Most of this section is the text of a Word document that I sent to the Office of Investigations at the Department of Mental Health on April 21, 2015. It continued my discussion of what had happened at the crisis unit at Quincy Mental Health Center by then.
For this publication:
-I added "(Maryanne)" to a part of the document where it initially wasn't clear about whom I was speaking. I also added "(her)" where I had accidentally not included it in the original email.
-The attempts to make me move from the room that I had for most of my stay at the crisis unit weren't "exactly" a week apart. They were six days apart.
-I have removed a name for privacy.
From April 15, when I was moved from my single room to the double room, to April 23, when I was taken from Quincy Mental Health Center by paramedics and brought, by ambulance, to the former Emergency Room of Quincy Medical Center, now called Steward Satellite Emergency Facility, for a psychiatric evaluation, I averaged about 5 hours of sleep every night.
I think that I recently have understood why I was told, on April 17, that I had to take my nightly medications in the nurses' station and was no longer allowed to take them in the med room in the other hall. April 15, 2015, was the night that Alexis, a mental health worker, had screamed "What do you want me to f---ing do, tell people to never f---ing cough? There's nothing I can f---ing do! You have to drop this s---! Get out of my f---ing office! This is crazy, get out of my office, THANK YOU," and slammed the door of the nurses' station in my face when I had asked her to stop the patient, Richard, from harassing me. Later that night, when I went to the nurses' station to ask the nurse, Jude, to help me to get my meds from the med room, Jude walked out of the nurses' station, nodding to Alexis and finishing up a conversation that she was apparently having with Alexis while I was walking to the nurses' station. Jude walked out of the office saying "Crazy, crazy."
That was not the first time that Alexis had viciously, verbally abused me, while Jude was the nurse working with her for an evening shift. Of course, if I had ever screamed at a staffperson the way that Alexis screamed at me on April 15, 2015, I would have been told that I had to calm down and either the police and paramedics would have been called or I would have been threatened with them being called.
I had had several conversations with Jude since I had gotten to the crisis unit at the beginning of December of 2014. Throughout most of my stay at the crisis unit, she spoke to me as if she understood that the mental health care system is abusive to patients. I don't know why I still thought that I could trust her by April 15, 2015. I went to the med room with her. We were sitting and talking quietly after I had taken the pills that I took each night while I was there. The phone in the med room rang. Jude answered it. I could hear Alexis say "Is Lena killing you in there?" I said to Jude "I can hear her." Jude got off the phone and asked me what I had heard. I told her. She smiled in an embarrassed way. It seemed to me to be bad that Alexis, who had not only enabled Richard to harass me repeatedly throughout her shift but who also had screamed at me in front of everyone and therefore had let everyone know that I would be punished if I objected to being harassed, was even pursuing the issue into my private conversation with Jude. I had had to try to control my temper while Alexis was screaming at me. This last intrusion was too much. I told Jude "People take one look at me and think they can push me around. They don't realize that when they push me too far, I'm going to punch them right in the f---ing face."
My guess is that Jude reported what I had said about punching people in the face and entirely omitted any mention of what had provoked me on June 15, 2015. She was setting me up to be forcibly removed from the unit when I couldn't take the harassment any more.
It is the responsibility of people who work in mental health care not to add to the distress of their patients.
-Nobody from the Office of Investigations at the Department of Mental Health ever responded to any of my emails.
_________________________________________________________________________________
The evening and night of April 8th were much
better than the night before. There were
a few coughs, but the April 7th intervention by Sarah and Brittney seemed to
have gotten through to everyone. There were
even a couple of male patients who had just gotten to the unit a couple of days
before the intervention happened, who had witnessed my attempt to explain what
my concerns and requests were to all the patients who were in the
livingroom/kitchen on April 7th and who said that they thought I did
get bullied; they were nice. They were
3-5 day crisis patients and left the unit a few days later.
On the morning of April 9th, I asked Maryanne if she
had read the emails to Kate Smith which I had printed and asked to be put in my
chart. She said that she hadn’t. I asked (her) to read them.
Kate Smith was not working at the unit from 04/04/15 –
04/13/15. I think that she was probably
on vacation.
Soon after I asked her (Maryanne) to read the emails, she
said that she needed to speak with me.
First, she asked me to wait in the livingroom until she had time to
speak with me. While I was waiting, she
walked into the livingroom area, behind the couches. When she walked back toward the nurses’
station, she coughed loudly when she was near me, in front of all the patients
who were also in the livingroom.
When she finally brought me into the nurses’ station to
speak with me, she told me that I had to move out of my room and into what’s
called “the swing bed.” She told me that
the decision was “from upstairs” and was something that she was told to do.
The swing bed is a bed that is in the small hallway that
connects the two larger hallways of the unit.
