Continued from Part 1.
Put on mirtazepine my daughter deteriorated rapidly. The crisis intervention team descended. They started by counting pills. When they found the number correct, they assumed I had destroyed the pills. They seemed perplexed.
One of the team would take her out for some one–to-one. They would visit the local park, go to the café and drink some cocoa. This sounded kind.
An apparently caring community psychiatric nurse arrived. I gave my daughter a tender hug. After that day, she believed that I was an instigator in her further dreadful abuse, and all her trust in me was lost, perhaps for ever. To this day there has been no hug. She disappeared in the car with the woman from the crisis team. She did not come back.
She had been re-sectioned and incarcerated in a secret “half-way house”. It was several hours before they told me in a curt phone call. I couldn’t phone, they could not release the address. It was in the “interests of her own health and safety”. Safety? Health?
What madness was this? It appears that their analysis was she is with her father, she has gotten worse – therefore her father is the toxic commodity. Blind faith in, and abject ignorance of the toxicology of their drugs meant they missed the first question that any carer has a duty to ask themselves when confronted with rapid and serious deterioration after commencing new medication. Is this an adverse drug response?
Her experiences in this half-way-house of horrors are recorded by us, but are too agonizingly painful to re-visit.
After extended interrogation by an aggressive and confrontational social worker, my daughter was returned home. She had been further traumatized by this latest abduction, which had the additional cruelty of complete denial of access to family. Cumulative exposure to enforced chemical poisoning was exacerbated by institutionalized brutality, bullying, ritual disbelief, and contempt.
By now it appeared to us that the raison d’etre of psychiatric detention is to abuse and destroy. More of her personal belongings had been damaged or disappeared during this incarceration.
When she came home, the crisis team visits to count tablets continued, ensuring the akathisia intensified. Driven by a toxicity which is now mentioned in black-box warnings of induced suicidal ideation on the packet insert, she began to visit internet suicide websites and I eventually became aware that she was being encouraged to plan and complete suicide by a stranger.
Turn to a colleague
I had respected and trusted the G.P. and continued to do so. Overwhelmed with the guilt of betraying her, I revealed this situation to him. I believed we were going to talk to her psychiatrist when we arrived at the center the next morning. I was bustled into a small office.
They more emphatically bustled my daughter into a room full of professionals. A few minutes later a smiling spokesman came to tell me she was now sectioned again, but if I set off immediately, I would be allowed to drive her to their hospital myself. I disintegrated in uncontrollable tears and sobs of despair and despondency.
An ambulance was called and she was led away to her third medical kidnapping in five months.
They augmented her poisoning with quetiapine. She rapidly deteriorated. A couple of weeks later, I begged them to stop. My fear of yet more brain injury was overwhelming. But what I didn’t know was that withdrawal could exacerbate akathisia and other toxicity. She got worse and they arrogantly and triumphantly insisted this clearly proved that she needed quetiapine. It was re-introduced.
I began to feel additional guilt for having appealed for an antipsychotic armistice.
Their next idea was to ensure that she remained isolated from this difficult and questioning father and family. They had a bizarre fantasy of rehabilitation by placing her in some form of protected accommodation. More opportunity for the brutality and the inexorable bullying that had permeated the entire duration of this perverse process. These professionals delude themselves into believing that this constitutes some form of care.
Hidden behind such a grotesque and enormous power imbalance, they are beyond questioning let alone being called to account. My daughter needed love, care and sanctuary. She would have got this at her own home. We needed to provide a truly therapeutic environment in which she could be rehabilitated from all of their perversions masquerading as a therapeutic endeavor.
She escaped only because the section ran its course. No one on their side accepted the medicines had caused the problem and possibly induced brain injuries.
We arranged to move back to her original home as it was evident to all except these experts that she was even more injured and damaged by these latest kidnappers.
I was called to talk to a further consultant in her hospital. “We think she might be bipolar but I reserve the right to change that diagnosis at any time”. The idea that she might have had a view or I might was just a fantasy of mine. We need to get her stabilized” he fantasized further.
They introduced a combination of risperidone and valproate. At one visit, my daughter managed to smile at this doctor. His response was both punitive and vindictive. “I think we will increase the evening dose of valproate – you’re a bit too happy”.
