"Paranoia"

December 8, 2014

This was part of the treatment plan that was created for me at the Arbour HRI Hospital in Brookline.

I wrote a lot of human rights grievances while I was at that hospital.  There were so many of them about my being harassed that I finally told the human rights office "Keep the grievances.  I'll tell you when I write a grievance that I think you have to address immediately.  Keep the rest of them, and you can think about what kind of hospital you want to have."  There were too many incidents for me to expect the human rights officers to speak to every person at the hospital who abused me.

My "treatment team" never varied its stance that I was paranoid and delusional.  I was coughed at or similarly abused every day.

The nurse who wrote this note was particularly vindictive.  I started my period while at the hospital.  I had one pair of pants and one pair of underwear; I had what I wore to the Emergency Room the day I decided to be admitted to a hospital.  Other than that, all I had to wear were hospital pants and hospital underwear; the hospital underwear were essentially elastic gauze.  When I realized that I was getting my period, I asked the first staffperson whom I saw for some supplies to deal with it.  This nurse happened to be that staffperson.  It was during the day and there were no crises happening on the unit.  Staff would often get things for patients while doing checks; it's not that time-consuming to get something for a patient from the supply closet.

This nurse smiled an evil smile when I asked her for a pad.  She said "Wait 5 minutes; I'm doing checks."  I objected to her making me wait, since I was standing there in the hallway feeling the blood making its way to my one pair of real underwear.  She yelled down the hall to another staffperson, "Can you get her some pads?"  She seemed to be enjoying my consternation and seemed to want to prolong and publicize my situation.

I wrote a grievance about what she did; that was one of the grievances that I asked the human rights office to address right away.  She mostly left me alone after that, although it didn't change her attitude at all, and I'm sure she found other patients to bully and try to humiliate.  The day that I was discharged from the hospital, the doctor incorrectly wrote the prescriptions that I was to take with me.  I asked that they be rewritten and was told "He won't rewrite them."  I insisted that they be rewritten; although they were rewritten, before that happened this nurse told me "You're discharged, and I'm calling the supervisor, who will tell me to call the police to remove you from the building."

I never saw a police officer at that hospital, so it seems that the nursing supervisor did not authorize this nurse to call the police. 

There is nothing paranoid about a patient's request to read his or her chart while a patient at a psychiatric hospital.  I did it at the Vermont State Hospital, and I'm sure that my doing so improved my situation.  When you are a psychiatric patient, staff can and often do write literally anything they want to write about you.  Reading your chart does a lot to restore balance to the power dynamic.

There is no psychiatric medication that has no side effects.  Weight gain is common; so are neurological reactions.  Some neurological reactions are permanent and don't disappear even when the medication is stopped.  Thousands of people have been permanently disfigured by those reactions during the years that people have gotten overmedicated in hospitals.  Probably, much of the public doesn't realize that many chronic mental patients "look funny" not because of a mental illness that causes their bodies to be distorted, but because of the damage done to them by psychiatric medications.

Many of the medications that cause those disfigurements are antipsychotics.

It could not be less funny to call someone psychotic or delusional when you know that the person is neither.

Even though I had sought treatment, had asked to be hospitalized, these people took me to court once I was in their hospital.  I spent every day of my time at this Arbour hospital dealing with being harassed and doing what I could to ensure that court did not result in a court order for me to be involuntarily medicated.  I made phone calls.  I wrote letters.  I wrote a letter to the judge describing what was going on both in and outside of the hospital.

I never threatened anyone at any hospital with physical violence.  What I did say a number of times is "I will write about this hospitalization when I leave.  The more you do to me, the more I'll have to write about."

 

 

This is a picture of part of a notice that is on a bulletin board in the hallway that leads to the cafeteria at the Arbour HRI hospital.  When I asked to read my chart while a patient, the doctor first tried to tell me that I could get my records when I left.  I told him that I was sure that I had the right to read my chart while I was still a patient.  He did let me read my chart, once.  We did not agree on anything most of the time that I was in the hospital, and I was never able to read my chart again.

 

The one time that I was able to read my chart at this hospital was the only time that I have been able to read my chart at any hospital in Massachusetts.  Everywhere, I have been told that I can have a copy of  my chart when I leave, but that I can't read it while a patient.  Looking at this notice, I have to question if what has happened to me and every other patient who asks to read his or her chart is that a policy like the one shown on this notice is misinterpreted and misrepresented.  It says that a patient can't get a copy of his or her records while he or she is a patient.  A copy would be a print-out that the patient can keep, like what I have now.  That has nothing to do with whether or not patients have the right to read their original charts while they are patients, to which staff add notes every day that influence the course of treatment that the patients get and the behavior of staff and, subsequently, other patients, toward patients.

 

There are a lot of doctors who are as dishonest and vindictive as this nurse.  Think of all the ruined lives of all the patients who never had a chance once they got into the system, decade after decade.

 

Most of the public doesn't realize how bad the mental health care system is.  I want to believe that; I want to believe that the lack of public outrage is the result of everything that the public doesn't know about what it's like to be a mental patient.

 

I am fortunate that I wasn't charged for my copy of my Arbour records, because this is how much it usually costs:

 

When I tried to be admitted to a hospital in November, a few weeks after being discharged from the Arbour HRI, I asked not to be admitted to an Arbour hospital.  I had successfully fought my side of a court case while at this hospital, and I thought I might not win again, being admitted again so soon after the last hospitalization.  Most hospitals like to attribute the patients' problems to the patients' not taking enough medication, or needing to be given something else to do what the patients' current medications supposedly aren't doing.  Even if a patient presents evidence of huge, real stressors, the hospital answer then tends to be that the patient needs more medication to cope better with those stressors.  If you're getting the feeling that a mental patient can't win, you're right; that's why so many people who have been mental patients try to kill themselves.

Not wanting to be at another Arbour hospital was the reason that I ended up at Bayridge Hospital in Lynn, where one of my fears for more than 20 years happened; the needle, in a room full of people, and my bare butt displayed for their entertainment.  I guess harassing me just wasn't enough for them; they needed their orgy of violence to have a consummation, and they got it.  A lot of patients do, at that place.  I have never seen a hospital that was more addicted to injecting patients.

The note written by the nurse at Arbour HRI also describes the decision to transfer me from the relatively quiet all-female unit back to the more disturbed unit to which I was originally admitted.  What happened the day after I had the reaction to medication that had my heart rate at 156 by the time my pulse was taken and my pulse was slowing was that I was told "the nursing supervisor wants to speak with you."  The nursing supervisor screamed at me that I was going back to the other unit.  What the nurse didn't write in her note is that I was being punished for believing that I had a right to have paramedics bring me to a physical hospital for observation when I had that medication reaction.  The truth is there if you know what to look for.

 

 

 

Copyright, with noted exceptions, L. Kochman, December 8, 2014 @ 10:14 p.m.