The Report That Erased Me: How Misdiagnosis and Neglect Delayed My Healing
At 14 years old, I sat across from a psychologist who would write a report that changed the trajectory of my life. I was suicidal, self-harming, and deeply distressed, but what stood out most in that room wasn’t just my pain, it was that no one really saw it. They saw a girl acting out. Not a girl trying to survive.
That psychologist wrote down the abuse. He acknowledged the physical attacks, abandonment, and psychological chaos I lived in. And then he concluded that my trauma wasn’t relevant, that my ‘developmental history was not contributory.’ That sentence became a badge my mother wore like armor, showing it to anyone who questioned her. It told the world that I was just a bad kid, and it let her off the hook.
This is the story of how that one misjudged evaluation buried the truth of my trauma, delayed my healing for years, and became a symbol of everything that’s wrong with how psychiatry often fails to see the whole child.
The Evaluation That Failed Me
The evaluation was court-ordered after I had attempted suicide and faced minor criminal charges. I was cutting myself. I was angry. I was numb. I was running away, getting arrested, acting like I didn’t care, because I didn’t know how to ask for help in a way that anyone listened to.
The psychologist assigned to my case noted many critical things: I had been separated from my mother during early development. My biological father had completely abandoned me. My stepfather was physically abusive, and I lived in a home where I was routinely invalidated and unsafe. He wrote it all down. It was all there, in black and white.
And then, in a stunning contradiction, he wrote that my developmental and medical history were not contributory to my diagnosis.
I was given labels: Oppositional Defiant Disorder and Bipolar II, diagnoses that would follow me and shape how others treated me. I was never referred to trauma-informed therapy. I was never connected with someone who could help me make sense of what I was living through. Instead, the conclusion was clear: I was the problem.
Weaponized Words
That report became a weapon in my mother’s hands. Any time someone questioned the home environment, she’d show them that page. A doctor said it wasn’t her. A doctor said it was me.
The reality was far more complex. My home was emotionally chaotic and abusive. My stepfather eventually attacked me, a few months after the evaluation. When I defended myself, I was the one who got arrested.
Again, I was treated as the aggressor, not the survivor. But in a strange twist of fate, that arrest ended up saving my life.
The First Safe Place I Had Ever Known
I was sent to a juvenile facility in Saint Anthony, Idaho, where I stayed until I turned 18. It was the safest, most stable place I had ever known. For the first time, I wasn’t surviving chaos. I was just… existing. And healing.
I completed my program, graduated, and never returned to the system. I went on to get married, become a mother, and build a life that no one thought I was capable of, because I had finally been removed from the instability that psychiatry had failed to recognize years earlier.
It’s still painful to think about how differently things could have gone. If that evaluation had recognized my trauma as the root, not the symptom, of my behavior, I might have received the support I needed so much earlier.
Living With a Diagnosis That Could Have Been Prevented
Eventually, I was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder. It explained everything, the emotional intensity, the fear of abandonment, the struggle to regulate my reactions. It wasn’t that I was broken. It was that I had been trying to survive for so long in a world that kept misreading my pain.
I have done deep healing work. Years of individual therapy. DBT. Self-forgiveness. Rebuilding my identity from the ground up. I’ve worked hard to regulate what psychiatry once deemed irredeemable.
But I still carry that diagnosis into adulthood, and with it, the weight of a childhood never fully seen.
The Label That Stops the Questions
One of the most damaging things about being diagnosed with Oppositional Defiant Disorder was that it stopped people from asking, “What’s really going on here?”
That label became the end of the conversation instead of the beginning. It told adults that I was angry, defiant, manipulative, a child who just didn’t want to listen. It completely ignored the reasons I didn’t trust authority or why I had so much rage. No one wanted to look beneath the behavior and see the abuse, neglect, and trauma that shaped it.
And now, all these years later, I see the same thing happening to other children, kids close to me. They’re getting the same ODD label, and once again, parents and professionals cling to it like a diagnosis that justifies giving up. I hear it all the time: “See? He’s oppositional. He just doesn’t like to listen.”