We diligently ensured compliance with this poisoning for a condition diagnosed provisionally and incorrectly. A slight and slender young woman became a swollen faced, breasts-bursting whale with antipsychotic induced pseudo-acne covering her back, breasts and face. Huge lesions even erupted on her swollen and bleeding lips. She cried out with the pain and disfigurement.
Her mother and I at this point had both read “Dear Luise”. We photographed this catastrophe and tried to endure our fears and terror that they might re-incarcerated her for injections of these poisons if I dared to reduce and cease the treatment.
Each new psychiatrist only sees the damaged person produced by the previous psychiatrist. Their imposed injuries are thus falsely interpreted as features of mental illness. The history is assumed to be as recorded, differential diagnosis is never revisited. An adverse drug reaction history is, as we were told, irrelevant.
Withdrawal
We were astonished when her next psychiatrist observed her dreadful appearance, listened to us and showed concern. He guided us through a tapered withdrawal over several months. Even more astonishing to all of us, he asked our daughter what she would like to happen. Despite her dreadful condition she managed to mouth the words: -“I have never had a mental illness and I’d like to come off these. They’re not doing me any good”.
At last she became free of her poisons.
But months, even years, after risperidone and valproate ceased, new drug induced pathologies are presenting and old ones are getting worse. As the diffuse and widespread neurological injuries pursued a tortuously prolonged course, it became more apparent to our daughter that her life and health had been utterly devastated.
Destroyed by people I had been deceived into believing were professional colleagues. I was overwhelmed with guilt and feelings of my own professional failure for being unable to save her.
An extra contractual referral enabled us to get another opinion. She had now been almost a year with no medication. I had succeeded in teaching her to walk again. Proper steps had replaced her neuroleptic shuffle. She was terrified at having to meet anyone.
The report we got confirmed that adverse drug reactions were the underlying cause of her presentation. There had been a generalized psycholeptic malignant syndrome with no underlying psychiatric condition.
No doctor has ever apologized to her or even discussed this report with us. No one has commented on the professor’s follow-up report one year after that again recording that her trajectory had been as predicted and that her unfolding drug free recovery endorsed his initial interpretation.
Where is their professional Duty of Candor?
Aftermath
We still live in daily fear of kidnapping and further persecution. We have no peace and never will have. Her exile from mainstream humanity caused so callously by mainstream psychiatry produces changes which could self-evidently be misinterpreted as features of mental illness in just the same way they deluded themselves that drug toxicities were psychiatric conditions. Then the enforced poisoning would begin again and there would be no stopping them.
She no longer has the privilege of knowing that should she develop a physical illness, a doctor will help her. She will never trust any doctor again, even though two doctors helped her. She will never trust me again as she believes I was a party to her kidnapping. She will probably never hug me again. We have to continue daily in our amateur attempts to rehabilitate her without input from health care professionals.
My daughter fights on with great courage but is wearied by the enormity of her losses. She has been labeled, stigmatized, brutalized and lived in constant fear through vital irreplaceable years.
We bought her a collie pup and watched her innate skills of puppy rearing and training re-emerge. We toil every day and night to devise, construct and deliver meaningful and effective forms of rehabilitation. Overall, the trajectory remains favorable but we realize and struggle to accept that complete recovery is no longer a realistic expectation. The injuries are simply too extensive for full recovery.
Five years will soon have passed from her original misdiagnosis and the first of her series of kidnappings. For her and her family, this has been an incredibly prolonged, very isolated and soul destroying experience. It has taken over our whole lives. There is, there can be nothing else.
Who is mad when there is a repeated misdiagnosis of drug induced problems as newly emerging psychiatric illness, which supposedly demands treatment with further combination psychotropics?
We still struggle with our disbelief that such long term, extreme, disabling, debilitating and multi-systems injuries can so easily arise from lack of prescriber awareness and the inability and reluctance of prescribers to recognize life-threatening medication toxicities.
“It doesn’t happen on olanzapine”!
How mad is it when the people who cause the problem get to determine who is and who is not mad!
Carla says
Thank you for sharing your story with everyone.
I am deeply, deeply sorry your daughter had to go through this inhumane experience. I feel for what you and your family has/had to go through.
As an outsider, looking in, I completely understand how you all feel.
