My Story, by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

The mega-hospital’s “embedded” psychologist did not refer me to trauma-trained professionals as he had promised. Instead, he changed my treatment plan without telling me. He decided to keep me coming to him for one 30-minute visit per week on a random schedule. The psychologist ignored me when I told him I was having suicidal ideations, and I thought it was the Lexapro. The following week, I told him the ideations were worse, I’d had a bad encounter with a parent, had cut myself again, and called to find out what happens to my IRA if I die.” His response was, “Isn’t that a normal question?” He again neglected to conduct a suicide evaluation, even though my depression score was critial.* Instead, he told me I needed to make better choices. Then he went on vacation without helping me make a safety plan or referring me to another provider. 

The suicidal ideations intensified while the bad psychologist was on vacation. I contacted the prescriber through the patient portal. She called, asked about the ideations, and then instructed, “Do not take that pill again. Go straight to an emergency room and tell them your PCP wants you to have a psych evaluation.” This terrified me, but I went because I thought it would help. 

Instead, the ER was the next step in a protracted nightmare. They took my clothes and belongings, put me in a cold room with nothing but a chair, and left me alone. At some point, a man came in to convince me to go to the local psychiatric hospital, Rockford Center for Behavioral Health. I said I was afraid it would be like a Cuckoo’s Nest. He assured me it would be a good place to go for just a few days, “a gateway to services,” and I’d finally have a psychiatrist, and even Expressive Arts therapy!

In the wee hours, they brought another distressed person into the psych ER. She was agitated, and the staff escalated the matter instead of helping her calm. This culminated when they forcibly held her down and shot her with “booty juice” as she screamed, “GET OFF ME! GET OFF ME!”

That scenario intensely triggered memories and flashbacks of my own experiences of abuse with pinning. I felt like all of them were happening again. I could not move for the terror in my body. 

When a staffer came in to tell me they’d soon be taking me out of there to the psych hospital, I said that scene had triggered me. The staffer looked at me like I was speaking gibberish. Soon, I was on my way to the Cuckoo’s Nest, unaware that I was in for a week in institutional hell. The hospital and its practitioners could have hardly done a better job of funneling me to a for-profit psychiatric hospital.

Rockford staff violated my rights first thing! A staffer made me sign a paper that said I had received a copy of the Patient’s Rights before I had received it. She only gave the paper to me moments before I went through the locked door where they would terrify and harm me, without offering any actual help. They strip-searched me, which gave me flashbacks to the traumatic strip-search I endured as a teen, which came with a sexual assault.  They took my phone and purse, assigned me a room, and told me I would meet with a psychiatrist. 

The psychiatrist was angry. Her demeanor indicated she didn’t really care about her patients. She tried to tell me I had to stay on the Lexapro “a few more days.” I told her no way; my PCP said to never take it again. The psychiatrist tried to convince me I had to stay on Lexapro because I couldn’t suddenly quit. I told her my PCP said I didn’t have to taper because I’d only been on a low dose for a few weeks. The psychiatrist relented. She put me on a different SSRI with a Black Box warning for suicidal ideations! Also, some other meds supposedly for sleep and PTSD. None of the pharmaceuticals helped, only gunked up my brain. 

Rockford offered no individual therapy or counseling. The group therapy was generally lame or even awful, with one poor staffer admitting, “Um, I’ve never led a group before, and they didn’t train me or even give me a handout.” Living quarters were infested with roaches, and cafeteria food was mostly fried fatty things. The cafeteria smelled like rancid grease, and the sewer backed up at lunch one day, but they kept serving food. The “dietician” told me the cafeteria couldn’t meet my Whole Foods Plant-Based diet because that’s not how they work. Many days, I ate only apples, for which I traded the crap food they gave us at break time. 

One day, they injected “the booty juice” (the sedative Haldol) into an elderly woman, whom they then left in a chair in the dayroom. She sat in her urine and diarrhea for over two hours before they cleaned her up just in time for her family’s visit. After the family left, the staff doped up the woman again and left her in a wheelchair all day, without fluids or nutrition. Her breath smelled like acetone. Residents cared more about her than the staff did.

Within a few days, I understood this was a place where they threatened self-admitting patients with being committed if they wanted to leave before their insurance coverage ran out. This terrified me. I felt so trapped! I decided not to give them any reason to keep me and to make note of everything I saw. I talked to other patients who said they’d been threatened with commitment. I lined up a lawyer to intervene, too. But their plan circumvented this. The psychiatrist merely changed my medications a little, and that gave her the right to keep me another 48 hours! 

I spent a total of 8 nights in the psych hospital without medical necessity, after which I could barely function for months, in part due to the polypharmacy withdrawal. I soon found the Buzzfeed News investigative report, “What the Fuck Just Happened?” about the parent company that owns Rockford and about 26% of mental hospitals. America’s largest mental hospital chain is notorious for patient abuses such as I endured, witnessed, and heard about. Staff are pressured to trick people into inpatient hospitalization and threaten those who wish to leave. Universal Health Services (UHS) makes almost a 30% profit by cutting staff and services. The article was almost 1.5 years old, so how could this still be allowed to happen? 

Since my unnecessary incarceration, I have filed complaints with the mega-hospital’s so-called Patient & Family Relations office, and with all the licensing and facilities boards I could find. None of these provided any resolution; they all protected the perpetrators at my expense. This includes Highmark Health Options, my insurer at the time. The corporation claimed that the abuse and neglect– Rockford subjected me to was “standard treatment” and therefore I had no objection. This was ironic, as the insurer had refused to pay for the last 3 days of my stay at Rockford, as it agreed I did not need that level of care. But who cares what it does to the wrongly detained and highly vulnerable person? Nobody.

