“Prisoners or Patients?” NJ Psych Hospitals Restrict Patient Rights

I’m glad someone is finally covering this topic. This is an issue around which even N.A.M.I. mommies and their big Pharma funded “anti stigma” campaign cheerleaders can probably find some common ground with those of us who identify as allies of psychiatric survivors and NAMI rejects.

I’ve logged in a lot of visiting hours during the last seven years and I witnessed a lot of human rights violations, not even counting the obvious lack of choices and alternatives for individuals, who like my daughter wanted safety and support without the prospect of being forcibly medicated or shocked. There is plenty of room for improvement in hospitals not counting the isolation, restraints, and other forms of abuse and torture.

My experience of visiting my daughter in two state mental hospitals, and two acute care hospitals, and one psychiatric secure residential unit is that everyone of them routinely violates basic human rights.

Presents are unwrapped and rules are non uniformly judged as to which things are dangerous and which are not. One day, a hand knitted scarf will be confiscated because it can be unraveled and used to choke people. Come back with the same scarf and a different staff member will wave it by. Employees are simultaneously given too much discretion to interpret vague rules giving sadists and opportunity to flaunt and abuse power, or they are not given enough discretion to show compassion in cases where it would obviously have a therapeutic effect on someone longing for a reminder of home. I think that if peer specialists would outnumber staff members without lived experience of being locked up, this problem would go away. In other words, it’s not a problem of the rules themselves but how they are interpreted and carried out and by whom. This is a staff problem. Peers should outnumber folks with no lived experience in all staffing and hiring.

The way psychiatric inmates win privileges is by and of itself demeaning and undignified. A patient, who for instance, is multi lingual and has a Phd in economics may be told gleefully by a high school educated mental health worker “Great work, Mr. So and So! You have enough points now to get a soda!” Petty system of rewards and punishments based on behavioral science or operant conditioning should be abolished in all so-called places of healing. People who are involuntarily committed in a hospital are not interested in chips and soda and pizza night and group movie night. They are interested in how to win their release and whether they are going to lose their job, their boyfriend, apartment, etc. while they are being detained for up to six months. They also want stimulating recreational and vocation activities and real therapy in accordance their goals and dreams, not gluing popsicle sticks together in art ‘therapy’

One hospital where my daughter was, gave points based on attendance at mickey mouse group ‘therapy’ sessions. My daughter told me about one group session run by a NAMI volunteer. My question is this: how does NAMI earn the right to conduct a group therapy session in a hospital when their cirriculuum sucks? NAMI only offers biomedical propoganda.

Patients are routinely restricted in the kind of reading material they can access. Brochures and fliers are limited to mainstream consumer advocacy organizations such as NAMI. I just had a call from a MindFreedom member who was in tears because their MindFreedom newsletter was confiscated from his room. It was a symbol of hope for him. On the cover of that issue was a group of psychiatric survivors protesting in front of the American Psychiatric Association. One of the protesters held a sign that read ‘I am not a case to be managed’. Why would someone steal something from a patient’s room like that? That is invasive.

Once, when picking up my daughter from a secure unit to drive her to an Icarus Project meeting, the director of the facility drew me into his office for a stern lecture. Apparently, he had visited the website of the Icarus Project and was concerned that my daughter would be exposed to “militaristic” propoganda and be persuaded to stop taking her medication. That is the word he used, “militaristic” The only times my daughter was exposed to militarism was in the mental health system when she was pinned down and forcibly injected. Jeesh.

At acute care hospitals, visiting hours are highly restricted. If you have a loved one in the ICU of the same hospital, you can visit with far fewer restrictions. Privacy laws are used as an excuse for a number of other restrictions. For instance, you cannot bring a cell phone from the outside into a restricted facility based on the fear that someone from the outside will take pictures of other patients. Never mind, if you want to provide a loved one with a cell phone in order to protect HER privacy so she can make a private call outside the hearing of nurses, other patients, etc. I would have given my eye teeth to have a cell phone to record an instance when no less than five orderlies jumped on a male patient who was not being violent. I digress.

I witnessed the mother of a psychiatric inmate, a non English speaker from Ethiopia, weep because they would not let her bring flatbread, olive oil, and other staples of her son’s diet into the backward. He would not touch the wonder bread, margarine, iceburg salads, pizza, frozen chicken mgnuggets and other processed food entries that were routinely served, cafeteria style by the state hospital. He was losing weight too, I couldn’t believe how gaunt he was. You would think the staff would be falling over themselves accepting help from a loved one with an intimate knowledge of her son’s ethnic and dietary preferences. Instead, ‘safety’ was limited to rules created for a minority of patients who were dealing with addiction issues. Supposedly, this little old Ethiopian woman could have put crack cocaine in her son’s goat cheese.

Visitors at Oregon State Hospital are routinely made to wait in the pouring rain, sometimes up to twenty minutes before an electronic door opens and they are allowed into a screening room where they are screened for contraband. They lock everything up. The whole process takes visitors 1/2 to be screened and have their loved one brought down. Then, they can enjoy the privilege of either listening to their loved one through a pexiglass window or if they have earned the correct amount of privileges, they can sit at a cafeteria style table and visit with their loved one with several orderlies prying on their every word. So much for privacy.

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Reid calls it ‘treating us like we’re brain damaged children’. He says when people are treated that way, they start believing it and then start acting like it and then staff feels vindicated because they were right.

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