Psychiatric Abuse

Good Dreams and Bad Wakings

I had an exciting thought about a poem at the tail end of a dream, and now I can’t go back to sleep. The fact that poems thrill me after three decades says a lot about poems. Perhaps it’s not just the Earth and sky that last forever, as the band Kansas asserts. It’s also the verse, the line.

I will never remember what happened to me two years ago today because I was overmedicated in the emergency room at Intermountain Health after being turned away when I went to the mental-health access center there for help the day before, but not before the access center kept me in a loud, brightly lit room for 24 hours with no bed, where I was left alone with two male nurses. What a terrifying thing for someone with a history of abuse at the hands of men to endure while in a state of trauma about her childhood abuse. Also, sleep deprivation and exposure to lights and noise, including music, day and night are more in keeping with prison torture tactics than with mental-health care, but sadly, the two are often one in the same. Shame on Intermountain for engaging in such practices.

To top it off, they failed to give me my thyroid-replacement medicine for hours, thereby exacerbating the state I was in by disrupting my endocrine system, which in turn negatively affected my HPA axis. That axis is key to emotional regulation. I don’t have a thyroid thanks to thyrotoxicosis and cancer, so my thyroid-replacement medication is critical. My TSH was already 11mIU/L when I got to the access center. It should have been less than 1mIU/L. The access center made my hypothyroid state even worse by not administering my medicine in a timely fashion.

The ER overmedicated me after I said Joseph Smith was delusional. What I actually said was, “Sure. It’s fine when Joseph Smith does it, but not me.” I wasn’t being hyperreligious. I was deconstructing religion, in that moment Mormonism, as well as the unwritten social rules that appear to govern when someone is seen as insane, divine, or both. Crazywise, as some call the latter. But not, largely, Southern Utahns, and certainly not ER workers at Intermountain.

That’s the last thing I remember. I blacked out for more than a day, this one: September 9, 2023. It’s a dark, rough-hewn box I can’t open, but I think Sharon Olds’ devil from her collection Satan Says might be inside it. By that, I mean my father.

Get in Line, Brian Kilmeade

Days of Bruising in the Sunflower State. Kansas City, Kansas, June 19, 2015.

You want me dead, Brian Kilmeade? Trust me, there’s a psych tech in Kansas who couldn’t agree with you more. This photo was taken three days after leaving KU Medical Center in 2015 with bruises all over my body after being beaten by a psychiatric nurse who also put me in a face-down hold, despite that position being illegal in most states and despite my having asthma. He threatened to hurt me even more if I ever “tried anything.”

What I had “tried” was getting my inhaler because I couldn’t breathe. The staff refused to give it to me, saying it was expired by one day, and they didn’t have orders for another one. I’d just been diagnosed with common variable immunodeficiency by the lead immunologist at KU Medical Center, but the staff in the psychiatric unit said I was making my diagnosis up. I also had thyrotoxicosis at the time, but nobody at KU Medical Center did the simple test necessary to reveal that was the case, even though it’s in their algorithm to test the TSH level of anyone who presents with symptoms similar to mania. The psychiatric unit’s former director implemented that policy.

Photos of these bruises are also on file at Shawnee Mission Medical Center, where social workers from KU Medical Center and a local organization for women took me to document what had happened to me. Of course I never did anything about what happened. Lawyers weren’t interested in my case. The state human rights organization wanted me to tell my story over and over again, which was retraumatizing. And my records from KU Medical Center were not accurate. This incident, for example, didn’t make it into the record. Nor did the EKG they had to do while I was blacked out, which I’m only aware of because I woke with a node still stuck to me. Nor did my being undressed, washed enough to be wet all over, and dressed again, but without my underwear.

The staff withholding my medication didn’t make the record. Nor did the staff throwing food on the floor for me to eat. Nor did two male techs standing in the doorway laughing at me. Nor did a female nurse dogging me in the hall outside my room while saying “I didn’t do anything to you,” as if this absolved her from everything that was done. Nor did the staff hanging up the phone on me while I was trying to call my immunoglobulin company, which I’d been instructed to do to set up my infusion deliveries after I left the unit,* or important organizations like the one that was trying to advocate for me, or my friends, or my family members. Nor did their crushing me in the doorway to the room where the phone was located while trying to remove me from that room. Nor did their playing violent movies in which women were being beaten. There are more nors, I’m sure. But you get the idea.

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* Having these infusion deliveries set up was a condition of leaving the unit. The staff repeatedly refused to let me use the phone or hung up mid-call in an attempt to keep me from being discharged.

Folding and Unfolding

This is the two-year anniversary of my stay at the local inpatient psychiatric hospital where the psychiatrist described me as being involved in sex trafficking, as if I was trafficking others as an adult as opposed to having been trafficked as a child. The psychiatrist also said my trauma had nothing to do with my mania, told me in so many words to be a better wife when I expressed my concerns to him about my husband’s behavior, refused to help me get services from the local organization that helps people who’ve survived sexual abuse, and wrote in my chart that I had a poor prognosis because I have no insight into having bipolar.

And he was supposed to be one of the better psychiatrists at that hospital.

This is also the day I briefly saw Utah poet laureate Lisa Bickmore and thought she was some kind of healing Earth goddess, which I still think is the case. When I’m manic, I see essences. Lisa is a lot more than a healing Earth goddess, but she also has the essence of a healing Earth goddess.

These are the final days of my hegira, the one I declared over before it was over. Over the next few days, I’ll be sitting with everything that happened two years ago in a process that’s like folding now and then together the way two ingredients are combined in baking. Not that I bake. I prefer folding time to folding things like whipped eggs and melted chocolate. When I need to eat something, I just eat it. I rarely mix it with something else.