But I *do* listen. And what I hear is a child trying to be heard in the only way they know how.
ODD isn’t just about defying rules. It’s about how a child learns to react when they don’t feel safe, seen, or emotionally supported. And too often, the adults around them stop being curious once the diagnosis is made. It’s easier to see the child as broken than to examine the environment they’re reacting to.
I wish every professional who diagnoses ODD was required to study trauma-informed care and attachment disruption. Because what looks like defiance is often a child screaming: “I don’t know how to trust you, prove me wrong.”
Why Iâm Telling This Story Now
I’m telling this story not to reopen wounds, but to make sure that other children don’t have to carry them silently into adulthood like I did.
We need to rethink psychiatry, especially how we diagnose youth in crisis. We need professionals who are trained to see trauma, not just behavior. We need evaluations that lead to healing, not pathologizing.
Today, my passion is working with young people who’ve been labeled as troubled, defiant, or damaged. Because I know they’re not. They’ve just been left to figure it out alone. And if someone had seen me for who I really was at 14, maybe it wouldn’t have taken me two decades to see it myself.
Diagnosis should be a bridge to healing, not a life sentence based on a single misjudged moment.
I survived. But children shouldn’t have to survive psychiatry. They should be supported by it.
“That psychologist wrote down the abuse. He acknowledged the physical attacks, abandonment, and psychological chaos I lived in. And then he concluded that my trauma wasnât relevant, that my âdevelopmental history was not contributory.â That sentence became a badge my mother wore like armor, showing it to anyone who questioned her. It told the world that I was just a bad kid, and it let her off the hook.”
Pardon my disgust at the psych industries, since covering up child abuse is technically illegal, but it is the primary societal function of the scientifically fraud based psych industries today.
I’m pretty certain ODD only became a DSM diagnosis, when the “childhood bipolar epidemic” started to become an embarrassment to the DSM debunked “mental health industries.”
“Diagnosis should be a bridge to healing, not a life sentence based on a single misjudged moment.” I agree.
And the DSM “diagnoses,” which were confessed to be “bullshit,” by Allen Frances who was the primary editor of the DSM, in I think 2010, is the truth.
Respect for the “invalid” DSM deluded psychiatrists, et al, should end.
By the way, no “mental health” worker may ever bill to help any child abuse survivor ever … to this day … and it’s all by DSM design.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/your-child-does-not-have-bipolar-disorder/201402/dsm-5-and-child-neglect-and-abuse-1
God bless, Melina, keep speaking your truth, and doing the right thing.
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When I read the article… I thought of my sister who is currently in a care home. This article seems to describe her life. My sister has been poisoned with psychiatric drugs filled with toxic chemicals by “mainstream psychopath psychiatrists” since she was a young child. The “natural childhood problems” and / or “natural childhood psychological problems” that she experienced as a young child and which were completely natural … could have been cured with a number of “alternative non-drug treatment methods and human behavioral therapies” … but for years, “mainstream psychopath psychiatrists” tried to so-called treat her with psychiatric drugs filled with toxic chemicals.
Probably… It must have been either (late 80’s and/or early 90’s)… back then we (like probably everyone else) had no idea how extremely ‘dangerous drugs’ psychiatric drugs were and how they caused ‘chemical damage (permanent chemically induced brain damage) to people’s healthy brains’.
***
Mainstream psychopath psychiatry, and the mainstream psychopath psychiatrists who serve (obey) it, have LIED to and DECEIVED everyone for years about the “deadly harms” of psychiatric medications. And yet they continue to lie and deceive. Despite the fact that they chemically damage healthy people’s brains and cause a variety of fatal physical and mental illnesses, and despite the large numbers of people being maimed and killed every year… they continue to lie and deceive people.
