Tag Archives: psychiatric hospitals

Surviving Timberlawn

18 Tuesday Sep 2018

Posted by in End Mental Health Stigma, Held Against Your Will, history, humane treatment, mental health advocacy, mental heath, mental institutions, patient abuse, psychiatric abuse, psychiatric misdiagnosis, Survivor Of Mental Health System, Timberlawn, Timberlawn Psychiatric Hospital, Uncategorized

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It’s been a long time since I’ve posted. I’ve been neglecting my blog because I’ve been struggling with depression, which just sucks the energy out of you.  My beloved dog, Julius, died last October, and I’ve been simply devastated.  One thing that has been steady that I’ve been working on is developing a documentary. I’m not quite sure how I’ve managed this, honestly. Just put one foot in front of the other. We’ve been in pre-production now since I last wrote.  I formed a production company, Thornton Square Productions.  Sound familiar?   Like the name of this blog, it’s named after the 1940’s classical psychological thriller, “Gaslight,” that tells the story of a woman whose husband tries to convince her she’s lost her mind.  The setting for much of the movie is the fictitious address, “No. 9 Thornton Square,” in London.  I’ve hired 2 wonderful and talented producers to work with me on this project.  The documentary is very personal and is centered around my own story of being held against my will in a psychiatric hospital in Dallas when I was in my 20’s. I’ve mentioned this in previous posts but am now putting myself out there. Gulp! The film will be a collective story of people who have experienced the same abuse.  Right now, we are looking for other survivors who were at the same hospital I was in, Timberlawn Hospital, in the 1980’s and 1990’s, even the 1970’s. If it happened to you, we would love to hear from you.  Or if you know of anyone or have ideas of how we can find survivors, we’d be grateful for your help.

The project launched with a dedicated website (www.survivingtimberlawn.com) and social media channels (Facebookand Twitter), each designed to shed light on the issue and create a safe space for those who experienced or witnessed similar abuse to come forward with their stories.

Here’s a short video about my experience at Timberlawn:

Pat’s Story from Pat Price on Vimeo.

 

Forced Incarceration Is A Myth. Says Who?

16 Wednesday Jul 2014

Posted by in humane treatment, mental health advocacy, mental heath, mental institutions, patient abuse, psychiatric abuse, Uncategorized

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**I yanked the first version of this post because I tried to cover a lot of ground, and it just felt overweighted. So, here is the  edited version which I hope will be more easily digestible. More to come in the next post.**

For my birthday, the friends who suggested the photo for the cover of my blog gave me a book called, Forced Into Treatment.  The title made think the book was an argument against forced incarceration,  or people held against their wills in psychiatric hospitals. Great, I thought. Someone has documented this. There’s another voice out in the wilderness!  I didn’t focus on the sub-title, “The Role of Coercion in Clinical Practice”, hopeful, perhaps, I would find some research, no matter how dated, that would back up the devastating impact resulting from forced treatment in general, and the trauma I experienced first-hand in 1989 when I was held against my will at Timberlawn Hospital in Dallas, Texas.

I was wrong. The book, the brain child of the Committee on Government Policy for the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, or GAP, published in 1994 by the American Psychiatric Press, is essentially, a tool to impact public policy, speaking to the psychiatric community, legislators and lobbyists. There is no bibliography or any detailed footnotes in the book except for broad citations. So, how representative of reality can it be? The back of the book lists only the other GAP publications and Symposia Reports, along with a section called GAP Committees (25) and Membership.  But it was the Committee on Government Policy that produced this book.  Its stated mission is The Advancement of Psychiatry. Not the Advancement of Mental Health, not the Advancement of Humane Psychiatric Care, and so on. The book covers a number of topics including, “Coercion in Child Psychiatric Treatment,” and “Mandated Therapy in Military Settings.”  But the one that caught my attention was “Coercive Treatment is Reportedly Not Abused.” The paragraph reads in full:

“One factor that is not much addressed in the debate over the need for judicial safeguards is the empirical data on the prevalence of abuse within the system. It is noteworthy that a congressional hearing by the Senate’s Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights chaired by Senator Sam Ervin, produced no cases of successful railroading (e.g.: forcing an individual into a psychiatric hospital not for his or her best interests but the for the gain of the petitioner).  A field investigation of mental hospitals in six states conducted by the American Bar Association concluded that railroading is a myth (Slovenka 1977). Although clinical and legal safeguards do prevent railroading, as defined above, the involved parties may become so frustrated with the restrictiveness of the system that they ‘finesse the law’ to obtain care that is in the best interest of the patient.”