It is exposed to everyone who walks through that hallway, which people
do all the time. There is nowhere to put
your things except on the bed if you’re not in the bed, or around the bed if
you are in it. Being poor means that
almost everything that you have would be difficult to replace. You can keep a few things in the nurses’
station to try to prevent them from being stolen; that’s helpful, but it also
means that you have to ask the staff every time that you need what they’re guarding. The swing bed hallway has no privacy. It is also where the patient phone is, so
patients who need to use the phone will be sitting on what is your bed at night
and anyone’s couch during the day. The
lights in the larger hallways on either side of the swing bed hallway are never
off, and a staffperson walks through the swing bed area every half-hour at
night to do checks on all the patients in their rooms.
When Maryanne told me, on April 9th, that I had
to leave my room and stay in the swing bed, and that it wasn’t her decision to
move me but was a decision that was told to her to tell me “from upstairs,” I
left the unit to try to find someone “upstairs” who could stop me from being
thrown out of my room and forced to stay in the swing bed.
I went to the lobby and followed the labels on the elevator
buttons to try to go to where Kristen, the person who had interviewed me for
CBFS, would be. She was the only person
whom I could think of who was “upstairs.”
When I found her office, and she saw me, she immediately
coughed. I told her that I had an
emergency and asked if I could talk to her.
She said that she had something else that she had to deal with
first. I said that I would wait.
She went into the office next to hers to talk to other
people, and she shut the door. I waited
in the hallway for several minutes.
Maryanne had told me that I had to move out of the room immediately, and
I knew that I couldn’t wait all afternoon to speak to someone for help.
I knocked on the door of the office where Kristen was
meeting with a couple of people. She answered the door; I apologized for
interrupting and said “I really have an emergency, and I know that you’re busy;
is there someone else that I could talk to?”
She said that I might be able to talk to Pam Weissman, the supervisor
for the crisis unit. Pam Weissman may be
the unit supervisor; however, she is almost never at the unit.
Kristen told me to wait in the waiting area. I did that for several minutes. Then I went back into the hallway where I had
found Kristen’s office. Farther along
that hallway, there was a young woman sitting at a desk; as soon as she saw me,
she put her face in the crook of her elbow and coughed loudly.
I went to her desk and asked if I could speak with Pam
Weissman. The desk turned out to be one
of a group of desks, and Pam Weissman was sitting at one of the other desks,
talking to Kristen. I gave Ms, Weissman
print-outs of the April 7th, 2015 emails that I had sent to Kate
Smith and that I had put in my chart on April 8th and asked Maryanne
to read on April 9th. Ms.
Weissman took the emails and then told me that she had “three things ahead” of
me to deal with and that she would talk to me as soon as she could. Her tone of voice was very condescending and
implied that I was being a difficult and unreasonable patient.
I went to the waiting room and waited. While I was there, an older woman whom I
didn’t know walked into the waiting room, deposited the person that she had
brought with her in the waiting room, and then coughed loudly when she turned
and walked away. I said “Don’t do that
again”; she didn’t turn around, just kept walking down the hallway and coughing
just as loudly.
When Ms. Weissman got me from the waiting room, she brought
me into her office and said that she hadn’t had time to read the emails that I had
given her. I said that I would wait
until she had read them. I sat in one of
the chairs in her office while she read them.
After she had read the emails, she told me that Maryanne
having read the emails that morning had nothing to do with my being made to
leave my room. Ms. Weissman said “I know
that will be difficult for you to believe,” which it was. Ms. Weissman then said “It seems like the
other patients got upset when you tried to talk to them.” She was trying to accuse me of having started
trouble at the unit, which I hadn’t done at all. I realized that the conversation was not a
productive one. I said “I would like my
old room back when the person to whom it’s being given leaves,” and I left her
office.
I took everything out of the bureaus in my room and put it
into garbage bags. I had the room
cleared out by the time that the next shift started at the unit. Maryanne had left when I went to the office
and told all the staff in the office to read the emails in my chart and to know
that I was made to leave my room after Maryanne had read the emails.
Soon after that, I was sitting on the swing bed with my
garbage bags of my things. Deva walked
over to me and said that she had called someone to try to help me stay in my
room. She was successful; I did not lose
my room that night. However, I was sure
that the issue wasn’t over, and I didn’t even take most of my things out of the
bags or put them away.
Exactly a week after the first attempt to take my room from
me, this past Wednesday, on April 15th, 2015, the day after I had
written Kate Smith an email telling her that it didn’t seem to me that Richard
was ever going to leave me alone until he was made to leave me alone, Ms. Smith
told me that I had to move out of my room and into the double, female room that
is right next to Richard’s room. She told me that I had to do this because
there was going to be a new admission of a male patient who needed special
supervision and who would be moved into Richard’s room, which is a single room
and the closest room on the unit to the nurses’ station.