One of the reasons mainstream psychopath psychiatry has become so powerful and still endures… is, unfortunately, due to politicians who profit financially from psychiatric drug manufacturers. It is not something unknown that psychiatric drug manufacturers… particularly in the US, have made ‘financial funded’ / ‘financial aid’ to election campaigns. As long as politicians (and governments) continue to receive “financial revenue /aid” from psychiatric pharmaceutical companies… it wouldn’t be too difficult to speculate that mainstream psychopath psychiatry will continue to “mutilate and kill” millions of innocent people every year.
***
My sister has been caught permanent chemically induced brain damage due to the toxic chemicals in the psychiatric medications she was given starting in the 1980s and 1990s. At least that’s my guess. If it weren’t so… he wouldn’t be in a mentally retarded care home today.
***
That being the case… I started researching. And I noticed this not only in “care homes” for the mentally disabled… but also in mental health units such as “mental hospitals, psychiatric hospitals, nursing homes and rehabilitation centers.”
And even in “psychiatric outpatient clinics and wards” of state and university hospitals and in community mental health units (CRMs) (where rehabilitation programs are conducted and toxic psychiatric medications are prescribed)… I realized this fact.
I realized that the vast majority of people who had to stay here, especially until their deaths, had been taking psychiatric medications loaded with toxic chemicals for long periods (months and/or years) while in civilian life (just like my sister).
Later, I realized that while taking these psychiatric medications loaded with toxic chemicals, they had also been caught from “permanent chemically induced brain damage” caused by the psychiatric medications.
Today, I realized that the reason these people are “forced to stay in these mental health units until they die” is/may be because of psychiatric medications containing toxic chemicals.
***
Think of it this way… Imagine, in civilian life, taking psychiatric medications for long periods of time… that contain chemicals that are extremely toxic to healthy brains and healthy bodies. And then, months and/or years later… you are been caughting permanent chemically induced brain damage caused by these toxic chemicals. And one day in to have looked – you’ve opened your eyes in a mental hospital, to stay there ‘until you die.’
And you’re not even aware of any of this. Because psychiatric medications containing toxic chemicals have turned your healthy brain into a ‘chemical soup,’ so to speak. And for this reason, you’re not aware of anything.
That’s what it’s like to get permanent chemical brain damage from psychiatric medications. You become like a ZOMBIE, so to speak. You stay that way until you die.
When you die… the harmful effects of psychiatric medications will likely be covered up, and your death blamed on other causes; – just as in mainstream psychopath psychiatry, a “cover-up culture” is quite prevalent in the mainstream medical world. For this very reason… the exact fate of people injured or killed by psychiatric medications is unknown. Those who die and are injured… who go to get hit; (killed in the confusion).
***
Of course, my sister isn’t in a zombie state right now. He probably has a chemical brain injury that is ‘salvageable, fixable’. (We hope this is the case.) That’s why we’re trying to do something. We’re trying to save him. We’re trying to prevent the chemical brain damage caused by psychiatric medications from becoming worse (permanent).
But we can’t do anything. Because… the mental health system in our country is not making any effort to correct this chemical brain damage. The mental health system in our country is MONOPOLIZED by mainstream psychopath psychiatry. For this reason.. People are being condemned to be maimed and killed by psychiatry. We’re trying to stop this.
***
To reiterate… Probably… Hundreds of millions of people are subjected to chemical lobotomies (chemical brain damage) every day by psychiatric drugs. Of these, at least (an estimated) more than 1 million (perhaps more) are been caught to chemical lobotomies (chemical brain damage) each year. A small number of these (actually, the number reaches millions every year) end up either mutilated or killed by psychiatrists. Or they end up in mental health facilities (with brain damage) until they die.
Isn’t it a pity, a sin for these millions of innocent people? And then… when I call mainstream psychiatrists “PSYCHOPATH” they get angry. They have no right to be angry. On the contrary, I think they need to be prosecuted. They need to be held accountable to justice.
***
As a final word. Mainstream psychopath psychiatry is not a medical field; it is a “money-making” industry. Mainstream psychopath psychiatry and the psychopath psychiatrists who serve (obey) it… MAKES MONEY by damaging (permanent chemically induced brain damage) the healthy brains of millions of people.
