In 2018 I obtained mental health insurance for the first time. I thought I could finally get serious help with recovery from severe Complex PTSD from extreme Developmental Trauma. Instead, the medical industry neglected, abused, traumatized, and gaslighted me so badly that I was flattened. I am still trying to recover.
My then PCP put me on Lexapro, a Black Box medication associated with intense suicidal ideations in a minority of patients. I asked for a pharmacogenomic test, as I’d seen my friend’s and it seemed the testing is important. “We don’t do that here,” my now ex-provider responded.
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.* 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, my PCP. She 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 an 8-day 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 psychatric 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 down. 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 I had been triggered by that scene. 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.
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 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. They took my phone and purse, assigned me a room, and told me I would meet with a psychiatrist.
The psychiatrist was an angry person whose 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 meds 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. 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 did the staff.
Within a few days, I understood this was a place where they threatened self-admitting patients with commitment if they want to leave before their insurance coverage ran out. This terrified me. I felt so trapped! I decided to not 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 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 stolen funds, 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 malignant players. 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–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 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 supposed lack of evidence when all 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. But I take my advice from the great Maya Angelou, who urged us, “Keep talking it. Never stop talking it.”