I wish I could restore your experiences with happy ones.
Drug toxicities are real.
I appreciate and understand that every professional is a master at their trade however, they are at loss, just like we are, when we are worried about mixing drug A,B,C with X, Y, Z.
How can we improve the current health care system, when a loved one has valid reasons/concerns regarding drug toxicity?
Honesty, is the only way that one can move forward.
I had the strength to pull myself out of a mess however, many do not have the support system put in place to help themselves out of a unforgivable situation.
When loved ones ask questions and are worried, please take the time to answer, no matter how insignificant the question may be.
This helps everyone involved, make a better informed decision.
If people want to seek the truth, placing a mental label illness on them, to deal with ‘ego’ dysfunction, is not going to benefit anyone. If anything, the ‘imbalance of power’, is executing ones good spirit and integrity.
If there is a lack of trust on her behalf, it is there as a defence mechanism.
Trust will most likely never be restored again, which is unfortunate, however, with some respect, compassion, understanding, human warmth and acknowledgement of what has happened, some form of ‘human functioning’, will slowly take place.
Human touch, the ability to listen, an emotional response without patronising and the ‘guts’ to say we messed up, is all part of the healing process.
The culture of medicine has a history of dark problems.
It is similar to driving without a rear vision mirror or not following the road rules.
An accident is bound to happen.
Why can’t the same principles apply in medicine?
If one is unsure of the outcome, steer away from any unforeseen collisions.
Leaving outcomes to chance, just does not seem right to me. Change the road map.
Medicine is a curse however, it can also be a blessing if all learn from past mistakes.
No one has the right to place any labels on anyone.
If someone is honest, a false label only gives others the opportunity to destroy that persons good spirits.
Keep living and look forward to better moments.
Trust is a ‘two way’ street and if you ever feel uncomfortable or something does not feel right, listen to your intuition because it may be telling you something very important.
Keep living and do the best with what you have.
Look forward to better moments and have faith that something good will come out of this experience.
Susan Schellenberg says
Carla, I agree with most of your comments but have difficulty where you say “. . .Trust will most likely never be restored again, which is unfortunate, however, with some respect, compassion, understanding, human warmth and acknowledgement of what has happened, some form of ‘human functioning’, will slowly take place. . .”
A similar yet different medical insult forced me to imagine that the lack of trust in my head had infected every cell in my body and was illness producing in itself. My ability to gain trust began when I visualize myself naked on a plot of earth then imagined my “Lack of trust” oozing like pus from every part of my body into the earth. I sometimes even sensed myself vomiting the insult. When this deep letting go felt done I would then asked the Earth to heal me and all other persons who similarly carried this wound. The more I repeated this process as bad memories arose the more well and able to trust I became. Visualization was just one of many other tools that helped me to heal.
mary says
A request has just gone for our MP to read Part 2 and share its horrors in the corridors of Power!
It never ceases to amaze me how similar, although on varying scales, many patients and carers have been treated. The denials of adverse reactions, the re-diagnosing coupled with different medications, the lack of acceptance of the possible damage caused by the adverse reactions and, of course, the attempted grinding down of the carer’s confidence by throwing all blame for the patient’s condition on to his/her shoulders. Is this really how ‘care’, whether in the community or in mental health units, should be in the UK (or anywhere else for that matter) in the 21st. century?
We hear more and more about ‘mental health’ but not nearly enough about ‘poor quality mental health care’ in my mind.
Added to that, and even more sickening, we have the fact that this poor father and daughter have had to remain anonymous – for their own safety. How much further can we sink as a society?
annie says
Dear Dr. Doctor (anonymous in case of repercussions)
“I read your letters to your lawyer” Naomi said
The chasm between us came to light
The whole business of Seroxat and my brave girl entertaining herself when she came home from school, yes, she was an A Plus Student until she was 13.
Thankfully, my dearest mother took control and food, homework, dog walking, gardening was done, and she was 82.