Probably… Hundreds of millions of people worldwide who take psychiatric medications… are subjected to permanent chemically induced brain damage (chemical lobotomies) caused by psychiatric drugs every day. Probably… of the hundreds of millions of people been caught to chemical lobotomies, at least an estimated 1 million (perhaps more) are also subjected to these chemical lobotomies.
Probably… A very small fraction of these millions of people (perhaps millions every year) who undergo chemical lobotomies are forced to spend the rest of their lives in mental health facilities. (We can safely say that the vast majority of the millions of innocent people currently in mental health facilities are/could be in this group.)
—
Mainstream psychopath psychiatry is not a medical field; it is a “genocidal industry” that harms people. Therefore, psychiatry should be removed from medical schools immediately (and urgently). Psychiatric drugs should be strictly banned.
Medical schools… should have real mental health units instead of psychiatry, and mental health systems should be equipped with a variety of non-drug treatment methods and human behavioral therapies. Courses on non-drug treatment methods and human behavioral therapies should be prioritized in mental health systems in medical schools.
Psychiatric medications must be strictly banned. The continued use of psychiatric medications, whose harmful and lethal effects have been proven, amounts to the deliberate maiming and killing of people.
Psychiatrists are not doctors. Someone who intentionally harms, maims, and kills people cannot hold the title of doctor. This should not be allowed. If they must be given the title of doctor… Psychiatrists and psychologists… should practice as ‘mental (mind) and soul health doctors.’
***
Melina Frankos, your article got me thinking. As a survivor, I hope you can help these innocent people too. Tens/hundreds of millions of innocent people around the world are waiting to be SAVED from the hands of mainstream psychopathic psychiatry and the psychopathic psychiatrists who serve (obey) it. I hope someone (especially governments and NGOs) will save these millions of innocent people… from the “savagery, oppression, and genocide” of mainstream psychopathic psychiatry.
Melina Frankos, thank you for your article. Best regards.
With my best wishes đ Y.E. (Researcher blog writer (Blogger))
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I’m sorry you and your sister have had to be dealing with this. I would like to read your blog
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What I donât understand is how psychiatry got so much power and prestige. For years, they pushed a fraudulent explanation for mental illness, meaning the chemical imbalance and defective brain theories. Only recently are they starting to get more exposure for this fraud, though some members of their own ranks have long spoken out, as you can see here: https://totalmentalhealth.info/to-the-mentally-ill-your-brainsare-fine/
Itâs probably the title âDr.â that reels people in. Though, they pretty much ignore medicine in their practice, so go figure.
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Thank you for sharing your story- it is very moving and powerful. Hope it reaches professionals open enough to take heed.
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Heartbreaking! But well done for you to see what was what and get yourself out of the insanity! That psychologist was an idiot who should have his license removed! It astounds me that these DSM “diagnoses” can be made without any consideration of context, even when he KNEW the context and simply denied it had any effect!!!!
In my view, you weren’t MISDIAGNOSED. You were ABUSED. You should not have been “diagnosed” at all. Those abusing you were the ones who needed to be “diagnosed” with something! But it always seems the victim is the one ending up being labeled as “disordered” while the abusive adults continue to abuse with impunity. I’m SO glad you escaped and didn’t let that define your life! Again, VERY WELL DONE!
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This story resonates with mine so much. It’s enraging to learn it happens to others, but it also propels this work we are doing forward. Thank you for daring to speak up about it.
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This is the only internet forum I access occassionally. And I am pleased that people can come here and shine a light on the terrible scourage that psychiatry devolved into. Yet another example of where profit over care determined the path for millions of hurting, trusting individuals. A real travesty. And, still, it goes on.
I was fortunate enough to find One compassionate professional- a social worker who listened and was ‘there for me’ when I finally left an abusive home at 18. I will be forever grateful. Although rocky for years, it was a start: A gateway to a possible future. I distinctly remember the first time I had the sensation of being happy, inside myself, just ‘being’: I was 50 years old! It has been a long road. Kids need mentors who can mirror their strengths and warmly affirm their humanity.
