Suicidal Extra-Criminal

Physically Forced Into Shackles and Imprisoned by Psychiatrics  

I escaped, maybe. Not unscathed. I felt myself imprisoned in something like a junta’s gulag. My gulag (and it can be yours too) was not like the Pinochetist or Stalinist gulags watched by a powerless citizenry. My gulag was unwatched by a powerful citizenry: The people of Vermont.

Unwatched, medical and psychiatric personnel used the large armed bodies of Franklin County’s Sheriff’s Department to threaten me with violence and transport me to Fletcher Allen in four point shackles, against my will, and without the presentation of a warrant, without the reading of Miranda rights and all rights expressed by Miranda: without the reading of any charges, the right to remain silent without a lawyer present, without phone access, legal representation, or access to my family or any outside advocate.

The Sheriffs paraded me through the ER to the registration window where a woman refused to address me, refused my request to have my rights explained, and to be given a lawyer. The Sheriffs walked me over to another room where a woman and a man sat. They did not identify themselves. I refused to speak to anyone without knowing my rights and without legal representation. I did tell them that I had told both NWCSS and Dr Rxxxxx that I did not wish to be admitted against my will. They immediately had the Sheriffs help security chain me to a table. I was completely stunned all this time and was motionless. I asked to be told why I was chained, for how long, could I use a phone, and would they provide an outside advocate such as a lawyer. The reply: “Not for you, you have no rights.”

The people in the Emergency Room who touched me, who physically hurt me, and spoke threats to me, refused to give me their names or employee status, and Fletcher Allen Hospital has also refused. Ask Maureen Ducharme at Patient Relations or Jack Conry head of security.

Chained to a table for hours, men and a woman grabbed at my body, made the shackles so tight I lost all circulation, discussed and laughed about how they could break my ankle, told me that I was more likely to get my head smashed open on the floor before I was ever untied, ever given a phone call, advocate, allowed to see a person asking for me in the ER waiting room, allowed to see a Doctor. I was denied water, laughed at for expressing fears about my falling blood-sugar level, refused a bathroom, and told “you have no rights, and we can keep you tied down all night if we want, or until whenever.” I thrashed in pain and fear for hours. I yelled for help, but the only people who appeared in the doorway were uniformed ER staff who smirked and laughed, and a few ER visitors who, in seeing an (im)pounded animal, gawked and slithered off as minders of their own business. I fell to exhaustion and my eyes rolled back into my head; unable to open them or my hands, I wheezed through my constricting chest, felt my nose and lips tingle with numbness. I waited in fear for something unknown.

Constitutional rights entail a dignity for which human beings are desperate. A desperation I had little understood until I was chained down in the filthy state of their denial, in the filthy walls of a psychiatric prison, and with my neck under the filthy foot of people who slyly touted their power to evanesce my rights, as if they were performing a brilliant extra-legal ballet that could only dazzle onlookers. With their looming physicality and extra-legal bold posture, they swung their moods unpredictably between calm condescension to angry faces and waving fingers. They spat that I was a creature who had better posture into a placating plea for their mercy. I was in the power of a psychiatric junta. A government of its own, they claim your body and person to be no longer an entity residing in the United States, but to be in the full custody of the Department of Mental Health. A Kafkaesque space, which resides in a constitutionally and morally barren hole in the minds of the individuals and agencies I name here.

That morning, Wednesday, May 23, 2001, I had seen a counselor at the NWCSS, a mistake I painfully regret. A housemate named Deborah, a social worker for Howard Mental Health/The Baird Center, dragged me out of a sleep and drove me to NWCSS. She had called my regular psychiatrist, Dr. Rxxxx, and made accusations against me: that I had written a suicide note and cut myself. Neither of these accusations is remotely true and I have no idea what kind of cruelty provoked their being spoken or the cruelty that followed. I was out of my mind with sleep because I had just gone to bed very late on a prescription sleeping pill. A person I had never seen before, the NWCSS counselor, saw me for a small amount of time, and recommended that I go to a hospital program. I asked her to explain to me what the program was like, what they would do with me and who would have access to me; did she have paper work describing the program, and what rights would I have. I asked her if I would be able to leave on my own volition; I asked if hospitalization would make me ineligible for certain jobs and health insurance coverage in the future. She said she could not answer these questions but she could make me go against my will. I said that I did not think it would be prudent for me to go without any of this information, and I did not understand how making me go against my will could be possible or helpful to me. She said she could force me to go under arrest by the police and she jumped up from her chair and yelled at me, “JUST WATCH ME.” I felt unsafe and I left the building, and foolishly stayed in the state of Vermont.

Dr. Mxxx, the admitting psychiatrist at FAER, claims to have seen me immediately. He claims to have not noticed I was tied down when he claimed me from the ER, not to have noticed that my body was numb and purple, that my hands were without circulation, that I was unable to open my hands or my eyes, and that I was unable to stand. He claims that he did not open and shine a light into my eyes. He denies picking me up himself or witnessing anyone else picking me up and throwing me from the table upon which I was chained, to a bed in a lockdown ward. The hospital has refused to release to me information about who was in charge of my care when I was chained. Mxxx told me “he was sure it did not happen.”