She abandoned her life in Kent and set to holding my hand when I was too scared to visit the loo on my own
She was doing the job that the gps and the psychiatrist failed to do
Even providing meals for the exhausted pilot at odd hours when he wasn’t landing on the beach on Barra and flying the air ambulance, rescuing some poor soul from an island which had no hospitals
Her statement sank in, in my terrible state of Seroxat withdrawal, for some unexplained reason I thought she hadn’t noticed
Mummy was always in bed for nearly two years
She had the dog, she had a fleeting dad and she had a grandmother
It all went pear shaped when the accumulation of all the drugs kicked in, around two years to the day I had gone cold turkey from Seroxat
Seroxat withdrawal was bad enough, but the Ativan, Diazepam, Librium and all those Beta Blockers made me want to escape from myself one final time
It seemed that fleeing our beautiful loch side home was the only answer
“Will I have to go to court” Naomi asked
This sort of question had not occurred to me…
When a gp tells lies about drugs and there is enough correspondence between a psychiatrist and a medical practice about Seroxat to sink a battleship, but, no one had the grace to discuss any of this with me, when her three referrals rubbished me to the point of death, when, the Clinical Director said litigation was a private matter, that whatever gps did was nothing to do with him, when I was an emergency admittance to his mental hospital, wrecked from Seroxat withdrawal and I am not seen for 6 days by anyone and my medication is not checked or discussed, when, I am in a general hospital three days later from several violent attacks from Seroxat and a Registrar describes quite clearly in his letter that I had stopped Seroxat abruptly, on advice, then does anyone wonder why I feel trodden on, disposed of, and generally upset at the monumental cover up from these weasel people who think I am so stupid that I can’t see exactly how it all played out…
I had asked for an inquiry to the Clinical Director which he refused.
When the owner of the medical practice received a full photocopy version of my medical records in 2007 as I was so concerned as to what had gone on and he agreed to read through them, we had a little chat when I went back to talk to him.
I can’t see anything particularly in your medical records, he said, but, I did notice you weren’t given Fluoxetine.
Fluoxetine, what, what Fluoxetine, what are you talking about?
He said nothing.
What do I do, I said, do I sue?
You can do what you like, he said, you can sue all you like, I don’t care.
Uh?
As I left, I was handed an invoice from the receptionist for £99.00 for reading my medical records.
There was no written report for my £99.00 and how stupid I was not to insist on one.
I was just too staggered by what he had said, and this was the time I got my medical records and when I read all of it, well, the deceit was off the wall….
So, all these years of a monumental struggle, destroyed relationships, loss of home, and being punched continually in the face made them the winners and not me
Does anyone see anything fair about any of this?
Particularly, when there is no lawyer in our land who will touch me with a barge pole?
Thankfully, Sir Andrew Witty is comfortably off with his family.
“Each new psychiatrist only sees the damaged person produced by the previous psychiatrist. Their imposed injuries are thus falsely interpreted as features of mental illness”
Brilliant, dear Dr. Doctor.. “Where is their professional Duty of Candor?
The puppy will help, a pony helped in my case and we are reduced to animals putting right all those wrongs..
Katie B-T says
I’m so very sorry to hear about your devastating ordeal. I really resonated with themes from your story. The life-alternating and irreversible nature of some adverse drug reactions gets so very little acknowledgment, caused by those whose duty it is to “first do no harm.”
Truth says
A horrifying description of the inept, cruel, ignorant and damaging actions of those who pretend they are doctors. So many similarities to Dear Luise.
Dr. David Healy says
The author of these posts writes:
Our family thank the authors who have thoughtfully and empathetically posted such sincere comments. Their insight and understanding has strengthened our hope.
Julie Greene says
Dear Family, First of all, I believe you. These are the three words I myself wanted to hear and rarely hear to this day. I so wish those that harmed your family apologized and made restitution. They still may do so. I hope you are embraced and believed by your surrounding community. I hope you can find support from politicians and activists and folks on here who fully know that this is not some isolated freaky thing. I want to thank you for your courage in speaking out and letting the world know what happened. I hope many read what you wrote and that your story travels far.