From my own experience of being held against my will at Timberlawn 25 years ago, the notion that forced incarceration is “a myth” is a lie.  I was a casualty of finessing the law. I wonder how many other people were victims of “the myth?”

 

Camera As Advocate

23 Thursday Jan 2014

Posted by in mental health advocacy, mental heath, patient abuse, stigma

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On November 19th of last year, the New York Times featured an article about hidden cameras in nursing homes, dubbed granny cams. Doris Racher, concerned about her 96-year old mother in a nursing home in Oklahoma, had a motion-activated camera that looked like an alarm clock placed in her mother’s room. The images captured of her mother being abused by staff were horrific but, sadly, not surprising.

As I read the article, I was struck by the parallels to psychiatric mistreatment. Based on my admittedly unscientific tracking of such reports, it seems once every year or two, an article appears in the news about elder abuse as if it’s never been reported on before: We’re shocked! Shocked! This is also true of psychiatric abuse. I began to think about the benefit of neutral watchful eyes in psychiatric hospitals. The camera as patient advocate. Such surveillance could counter stigma’s close cousin, invisibility, and medical records which are written by the very doctors and staff who are the subject of complaints. Patients have little or no say in what is documented (and even if they did, their words would carry less weight). The odds are depressingly low of their complaints being taken seriously if they muster the courage to come forward. Their credibility has been snuffed. This is especially important in cases where family members are dubious or indifferent. I know this from my own experience, a part of which I will bluntly encapsulate below at the risk of being a bit overwhelming. I will continue to share my experience with you in future posts.

In 1989, after my father died, I checked myself into a highly-regarded, private psychiatric hospital in Dallas suffering from insomnia, anxiety and side-effects of medications I’d been on for years.  Just before I was to be discharged, my assigned doctor decided I was suddenly too sick to leave. She had learned that my family had the resources to pay for long-term treatment, and tried to have me committed. (I was deemed paranoid for thinking their motives were financial. Later, I learned the hospital was on the verge of bankruptcy at the time and re-organized under Chapter 11. Was I paranoid? You decide).  I was held against my will for weeks, and denied counsel. My family was indifferent. By the time I felt strong enough to sue, the statute of limitations (a meager two years) had expired. All complaints I submitted to the appropriate boards were dismissed without explanation. That hospital is up and running again. Those doctors are still practicing, as far as I know. I am haunted to this day by what happened to me and others there. What other lives have they ruined in the years since?

If there had been some form of surveillance in place, cameras as my advocates,  would I, or any other forceably incarcerated patients, have had a better chance of being taken seriously, especially in the case of a hospital that had the stellar credentials to use as camouflage? Texas currently allows surveillance cameras in nursing homes. Why not extend that to psychiatric facilities as well?

It’s not as easy as that, of course. For one, there is the issue of privacy. Though the Constitution doesn’t guarantee a right to privacy, and security and surveillance monitoring are woven into our daily lives now, there are legitimate legal and ethical concerns. Where is the fine line between protection of an individual’s  privacy and the common good? I have no easy answers for this, or any at all at the moment, actually. But today the question is as timely as ever.

In the 1990’s, with mass deinstitutionalization, psychiatric patients were often left to their own devices. Many of them were left homeless, reliant, at best, on inadequate  outpatient services, if they had access to them at all. Inpatient care plummeted. Today, with the Affordable Care Act mandating mental health parity, insurance will cover mental health treatment on par with other physical ailments. The limits for inpatient care will expand. With the sites of gun control legislation aimed at treating the mentally ill, there will most certainly be an uptick in inpatient care.  If we are serious about putting a stake in the heart of the systemic problems in institutions, and in protecting patients, I think we have to take seriously the benefit of cameras as advocates.