In January 2020, UHS settled a $122M fraudulent billing lawsuit with the DOJ and 15 states, including mine. This was for their illegal billing for patients who did not need to be there, and those who no longer needed that level of care. The states got back a fraction of the fraudulent funds, and the whistleblowers landed $6M. None of the victims received anything. All the suit cared about was some funds. Nobody in UHS was held accountable, and the deep harm to their victims is still unacknowledged. So, I began to speak out about the chronic abuses of the mental illness industry. But, corporatized medicine was not yet done, causing me great harm!

Just seven months later, I encountered the most malignant player I’ve met in a lifetime of them. I sought treatment for a prolapsed bladder and agreed to “one quick, simple procedure, no external incisions and no tissue removal” with a six-week recovery period and then, “back to a normal life forever,” the urogynecologist promised. Twice, I signed consent for the agreed-upon procedure, a sacrospinus ligament suspension, and that was the only treatment we had discussed, so I was wholly unprepared to discover afterward that he had violated my right to informed consent by performing two additional procedures for a different condition, which involved external incisions and removal of healthy tissue. Without consent! By the time he had done it to me, he had done the same to so many women that the nurses called it “The Dr. Goldstein Special.” This is medicalized Female Genital Mutilation (FGM).

The Deputy Attorney General assigned to my complaint was very supportive of my position until she met with some insurance and medical people whose identities are protected by law. Suddenly, this medicalized Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) was “within the scope of care,” I was “a little too sensitive” due to my history, the doctor was just “old school” (in his 40’s?), and my best protection was to “talk to your state representative” and when I see another doctor, “talk about consent more and hope the next guy’s better.” She told the licensing board to dismiss my case on the supposed lack of evidence when the evidence is quite clear in the medical record. So, I began to speak out about non-consent and FGM. More complaints, letters, etc. Similar results: everything in the system protects abusers from their victims.

And still, the medical abuse continued. Despite my having told a physician that I had Medical PTSD and wanted to put off the recommended bowel surgery for a year, he insisted it was urgent and I should wait no longer than 3 months. The morning of the surgery, he made note of the self-harm marks on my wrist, and that I had performed it because I was so anxious about the surgery, and went ahead with the surgery, when patient safety protocols would have canceled it. 

That surgery nearly killed me. It put me into a year of near-death and 7 weeks very near death. I could hardly function. It was a challenge to drink enough water, eat some toast, and walk to the mailbox. I was in bed 20 hours most days, and was plagued by intense symptoms like functional seizures throughout the day and for 60-90 minutes before bed, up to 5 bed-soaking sweats each night, and frequent multiple brutal muscle spasms at the same time, making me sweat and cry. 

In late 2020, I was diagnosed with quadrilateral Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS), also called “the suicide disease” due to the pain intensity and duration. And the blows kept coming. My primary care physician and psychologist abandoned me when I told them “My body says I might die.” Meanwhile, the effects of trauma had destroyed my social connections, access to my communities, and capacity to even engage in relationships. 

And then the federal government denied my disability claim. I was fighting for my life, but the judge said there was insufficient evidence that the massive trauma I’d experienced was affecting my ability to work. Because my doctors had not put my trauma in the record. My attorney and I took it all the way to the Appeals Committe, but the system is clearly stacked against trauma survivors. There was no financial, physical, or social support for me while I was deathly ill from a lifetime of stress and trauma without support. 

I surely would have died if I had not understood the basics of the neurobiology of trauma and recovery. I knew that I was experiencing severe Central Censitization due to a chronically unsafe environment, and that repeated experiences of safe connection were the remedy. But between losing connections with family, friends, shipmates, and collegues, my impeded capacity for connection, and the COVID-19 pandemic, these experiences were almost nonexistant. Especially in the medical field I was forced to turn to for help.

I managed to find one doctor, a young pain specialist, who could comprehend what I shared: that a lifetime of abuse at the hands of caregivers and others in positions of power had induced a chronic state of dysregulation so extreme that my life was in danger, and that attunement, compassionate witnessing, empathy, and validation of my lived experience were vital. Especially from a man in a position of power.

Slowly, we figured out a good treatment plan for me. It put me on an upward trajectory for an extended period. But then I lost this doctor and my twoother trusted practitioners. The hospital permanently kicked me out for continuing to speak up about the gynecologgical abuse. That loss was a major blow. It sent me reeling.

Following that, I experienced years of further abuse and neglect at the hands of those in the “healthcare” field. I learned the hard way that we don’t have a healthcare system, but a patchwork disease management industry, which effectively keeps people with chronic conditions coming back for more ineffective treatments until they are beyond hope. Through my study of Relational Neuroscience, I learned that nearly all chronic conditions–including diseases, recurrent pain, and “mental illness”–are indicators of an overloaded nervous system. Reduce the load, and the person can recover.

It’s been 8 years since the psychiatric abuse and 7 years since the surgical abuse, and I’m still talking about it.  As long as there is no justice, I will not stop.

This is part of why I am a Relational Neuroscience educator. Sharing the good news of neuroplasticity, safety, and connection is a grassroots way of stopping abuse and supporting survivors.

*The Joint Commission recommended in 2016 that all medical patients in all medical settings (inpatient hospital units, outpatient practices, emergency departments) be screened for suicide risk.