Tess says
My heartfelt prayers to you and your family. Like your daughter, my now-adult daughter has suffered horribly over the course of 15 years at the hands of these psychiatric ‘professionals’ (whores for the pharmaceutical companies if truth be told). What began as a ‘treatment program’ for alcohol morphed into a life sentence of ‘legal’ drug cocktails that has all but robbed my daughter of her ‘self’. The child I raised is gone….replaced by a robotic, shell on a person now consumed by her own emptiness and desperate dependence on prescription drugs. She has been in and out of dozens of in-patient ‘programs’….each one changing the drug and the dosage of the one prior. I spent the first few years begging doctors not to ‘medicate’ her…to no avail. They all have their administrative agenda: Medicate them to ‘stabilize’ them, then call it a success for insurance purposes and show them the door – with an entirely different prescription regime. It was inevitable that the side effects and highly addictive aspect of the ‘legal’ drugs would lead her back into program after program. They faulted her, of course. She felt like a failure, which was compounded each and every time she went into another program. These ‘programs’ are very, very dangerous places, and I would never recommend anyone sending their child into one of them…..ever.
And, as an aside, I would stake my life on the assumption that just about every person we hear about lately who went on a killing rampage was likely on one psychotropic drug or another. Did you know that Adderall, for example (given to children for ADHD and adults for anxiety) is essentially one molecule away from crack? We are foolish to trust these doctors with our lives and the lives of our children. The fact is that they are ‘educated’ by the pharmaceutical-funded ‘establishments’ and receive more training in what drugs to prescribe than they do nutrition, for example.
Diana says
I am very moved by your story. It is so important that you share it, it is so important for the whole medical community to wake up and start questioning these drugs that are making people disabled, that are even killing people!
What happened to Hippocratic oath?
Where is science in modern medicine??
My warmest regards to you and I wish your daughter will continue to heal!
Carla says
Dear Susan Schellenberg,
I trust no one!
After all the lies and deceits, I am in no position to trust, anymore.
What kind of a professional are we, if we leave someone to suffer on their own, after all the damage has been done?
To add insult to a wound, they then close their doors on you and lie to you continuously!
I would not trust some clinicians even if my life depended on them!
My life did depend on them and they were never there for me!
I have moved on and have forgiven but will never forget.
I can see straight through nonsense and when I question some clinicians they feel cornered.
Imagine how people must feel when some clinicians try to harm them with the poisons they prescribe!
I visualise peace, love and abundance for everyone.
Love runs through my veins and I am quite a reasonable, compassionate and empathetic being however, I have very little tolerance for people who are in if for the money and then close the doors when something tragic happens to you.
When I see trouble, I run……………………………………!
Some clinicians will NEVER question the integrity of the meds they dish out to patients.
The mind, body and spirit are all interconnected.
If harm is done, only the person who lives with it knows what they have to deal with.
Inflammatory comments, do not heal people.
Healing oneself is one thing but dealing with lies and deception, is one of those things in medicine that no one has to be a hostage to.
Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.
~ William Shakespeare
Heather says
I just wanted to add my heartfelt sorrow for all you and your daughter have been through, and I do admire you enormously for your resilience against such dreadful treatment. Terribly sad to say, we lost that battle for our dear son, who decided that death was the only way to give us our lives back, having watched us struggling to get across to his various psychiatrists that it was only the medication that was making him more and more ill. His story was very similar to that of your daughter, although he was never sectioned, but humiliated beyond all belief, and dosed up with various medications, one after another, despite obvious akathisia.
You are so right when you highlight the cruelty and lack of reason and compassion shown both to you and your daughter. No one who hasn’t experienced it can imagine the horror of pleading with a psychiatrist who seems to be lost in a world of denial and craziness. It seems as though you are living in a nightmare.
My father was treated for manic depression back in the 1960’s, and although it was far from easy to manage, there was none of this arrogance and hostility from his doctors that we see today. Because his manic depression had started in 1940 after open heart surgery and lack of oxygen, he couldn’t be given Lithium as it would have killed him. He was treated at Bart’s Hospital by the late Professor Lindford Rees, who afforded him respect, and offered kindness always.
The mental health picture in 2002-2012 has totally changed. Arrogance and reliance on concoctions of medications are the order of the day, and the skill of thoughtful psychiatry of the old school, practised by people like David Stafford Clark, has all faded into history, and it seems as though lazy stupidity has taken over. How on earth did all this happen?
I read your daughter’s story with mounting anxiety and horror. It was like reliving so much of what happened to our beloved son. I am so terribly sorry you were put through such hell, but I do hope things will improve in time, and it is so good to know that you saved her. I wish we had fought harder and with more knowledge, to save our son.