By Teresa Reile
One woman’s story of triumph over by a mental health system gone rogue and her eventual return to normalcy.
This is Sandra’s story – a woman who lost a significant relationship, was sad and upset, got drunk one night, ended up in the hands of psychiatrists, and for the next TWENTY TWO years, her life was not her own.
Sandra was a successful business woman working in the construction/design field, with a good relationship, nice home, close family – basically, everything one would want for a stable happy life.
In a bizarre twist of fate everything changed. Her significant other left her. She loved him, but now he was gone. As any normal person would be, she got upset. She was sad. She needed someone to talk to. She called her family, her friends, the Bishop from her church. No one would listen it seemed.
They just didn’t want to hear her.
She turned to ‘someone’ she would listen…Captain Morgan and the bottom of her glass. The year was 1997. She sat alone, afraid, sad and drank until she was quite inebriated.
As Captain Morgan has the habit of doing, he starts out as a friend, but as the night goes on, he turns into the pirate that he truly is and he stole her sense of propriety.
She didn’t realize it at the time, but she had hypoglycemia. Hypoglycemia and alcohol are a volatile mixture, especially on an empty stomach and can make someone appear crazy.
This is exactly what happened on that fateful night in 1997.
After Captain Morgan raped her sobriety, she went to her neighbors houses knocking on doors telling them that she was ‘coming out’ – whatever that means. It sounds crazy and it sounded crazy to them.
One of them called the police.
When the police arrived, they asked her what was wrong. Finally! Someone who will listen to her! She told them what was wrong. They listened. Boy did they listen. They listened to everything she had to say and then told her that she needed to get dressed out of her robe and go with them to see someone who could help her.
She had just gotten out of the tub prior to her date with Captain Morgan and stayed in her robe.
They asked her if she had tried to kill herself
They took her to Jacoby Hospital and put her in the psychiatric ward. They just dropped her off and left her there. She was in a big room with lots of beds. An orderly told her to go lie down. She looked around and saw a huge room with people strapped to beds who were comatose.
She was intoxicated, but realized that she was going to be strapped to a bed and put into a drug induced coma and in that moment she sobered right up.
The realization hit her so hard and she screamed at which point they held her down and injected her with a syringe of some drug.
She still to this day does not know what was in that syringe, but what she does know is that it made her crazy and made her body feel as though it were on FIRE. Her body was burning up. She was SO HOT that she took her dress off and started running down the long hallway.
“You need to be covered in blood’
She was drunk, she was hypoglycemic, menstruating and had just been injected with a drug that was making her insane…she ran down the hall, naked, burning up , pulled out her bloody tampon and hit the security guard with it while screaming, “You need to be covered in blood’. Her THINKING at the time, was, ‘he needs to be covered in the blood of Christ’ but her mouth couldn’t articulate. She was crazy on this drug.
The orderlies grabbed her. She remembers one nurse saying, “She’s so hot. She’s burning up.’ They threw her in an ice cold shower. One nurse said, ‘you can’t shower if you are menstruating’.
After being burning up, and thrown into an ice cold shower…now she is freezing.
As she stood, naked, shivering, bleeding, bewildered and afraid…they injected her again. This time she passed out. But before she did, she remembered being strapped down onto one of the beds, saying, ’where are you taking me….’?
When she woke up, she was somewhere else. She had no idea where she was or how long she had been there. She was in a white room with 2 beds.
“How are you feeling”?
A nice young man in a clean white suit came in and asked, “How are you feeling”?
She replied with what anyone in her position would reply…’Where am I’?
She was met with a blank stare from the nice young man in the clean white suit and he again asked her how she was feeling. This charade went on several times until she finally answered, “I’m fine. But where am I…?” upon which, he turned and walked out of the room.
Shortly thereafter a woman walked into the room and asks her how she is feeling. The first thought was, not this again…but politely answers , “Fine. Where am I? The woman identified herself as her new ‘roommate’ and said, “You are in drug rehab’.
Startled, she says, ‘Rehab? I have never done drugs in my life! I was just drunk!’
The roommate consoles her by telling her that she is simply in denial.
The drugs in the syringe had wiped out her memory.
She couldn’t remember a thing. She found a prayer book and found the ‘Hail Mary prayer’ but she couldn’t remember who this ‘Mary’ was, so she recited the prayer and inserted the name of ‘Jesus’ instead of Mary and prayed for her life.
While praying, the nice young man in the clean white coat came in and told her she needed to go out and ‘mingle’. In other words, she had to go to a group therapy session. Everyone in the group was sharing their experiences of being addicted to drugs. When it came her time to share, she told the truth about the fact that she was not a drug addict and not even a habitual drinker. She explained that she was just drunk that particular night. No one believed her.
They told her she was in denial
She asked the nice young man in the clean white coat what was in the syringe that he injected into her and told him that it wiped out her memory.
He wouldn’t answer the question.
Her older sister visited each day for seven days. On the seventh day, she was released to her sister’s care with a diagnosis of ‘Bipolar Manic Depressive.’
Seven days of HELL. NO MEMORY AND NO ANSWERS.
Her sister never, to this day, told her what the nice young man in the clean white coat had said to her.
However, while in the rehab center, the roommate relayed that they use ElectroShock to people to get them to stop using drugs.