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I had the opposite experience. I had a very loving and supportive family. No dysfunction and I certainly knew what love was. When I was 13, I experienced my first genuine romantic love. I wasn’t “too young to know what love was.” Maybe just too naive to know that not everyone who says they love you always behaves with unconditional love like I’d known in my family. We were together for a year. No sex. Nothing abusive or dysfunctional. He because extremely upset because I merely considered a breakup due to not being able to see each other over the summer. He broke up with me and, although the summer went fairly well, the following school year was pure hell. He slandered me and toyed with my emotions. He bullied me unmercifully. My parents tried everything to help. They finally got me in with a therapist who proceeded to blame my parents for my distress and dismissed the bullying. So I went without this trauma being addressed for decades. Even future therapists would throw things back on my parents based on confirmation bias. I also chose nursing as a career where bullying is rampant. My choice wasn’t based on “a desire to help others because no one helped me.” It was my lifetime interest in the medical field. Anatomy, disese processes, etc. I have always had gratitude, practiced self care, would never harm myself. My problem is an extreme adverse reaction to bullying. Also, incompetence in the medical profession. I’ve seen too many harmed. I don’t blame myself or hate myself. I just cannot tolerate bullies and bullying behavior and negligence the way most people do. My parents were great. But no therapist seems to understand that bullying is a universal problem and it’s not always parents or relatives that were bullies. They are so locked into the “bad parent” ideology, especially “bad mom,” that they seem blinded. I just can’t seem to break through that confirmation bias. I know parents can be abusive. I’ve had friends who had horrible parents and told me I was lucky to have mine. But therapist who want to save others from the same abuse they suffered, especially at the hands of parents, create conformation bias. These thetapists can’t seem to get out of their own heads to help the client. Articles like these seem to promote the idea that childhood trauma from parents is ALWAYS the cause when people seek therapy. I’m not negating their experience, just pointing out how that mindset can also be harmful. Trauma can come from many sources and my mother was NOT my first bully nor am I “glad my mom died.” She was my best friend. I miss her and will not allow her name to be besmirched.
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The only success stories I have seen (or experienced) regarding bullying is when the victim learns to stand up to the bully. I know two people who were bullied as kids, and it only stopped when they finally cracked and beat up their bullies. They were from older generations, so they could get away with that back then, haha.
I had a bullying experience too. At one of my jobs, this psych nurse started bullying me when she noticed the depressive episodes I used to get. I was sitting in the break room in a depressed funk one day, and she sat by me and proceeded to go on about how she didn’t care about me and so on. It was very inappropriate and odd, especially because we barely even knew each other. I think she perceived my frailty as disgusting. Anyway, I didn’t cry about it. I didn’t complain to the boss or HR, though I certainly could have. Next time I saw her, I behaved the “ice queen,” tone cold and snappy, head held high. She was visibly taken aback, and oddly enough, she started liking me after that.
I had heard this nurse boast about being a psychopath, so I guess the way she behaved should not be that surprising. I’m just grateful to God that I made the right decision and asserted a boundary immediately, because that could have escalated into a truly miserable situation.
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Melina, thank you for sharing your painful story. As you say, the arrest and juvenile detention was a blessing in disguise that allowed you to escape the abuse at home. I am so glad you survived to tell your story! Kudos to you for speaking out and working with youth to help them avoid the nightmarish events you endured in your youth.
It never ceases to amaze how clueless and frankly stupid some of these mental health professionals are. I don’t know if it is possible to be that clueless so it makes me think they are simply very cold, heartless people who are only in it for the power, prestige and paycheck, patient be damned.
