The original harm was devastating. What happened afterward taught me just as much about the system.
After the psychiatric abuse, I contacted the hospital so-called Patient and Family Relations Department. I expected a process that was interested in understanding what had happened, looking at where things went wrong, and preventing it from happening again.
Instead, I found a protracted, painful, do-everything-you-can-to-make-the-person-shut-up-and-go-away experience. I have a stack of letters from that department, mostly stonewalling and word salad.
They wondered why I kept coming back. Most people gave up after a few tries. I hung in there probably longer than anybody ever had. Part of the reason was because I wanted to see what the system would actually do. Not just for me, but for anybody who reported serious harm. I took notes on every interaction and saw the patterns.
It took eighteen months just to get a meeting. And the meeting wasn’t even with the psychologist whose actions had caused the harm. Instead, it was with two physicians from the same satellite facility. It seemed like they hadn’t been briefed in advance. Their faces wore matching “thrown under the bus” expressions, with eyes like silver dollars.
Oddly enough, their surprise turned out to be the best part of the whole process. Unlike the Patient and Family Relations personnel, their responses weren’t scripted for legal security. They were genuinely shocked and upset by what I described had happened to me in that facility.
I felt bad for them because it appeared they had walked into a booby trap. Knowing that made me even more determined to treat them with respect. I didn’t go off on them. They weren’t responsible for any of my problems.
I brought with me a list of intervention points that had been missed. Any one of them could have prevented the manufactured mental health crisis I experienced after being given a pharmaceutical “remedy” for the distress that came from a lifetime of abuse. As we went through the list, they became increasingly engaged. They were impressed with what I had put together and asked if they could keep it.
From an Interpersonal Neurobiology perspective, people make sense of their experiences through relationships. Institutions do the same. When a system responds to reports of harm with delay, deflection, bureaucratic language, and endless process instead of curiosity and accountability, it teaches everyone inside it how not to respond. The complaint process stops being a path toward repair and becomes another layer of the injury.
I wonder where those two doctors are today. My guess is they’re long gone from that hospital. It is hard to imagine they could go through that process and go back to business as usual. Who would want to stay in a place that treated patients that way? And who would want to practice medicine in a system that treats its own doctors that way, too?
Unfortunately, the psychiatric abuse was just the beginning for me. The non-consensual gynecological surgery–medicalized genital mutilation–was even worse. I didn’t turn to Patient and Family Relations for help. I knew from prior experience that it’s the soft end of the hospital’s legal department. Its goal is not helping distressed patients and families, but containing their distress, extinguishing their expression of it, and protecting the institution’s fiduciary, reputational, and administrative interests.
