| Question: |
|
| What are your impressions of the mental or behavioral health system? What’s good, what’s bad, what needs to change? |
| |
|
See
who answered this question
|
|
| Answer: |
|
When Treatment Is Torture:
A Personal Account of Seclusion and Restraints
By Wendy McNeill
Well, it has been observed by psychologists that the survivors of traumatic events are divided in two well-defined groups: those who repress their past en bloc, and those whose memory of the offense persists, as though carved in stone, prevailing over all previous or subsequent experiences. Now, not by choice but by nature, I belong to the second group.
--Primo Levi
Moments of Reprieve: A Memoir of Auschwitz
Altogether, I have spent two years of my life in psychiatric hospitals. Some of the staples of institutional living include the following: the strict smoking schedule, anxiously-awaited visiting hours, “Group,” the inability to wear shoes, crude art therapy projects, and of course, doctors, nurses and patients who became your allies, friends, or otherwise.
I have to say that I have had weird and occasionally wonderful times at the host of hospitals where I was cared for, but I have experienced the underbelly of the psychiatric treatment protocol as well. As one with bipolar disorder, not only have I been at the mercy of the mental illness itself, but also at the mercy of something equally horrifying and dangerous: seclusion rooms and restraints, used in conjunction with powerful medication. Together, this combination has compounded the trauma of having a mind prone to unraveling on its own.
Of the three times in four-point restraints and seclusion and three times in seclusion alone, I define one incident as torture. This incident made an indelible mark on me and undermined my trust in the process of treatment for many years. This occurred the first time I was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, on my nineteenth birthday, when I was first diagnosed with a mental illness.
November 28th, 1990
I had just finished my Latin final at UCSD. It was the end of the fall quarter of my sophomore year, and I was living on campus. I was supposed to be preparing to go camping. Instead, I was writing passionately in my journal while singing with gusto and energy. I poured a cup of coffee in the fish tank so our pet would experience the ecstasy of elevated consciousness with me. My joy at my cleverness was immense; the fish later died.
When my friend came over to pick me up for our camping trip, not only was I not ready, but I was fragmenting before his eyes. My conversation was unintelligible. I thrust my journal into his hands, my elegant penmanship giving way to a deranged scrawl. I could not stop talking; English turned to gibberish. My mind was dissolving, and fast, my elation and euphoria wiping away my ability to reason.
I was in the midst of manic psychosis.
Now, the psychosis was the finale to a series of bizarre and uncharacteristic behaviors, increasing in intensity over a period of months which bewildered and confused my friends. The simple explanation was that “I was going through some stuff” as a result of my father’s suicide six months prior.
The chain of events that led to my hospitalization unfolded quickly. The roommates were summoned; the Resident Advisor was summoned; the Resident Dean was summoned. Suddenly, my brother, living at SDSU, appeared from nowhere, yelling at my roommate to find out “what I had taken.” My mother and a friend arrived from Los Angeles. I couldn’t put the pieces together. Soon, the campus security guard, who I knew and trusted, forced me into my mother’s car.
I don’t remember being checked into the hospital. I only remember being strapped down. I gaped in horror as the needle of the syringe was inserted into my vein. I screamed. I screamed harder as I watched my brother turn and walk away. The drug started to act, turning my mind of mercury to concrete.
After I was thoroughly drugged, “they” let me lay down on a white bed in a sterile room with my hospital clothes on. When I woke up, I didn’t know where I was or why. There was a plate of plastic-looking food which I promptly threw in the trash. I walked onto the unit and saw a whiteboard with lines and words I couldn’t read. A nurse soon plied me with a plastic shot glass of “orange juice,” which I swallowed. My lips puckered, and I determined she was lying: it couldn’t be real orange juice.
The door of a storage closet was open. Inside were shelves upon shelves of crates and cartons filled with art supplies. I couldn’t make out the closet’s contents completely, but I was motivated. The only thing obstructing my complete view was a large male nurse in scrubs who stood in front of the open doorway. I tried running into the storage room door, but instead, ran into the nurse.
My next memory was finding myself in four-point restraints, strapped to a metal table, naked, in a seclusion room with dark brown walls and the incessant hum of an industrial-sized air conditioner. On the wall, there was an intercom which at first I assumed was a working intercom, but no one responded to my questions. Eventually my tongue swelled up and would hardly move. I could not say my name, although I tried many times. Lastly, there was a dot of red light above my head, which I presumed to be part of a surveillance camera. I became convinced “they” wanted to kill me as part of a research project.
My memory is fragmented, but I know I was there for three days. I sat in a pool of urine for many hours. I saw no familiar faces, only a nurse with garish make-up and her two “henchmen.” They would come in periodically, leave a plate of food on the floor, untie me long enough to try and eat and defecate in a kidney-shaped plastic bed pan, and come back and tie me back up. The woman only observed as the men “worked.”
On one occasion, my innate sense of rebellion flared, and I decided to get out of the restraints by any means necessary. Fox-like, I started to lubricate my right wrist with saliva, and after toiling for many hours, I slipped my hand out of the restraint. I relished the small victory. Soon after, the scary nurse appeared with her henchmen again, and she laughed. “It looks like we’ve got a little escape artist on our hands.” The male nurses corrected the situation and tightened all of my restraints, especially the right hand I had set free.
Eventually I was transferred out of that hospital by ambulance and back to a hospital in my hometown, Northridge, in the San Fernando Valley, to be close to my mother. I was discharged after only a week and soon returned to UCSD for the winter quarter, lithium in hand, but otherwise with no acknowledgement that anything had happened.
This was my first exposure to mental health care, before I had heard the word “bipolar.” I was new to the system, but I had the bruises on my wrists and ankles to prove that I was a now full-fledged member of this sometimes counter-productive world of medicine.
Later in life, my mind has been caught in psychosis, where thoughts of this experience engulf me, submerging sanity. It was in that hospital that I acquired those specific memories that once seared on the mind will not die until I do, classic scars of trauma. For that, the psychiatric practice of using seclusion and restraints to control already sick people should be condemned.
|
|