Actually
I got high quality care ONCE. The year after I had to withdraw from
Berkeley in 1966 due to severe depression (how my father was involved in this I
won't discuss - perhaps sometime at a reunion?). I got myself
together got accepted to Univ of Colorado Denver and then moved to Boulder to
continue college (very successfully academically). It then occurred to
me to leave Colorado and move to NYC. The real reason was to see if I
could convince Sue Blair to marry me (we are now going on 23 years married -
but that started in 1994 - 27 years after this story). So it's
fall of 1967 and I get to NYC and get a job as a beginning actuary.
But various stresses (including being turned down by Sue who was already
engaged to her first husband) led me to call up Bellevue Hospital and ask for
an appointment for an EEG because I thought I might have unusual brain waves.
They said sure come on down. When I arrived they proceeded to
take off my clothes, put me in a mental patient uniform and involuntarily commit
me to the violent psych ward. The accomodations there were a dorm room
with bunk beds and bare concrete seclusion rooms. Every inmate
(for without a doubt that is what we were - others besides myself were captured
because of what I like to call "thought crime) had to line up twice a day
in front of a punch bowl of liquid Thorazine and forced to drink from a small
paper cup. If you did not drink guards grabbed you by the throat and
forced it down. I was raped (naturally denied as an hallucination - it
was not - this was the prison ward). By sheerest luck there happened by
some distant cousin was working at Bellevue in admissions. She recognized
my name and call my father in Denver. He proceeded to call my cousin
Marty Willick who happened to be a psychiatrist and Marty got me out of violent
ward after about two week I was told that the shrink at Bellevue did not
want to let me go (apparently one reason is that mentioned that Sue was my
hight girlfriend and he got in touch with her to ask about our (none-extent)
sex life in high school. Anyway Willick happened to know the guys
supervisor at Bellevue because he went to med school with him and so had some
clout. I was transferred to Jacobi which had a small pych ward and then
to Bronx State Hospital which happened to have a psych training unit on the top
floor. The ward was run by a shrink who went around in a African dashki.
He showed the patients and staff a movie (maybe National Geo?)
about how shamans treated people behaving with what in the West would be
described as psychotic features but there was "labeled" as
possession, by making slits in the scalp and rubbing in some native plant.
The head shrink told everybody after the film finished that they had the
same "cure" rate as he and his colleagues in the West. I don't
believe I was given any medicine there but if I was I would only have been pill
forms of Thorzine I guess. There were more staff than patients on that
unit so there was always someone to talk to. Although I finally got my
Bachelors degree in 1973 from what is now Metor State University I like to say
that I'm proudest of graduating from Bellvue with a degree in survival.
Didn't plan to be
autobiographically here but this is only lthe beginning of my mistreatment at
the hands of psychiatry. Perhaps 1976 was the "annus
horribilis" since at the private Gladman Hospital in Oakland Calif I was
dosed with 1500mg of Thorazine, 1000 mg of Mellaril (two 500's we used to call
"pink bombers" and 50 mg of Stelazine at the same time. Among
other treatments there I was put in 5-point restraints inside a seclusion
room for close to 24 hours. I acturally got of the restraints one
time and knocked at the seclusion room door to ask out. A short lived
victory - of course the guards just made the restraints tighter.
Well this is first
time I've actually put these memories down on paper but it may give you a
flavor of why I despise psychiatry - certainly the "AOT" part of it.