In further inquiry, by a family member, Mxxx admits that he knew I was tied down from 8pm to after 11:00pm. He deliberately ordered this. He claims that when he returned so many hours later that it was my state of agitation that proved to him I was a danger to myself and should be imprisoned. He claims that my treatment, under his orders, at the hands of the ER and security was legitimate. He claims that I told him I was suicidal (an outright lie). He claims if he had not tied me down I would have fled. Now, I ask you, who would not flee from this kind of nightmare?

Dr. Mxxx chained me to a table, left me for hours in a dangerous environment, then threw me into a lockdown ward, because he was unable to recognize a beaten, exhausted, chained human being for what I was: proud, self guarded, terrified, and scrambling for my safety and my self-dignity. I know they beat my pride and courage from me, in spite of myself, because in the end I shook Mxxx’s outstretched hand, fearful that his pride would grow angry and refuse my release. I am ashamed. But I also know that I was not suicidal because they had to work so hard to beat my pride from me. I fled the state of Vermont, and now sit in a room in another state sick with newfound faithlessness, anger, fear, and shame, afraid to go out of the house. But Mxxx assures me he is confident that he is above reproach and has no doubt that he helped me. My family has told Mxxx that they don’t recognize me; they are sure that the whole incident from beginning to end has been nothing but reckless and damaging.

Mxxx never came to see me again except to shake my hand about 48 hours later when he told my scared family he might let me out the next day. Thrown into lockdown, 11:30 Wednesday night, I waited over twelve hours before anyone saw me. A Dr. xxxx gave me a survey regarding place of birth and like questions. But he told me I had no rights and my fate would be up to the attending Dr. Ixxx. In the end, Dr. xxxx told me that he thought I should have been released Thursday morning when he first saw me, and that I was a legal mishap.

Dr. Ixxx had a different opinion. Ixxx merely repeated the same survey xxxx had given me. I objected that this was not treatment and was not helping me. I had waited all night and all morning to see someone who would help me. I was living in fear and had no idea what happened or what was going to happen to me. I complained about my ER treatment and Ives asked if I had any physical bruises on my body to prove it. I said I had purple hands I could not open, purple feet, knees that would not hold my weight, and I was shaking with terror, to start, but Mxxx had refused to make any documentation. Ives said that it didn’t matter because the psychiatric department was not responsible for what happened in another department. I asked how it was that I could be imprisoned without due process and left to the mercy of men like him. He said the Department of Mental Health, an agency of the State of Vermont, had taken away my rights and gave the hospital the duty and obligation to treat me in any and all ways that they saw fit, and I had no recourse. He claimed that my rights were not being violated because I had no rights. And that he was concerned about my mental state because I could not understand that I had no rights. I refused to admit that I had no rights. He became angry and stormed out of the room. I walked after him and asked if his idea of treatment was to force me to deny that I was a righted human being. I accused him of reducing me to the status of a stray dog. Ives walked off the ward and yelled to me that there was no treatment for me and that I had no rights.

I was supposedly in the custody of Susan Besio of the Department of Mental Health at the State Hospital in Waterbury. I have never been able to speak to Besio, and for three weeks the State (all levels of Courts and the State Hospital) told me they had no record of me. Even after admitting a record existed, they have refused to provide me with information about my case. I still don’t have a copy of the warrant, the case presented to the signing judge, or the name of the signing judge. The counselor at NWCSS has also refused to speak to me, or my family, or any person who has called on my behalf. 

My advocate at the hospital was a social worker named xxx, who refused to see me. I did not know she existed. The nurses answered my repeated requests for an advocate, by telling me one was coming; a social worker was coming. But no one came. The advocate was forced to see me when my family arrived. She said she refused and refuses to help me because I was “ranting and raving” about my rights. She said that she did not want to be “yelled at about that stuff.”

I called my regular Psychiatrist, Dr. Rxxxx, who told me that she did not know I was incarcerated and that she had had nothing to do with it. But a hospital report shows Rxxxx lied. She refused to help me and she has refused to answer my phone calls for six weeks and counting. Rxxxx has refused to speak to my therapist with whom she was supposed to be working while she prescribed medication. I call Dr. Rxxxx’s office every week, but she refuses to speak to me and does not respond to voice mail messages. On July 5, 2001, I received a letter from Rxxxx where she states that she did know I was hospitalized and she had spoken with NWCSS, and the psychiatrists at FAER. Rxxxx states, “It is our obligation to do what we need to do to keep people safe . . .”

The Psychiatrics see patients in two ways: Either because psychiatrics did nothing, someone might kill herself in the freedom of a lifetime that has nothing to do with the mental health world, except that some vain therapists or psychiatrists deluded themselves into thinking that they could become the keep safe guardians, at all and any costs, of a patient’s world. In their own special manner, psychiatrics think that smothering someone under their paternal lard is really a large hug from a fat mother. In such an embrace, the second option of the either/or emerges: A patient might kill herself in a moment that has everything to do with escaping the mental health world. This accused suicidal extra-criminal prefers freedom to smothering imprisonment in the gulag of these strange strangers. Who in the jury pool prefers imprisonment without police or legal protection?

I asked Ives what kept psychiatrics from picking people up off the street and forcing them into involuntary examinations, holding them until they lose their jobs, their businesses, their homes. He said nothing; expect that it would be too much work, with which they need not bother because enough people voluntarily enter the mental health world unwittingly with no understanding of their rights: they have no rights.

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