The roommate had a hard time quitting the drugs and had been given the mandate that if she wouldn’t stop, the next step is to shock her brain with electricity.
She was scared. Very scared.
Prior to being released on the 7th day, they put her in a wheelchair and took her down in an elevator that went down, down, down…deep down into the bowels of the earth. When the elevator doors opened, there was a very long hallway.
She was told that they were going to do a ‘procedure’
People were asking how she was feeling. On the way down the very long hallway, the orderly stopped outside the door of a room with a big chair with restraints and a helmet.
Her heart stopped for a moment. She shook with fear. ‘They are going to fry my brain.’
The orderly started walking again, slowly, pushing the wheelchair further down the very long hallway.
Her heart was pounding.
They turned a corner and entered an x-ray room. They did the x-ray and then brought her back up the very long ride up the elevator and told her she was free to go.
Is it part of psychiatry to scare people into submission?
She was remanded to her sister’s care. The family treated her differently. She was not referred to by her name.
She still had no memory. Her zombie-like state from the drugs lasted for a very long time. She felt like she moved and spoke in slow motion.
The nice young man in the clean white coat instructed her to take Cogentin, Lithium and Haldol ‘for the rest of her life’.
What he didn’t tell her was that the side effects of these drugs cause heart attack, stroke and DEATH.
She really WOULD be taking them for ‘the rest of her life’. A very sick joke.
In 2007, she had the first of fourteen mini strokes. They continued until 2018.
Prior to her date with Captain Morgan, she had always been in great shape, thin and never had high blood pressure.
Since the incident in 1997 where she had been injected with drugs and forced to be on a very potent drug cocktail, she has gained weight, had very high blood pressure, diabetes and her organs have begun to shut down.
In 2004 or 2005, on her way to work, she had an anxiety attack on the train. She got off and went to the hospital. They immediately put her into the Critical Care Unit and were marveling at this woman who ‘felt ok’ with a blood pressure of 227/180!
What happened after that was startling. They put her in the psychiatric ward of the hospital and kept her there for 30 days.
Why?
If you have a history of ever being in a psychiatric hospital, every time you go back to the hospital, you are immediately put right back there. Each time she had high blood pressure, or a stroke, she was put in the psych ward immediately after her vitals were stabilized.
Once they think you are crazy – you are crazy for life.
She recalled having had a friend she used to work with who was now working at this hospital, so she requested that he come to see her.
He was now one of the Chief Administrators of Psychiatry for the hospital. She was so happy to see him and went to give him a hug. He kept his distance while he told her that she was in a closed unit with everything on camera.
She recounted her ordeal in 1997 and her descent from being a well respected administrator in the construction and banking field to a blithering zombie who is on a drug cocktail and now living in a shelter. He was astounded.
He turned her over to the Chief Psychiatrist.
She asked him how he KNEW, that these pills were leveling out her brain chemicals such as Seratonin.
He said that he didn’t know.
She was watched for thirty days. Every move, every waking and sleeping moment was on camera. After 30 days, the Chief Psychiatrist told her that she was not ‘bipolar manic depressive’, she was depressed because of her living situation.
He took her off of those three drugs that were making her into a zombie and he put her on 10 mgs of Lexipro and told her that she would have to take it for the rest of her life.
She made a conscious decision to GET BETTER.
She decided that she was going to BE better and go back to the way she was before all of this happened. She completely weaned herself off of the drugs. It took a while and it was hard, but she did it.
As the years went by, her memory started to return. Her organs in her body were SCREAMING for help.
After one and a half years, she was finally completely off of all drugs. It was time to stop talking and start DOING.
When she walks down the street now, people don’t see a zombie. They see a happy person and they say so. They see HER.
She says, ‘This is ME.’
Her psychiatrists didn’t even want her to work. Instead, she put herself through school and today she is a certified Peer Counselor. She is now CREATING jobs for people.
She did it all on her own and stresses that it was definitely not with the help of the medical community.
Looking back, she says that all she needed was someone to talk to. That’s it. If she had someone who would have listened to her, this never would have happened.
‘Doctors are not always right – especially psychiatrists’
“Moral of the story: don’t get involved with the Mental Health System to begin with. Psychotropic drugs are not the panacea they are proclaimed to be. People on psychotropics die 20 years earlier than they should.”
She says her strength comes from above. For 22 years she suffered at the mercy of a mental health system gone awry. A mental health system that does anything BUT care for one’s mental HEALTH. Twenty two years of her life wasted, in a zombie-like state, thrown out like a piece of garbage.
She recounted how one former psychiatrist was doing studies on patients and he found that patients on psychotropic drugs were experiencing Metabolic Syndrome problems. He said that most Black and Hispanic women were being diagnosed with Bipolar Manic Depression and most black men were being diagnosed with Schizophrenia. This metabolic syndrome spike was being caused by the drugs. He realized that he was killing people, so he quit. He now educates people about this.
She encourages everyone to break free of the mental health system. ‘Not everyone who is depressed needs medication. Why don’t you try talking to them first?”
She is now herself. She is NOT what HAPPENED to her. She IS Sandra – Embracing life. Sandra means: One who hates Evil and defender of mankind.
She is SANDRA MITCHELL. SHE IS BACK.