe anyone bothered to notice that I was not merely smearing but writing in shit...

The point is, I did this as a response to trauma, small as you might say it was. I felt traumatized. I felt brutalized. And I felt and was out of control as a result. This is not to say that my impulsive behavior served any purpose other than venting rage and sheer revenge at my abusers. It certainly won me no friends and no compassionate understanding from anyone. It could have, someone might have understood it for what it was, and seen that what they were doing to me was in fact brutality and  traumatizing…They had after all diagnosed me with PTSD, so WTF did they think they were doing?

It doesn’t help, frankly, that “Dr Angela” believes that they were “on my side” and “doing their best” and “actually helping me” all along. I do not agree. I do not believe that. I think they were hidebound in their determination to break me, and if they could not see that they were perpetuating harm, they should have.

Okay, okay, okay Pam. Calm down. Calm down. Remember you are practicing forgiveness, not worrying the sore into an infected mess! 8)

This is hard. It is so difficult to forgive and let go of harm that no one admits to having done, one, and two, claims was actually for my own good. To help me!

Bull feathers! I still have exquisite backside piriformis muscle pain when I move in certain ways or even sit down on my right hip. And if I take off a T-shirt with the usual crossed arm movement, it causes agony in my deltoid muscles from the injections they gave me there too.

But forgive and move on, forgive and move on…I need to take a deep breath. Think about other things. Get ready to go out for coffee as I have made a date with an old friend of mine I haven’t seen since that debacle at the Institute of Living last winter. We always have great talks. It will be good to see her!

 

Yes, I will leave this on that note. The fact that I do not isolate myself, but that I have lots of friends and do things to keep myself busy and fulfilled and purposeful in life. Trauma and memories and flashbacks of trauma may still get me, and they get me in the gut a lot, but they haven’t got me completely over a barrel the way they might have. There was a time when I was more isolative and friendless but not any more. Not anymore.

Art, Health

The Voices in my head: Collage art made At Yale Psychiatric hospital 2013

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But in truth I screamed all three weeks and never stopped. I am still hoarse!
But in truth I screamed all three weeks and never stopped. I am still hoarse!

I just was released from the Yale New Haven Psychiatric Hospital and i regret to say that it was far from the kind and gentle “soft place to land” in a crisis that i remembered. Partly this was my fault, for wanting to not take the meds that i already knew would be forced on me, quite despite Dr Milstein’s assurance to my outside psychiatrist that he would never force meds or Zyprexa on me as “it doesnt work.”

No, I did not know that meds would be FORCED on me…Not until Robert Ostroff MD took over my care and made it clear he did not give a damn how I felt. He decided to punish me with massive doses of Haldol when I refused Zyprexa, and I know he is of an age to understand what he was doing. One, he is a Yale Physician, so he knew of the hearings in Congress back in the 70s where the Russian dissidents were complaining of TORTURE by Haldol injection, and where Congress actually decreed that the drug was in fact an instrument of torture when use on Russian citizens…He KNEW what he was doing to me, PUNISHING me. He just had the power to do it and could. So he did. He NEVER saw me to talk to me, NOT once. No, he just oversaw torture, and while Robert Milstein, MD (basically a good guy, if deluded into believing that psych meds are good for people) was supposedly on vacation, he too was available and did nothing to stop this. For that I do not forgive him…Or, I forgive him, but will never trust him to treat me again. No, I will never go back there.

In fact, I’m here to say that no hospital psychiatrist can be trusted when they promise not to force you to take drugs…that is what they are paid to do and are largely paid to believe in. It did me little good to try NOT to sound like i was ranting and raving esp when attempting to persuade either doctor or social worker in hospital to read Robert Whitaker’s ANATOMY OF AN EPIDEMIC or even borrow my copy of his MAD IN AMERICA, both books i find life and mind changing in a major way, even a year after i started reading them for the first time.

I dunno what to do though, in terms of meds. I function fine in between times in hospital, mostly. And so are the Abilify and Geodon helping or simply not Not preventing a relapse when it comes? There is reason to think that Geodon may be damaging my heart, slowly but surely. My EKG said something Dr Milstein refused to explain about a “probable infarct” but was that me, my heart or some general info on the EKG sheet? I wasnt allowed to look at it long enough and NO ONE answered my questions about it. Probably fearing i would stop taking the offending medication, which was true and i did anyway so they ought to have talked to me honestly.

But honesty is not a general policy in brutal psychiatric units where they restrain you, holding you down and bruise you to give you injections of Stat meds that are really ordered only because someone with the power to order them got angry and resentful…

I cannot sugarcoat my own demeanor during this stay. I was not a pleasant patient to anyone most of the time. And at the worst times i was likely considered horrendous. I screamed daily at the top of my lungs, i resisted their treatments physically and violently, i defecated on the floor of my room and even put handsful of shit across the walls, and apparently i even threw a cup of coffee at someone…though i do not remember doing this and the report may have been distorted by second hand information about me, coming back to me. But i was a horrible patient and one aide even called me, every chance he got, a dog, a pig, a swine….in covert secret ways, audible and openly but when no one else was around to hear him except the other aide who would back up his story that it never happened.

On the other hand, there were a few kind and compassionate understanding people who did not throw my smearing shit in my face or even take my calling them horrible names (bestowed on my vocabulary by a former friend who called me them) personally.

I need to enlist just such people for private duty help for the next relapse, if it should happen…but how? Ads on hospital cafeteria walls? How to vet the sign-uppers, so i do not get attendants that will abuse me in my own home? How to trust, and when, what they or references tell me? So many references are positive and therefore lies that they are tantamount to useless unless secretly negative!

Decisions decisions….must be made well before anyone is needed to help me at home….one to one, constant observation-plus!

Well, i am still recuperating, and worried about deep hip pain though seemingly improving is scary, reminding me of the avascular necrosis bout i had about five years ago. Was it meds induced? possibly because it healed magically in a month post radiographic dx, with a stay in psych hospital and change in those meds. But if i dont withdraw abruptly from, say, topamax or geodon, but slowly, will the hip pain continue, or evolve into worse than just, say, pain, but real bone destruction ans disability? Can i take any risks at all at age 60 with drugs that have no proven track record research wise, and seem to help me but may only being doing harm?