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Thank you so much for the exquisite rendering of this very important story, Melina. Iâm personally inclined to believe that the psychiatric pathologizing of abused, neglected, and abandoned children has long been the rule and not the exception; a not insignificant public health issue given the staggering number of children âreportedâ abused year in and year out. It seems to me the very first order of focus in assessing a child with behavioral issues suggesting ODD-a vapid diagnosis by any critical metric, is a deep dive historical examination of the role âboundary violationsâ have factored, and then assess the various ways caretakers overt and covert behaviors have failed to provide the fundamental tenants of the interpersonal care and conditions necessary for the âgood enoughâ (e.g., Winnicott) developmental matrix. Simply put, boundary violations like those Melina detailed here, need to be acknowledged and repaired, not compounded by an entirely additional layer of narcissistic abuse (i.e., atomizing psychiatric labels that systematically deny the childâs âshared historyâ, and relegate the child more disempowered, alienated, and objectified, while addressing nothing beyond assuaging the clinicianâs illusions of expertise, save defend the abuse and perpetuate the broken bonds). But, then, repairing the damage from boundary violations incurred during childhood, is demanding (i.e., complex, dynamic) and time-consuming work, that, invariably, flatters no one other than the courageous and desperate child…
Fifty odd years ago Erik Erikson said, âDonât confuse the child with his behaviorsâ.
Fifty years later (2103), Bessel Van Der Kolk writes of a child diagnosed with ODD, âHe probably just wants to be left aloneâ. When did the psych-disciplines become so willfully psychologically and intellectually obtuse?
Hereâs the partial answer that I believe needs to be addressed- riffing from a passage from Jeff Schmidtâs book, âDisciplined Mindsâ:
âProfessionals are licensed to think on the job, but they are obedient thinkers. All professional work is in part creative. However, individuals are selected to professional work not because they are more creative than others, but because they can be trusted to make sure every detail of what they create is politically correct for their employersâ points of view…Employers will hire dull but politically undisciplined individuals over those displaying any amount of undisciplined creativity. Just as professionals engage in playpen creativity, innovating within the safe confines of an assigned ideology, so too they engage in playpen critical thinking…Professionals generally avoid the risk inherent in real critical thinking and cannot be properly called critical thinkers. They are simply ideologically-disciplined thinkersâ
Todayâs graduate schools âsystematicallyâ educate future mental health professionals to ânotâ think critically, i.e., historically, contextually, hermeneutically, Socratically, politically, and more. Worse, still, the vast majority of todayâs mental health professionals have been deprived of an education grounded in the rich canon of psycho, social, philosophical, literary, and theoretical frameworks. In the void of both, todays mental health professionals are indoctrinated to be âsocietal managersâ, âtechniciansâ dispensing ideologically based nostrums while believing themselves to be providing epistemologically and scientifically based treatment/care. And itâs one thing to have a society populated with depoliticized ideologically constrained mental health practitioners-or that in that void resides far too little compassion itself, and quite another for that society to increasingly internalize the psychiatric diagnostic lens as the lens from which to understand themselves and others, save reality itself.
To wit: Iâm deeply encouraged by reading stories from people whoâve overcome psychiatrically compounded child abuse, as Melinaâs has. But it deeply saddens me to think that a BBD diagnosis would provide an acceptable substitute âexplanationâ, considering the damage incurred by Melinaâs childhood ODD âexplanationâ. I will only say that Iâm confident that Melinaâs multitudes will one day shed the BBD diagnoses, like that of a seasonal leaf from a vibrant oak tree.
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Kevin, thinking critically, i.e., historically, contextually, hermeneutically, Socratically, politically, epistemologically, scientifically—or even existentially—are things most people, mis-educated professionals included, don’t have time for, living day to day.
Besides, none of them hold a candle to knowing something intuitively.
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Excellent article.
But here’s where we differ: I see no room for psychiatry’s redemption. It has a long, storied history of being oppositionally defiant to the lifelong harm its labels and drugs too often create, all in the name of “treatment”—especially for people who simply need someone to listen who won’t shut them down… something everyone needs when they’re in emotional distress.
Until psychiatry learns to listen without labeling—something that’s not likely to ever happen—it will remain an extension of the harmful family system it so often protects—making it the flagship of the gaslighting industries.
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