On June 12, 2018, seven years ago today, I sat in the office of ChristianaCare psychologist Dr. Alan L. Schwartz and told him I had been triggered by unexpected contact with my mother. I told him I had cut myself afterward. I told him about the CPTSD tattoo I had imagined earlier that year, modeled after those forced on Holocaust survivors, because I felt I had lived through my holocaust, and the world insisted on denying it.
He didn’t refer me to a trauma therapist like he’d promised. He failed to conduct a suicide assessment, though it was his duty. He didn’t act like anything I said required a serious response; I was supposed to just think better thoughts.
My “Detailed Depression Screen Score” that day was marked 16, critical. I had Complex PTSD, was living alone, and drinking to numb out. I had no real support. I had just admitted to self-harm and suicidal thoughts. And I was on Lexapro, a drug known to trigger suicidal ideation in exactly the population I represented.
The hospital psychologist said they used a “team model.” He said he would talk to my primary care provider, the one who prescribed the Lexapro. Nothing happened. No call. No medication review. No change. No safety net.
When I asked for a pharmacogenomic test to find out how my body handled SSRIs, I was told, “We don’t do that here.”
Worse still, the hospital employees’ failures set off a chain reaction that caused even deeper harm. Because I kept showing signs of crisis, with no one helping me, I was shunted into the Psych ER. And that was where the next level of institutional trauma began.
The Psych ER didn’t stabilize me. It neglected and traumatized me further. It was clinical abandonment dressed up as care: isolation in a cold room, lack of safety, and manipulation. No one treated me like a person in pain. I was treated like a problem to contain.
From there, I was funneled into Rockford Center, a psych hospital owned by Universal Health Services (UHS), a for-profit giant notorious across the country for patient abuse, underqualified staff, and systemic cruelty. This corporation has a long record of federal investigations and whistleblower accounts for patient abuse. And I lived it.
I was placed under the “care” of undertrained and overwhelmed staff. I was coerced, gaslit, and threatened. I witnessed what happens when a hospital cares more about its bottom line than its patients: terrifying people into staying longer, warning them that if they didn’t agree to be held “voluntarily,” they would be committed involuntarily. UHS wanted to squeeze out every last dollar from their insurance plans.
Months later, at a different practice, I got the test. The result? I have two copies of the gene that processes SSRIs. I’m an Ultra Rapid Metabolizer. That means Lexapro destabilizes me. It floods my system, spikes, and crashes. It doesn’t regulate mood—it blows it apart. My body was telling the truth they wouldn’t hear: the drug they prescribed was making me suicidal.
I filed complaints with the hospital and with the licensing board, but there was no resolution. No one was held accountable. The psychologist kept working. The hospital refused to let me say what I needed to say to Schwartz; instead, it threw two doctors under the bus. The board shrugged.
That’s what this system did to me. That’s what it still does to trauma survivors.
My manufactured mental health crisis started with a primary care provider who prescribed a dangerous medication without follow-up.
It continued with a psychologist who didn’t listen.
It was institutionalized by a hospital that pretended to practice “team care” while abandoning coordination entirely.
It culminated in a for-profit psych ward known for mistreatment and terror.
This is not bad luck. It is a system working exactly as designed: to protect itself, to extract profit, and to discard the ones it harms.
And still, I survived. Not because of anything they did, but because I refused to disappear. Since then, I have refused to be silent; I’m naming every failure, every betrayal, every abuse, because silence is what allowed all of this to happen in the first place. And I will not be complicit.