When I tried to question what was happening, I didn’t even
get through a sentence before Ms. Smith was screaming at me in front of her
staff and Angelina, my mobile case manager, was rubbing her hand all over her
nose from a few feet away from me.
I’m sure that Ms. Smith coughed at me from her office when I
was moving my things from my old room.
What Ms. Smith told me about why I had to move from my old
room was a total lie. She gave my old room to the new, male patient, even
though my old room is in the next hallway and not visible from the nurses’
station. Richard was never moved from
his room. There have been several
vacancies, including my room again and other single rooms, in the almost-a-week
since I lost my old room. My old room
was immediately given to another new male admission when the first patient to
whom it was given left, and the other single rooms that were made vacant were
immediately given to new admissions.
My first roommate was a nice woman. However, she was a 3-5 day crisis patient and
has left and it’s only a matter of time until I get a roommate who will cough
at me all night. One thing I can’t be
without, considering all of the stress is in my life, is sleep.
Yesterday, I told Maryanne what Ms. Smith had said was the
reason that I had to leave my old room.
(I’m not writing the last names of people if I don’t know what the last
names are.) It was the first time that
Maryanne had heard anything about my having to be moved from my room so that
Richard’s room could be given to a new, male patient who needed special
supervision by staff. That’s probably
because everything that Ms. Smith told me about why I had to move from my old
room was a lie; maybe Ms. Smith was even initially planning to give my old
room, which I like the most of all the rooms at the unit, to Richard.
I was in that room for a long time, and I wouldn’t mind
letting someone else have it if I hadn’t had to move into one of the two worst
rooms on the unit and if the process of my being moved weren’t dishonest and
vindictive. Richard’s room and the
double room next to it where I was moved, are in the most highly trafficked,
loudest area of any of the rooms on the unit.
Not only are they nearest to the livingroom/kitchen area that has other
patients in it from early in the morning to at least 11 at night, my room is the closest to the
door that leads out of the unit to the smoking area outside. That door is opening and slamming shut from
at 6:30 a.m. or earlier until 10:00 at night, which is the latest that people
can smoke. I don’t smoke, and there is
no advantage to me to be in the room closest to that door at any hour.
Even if I were to be accepted by a landlord tomorrow, it
would be weeks before I could leave the unit for an apartment. The apartment would then have to pass an
inspection scheduled and conducted by the Metropolitan Boston Housing
Partnership. Then MBHP would schedule a
day for me to sign the lease. I would
have to coordinate the moving of the things I have in storage with
HomeStart. It’s a process that involves
other people and which I don’t control.
For me to have to be in this double room, where I can never
be away from the sound of the television and the voices of other patients from
early in the morning to late at night, and for me to have to deal with
adjusting to each new roommate that I am given, in this unit where I have had
to fight since I got here to be respected and to have my rights respected, is
going to be additionally and unnecessarily stressful. I am not antisocial. However, it’s too much.
Whatever anyone who works at Quincy Mental Health Center has
tried to say about how my being forced out of my old room wasn’t a punishment,
I don’t believe it and I don’t think anybody else does, either. The harassment of me immediately got worse
when I was moved into this room. Most of
the staffpeople who had started to be so supportive and helpful in the weeks
before the first attempt to take my old room were scared by that attempt, and
were definitely scared when I was finally moved from my old room to the new
one. This past Friday night, when I got
to the unit, Lily, the evening nurse, told me that she was told that I was no
longer allowed to take my meds in the med room that is in the far hallway of
the unit, and that I have to take meds in the nurses’ station, in front of
everyone who happens to be in the nurses’ station when I do that. The med room has privacy, and it’s where I
have often talked with the evening nurses after taking meds for the past
months. Those private talks helped me to
build what I could of a support system in this temporary living situation,
which someone who has the power to put a stop to those talks realized.
The harassment of me by patients got so bad that, on
Saturday afternoon, I told the staff that I was going for a walk. I went into Boston and stayed there for
several hours.
It was about 8:00 p.m. when I called the unit. I didn’t want to go back. I had thought about going to an Emergency
Room, saying that I was suicidal and asking to be admitted either to a mental
hospital or to another crisis unit until something could be done about the
terrible situation at Quincy Mental Health Center. I am often sad about how difficult my life
is, even without terrible problems where I live, and what had happened at the
unit had made me feel a lot worse. I had
decided to go back to the unit that night and called the nurses’ station to say
that I knew it was getting near the curfew and that I would be there as soon as
I could be.
The evening nurse on Saturday was Lily, who was particularly
supportive in the weeks before I lost my old room. She told me that she had told Ms. Smith that
I had shown her, Lily, a video of a few seconds of time. The video doesn’t show faces; I filmed it
while standing in the doorway of the nurses’ station at the unit this past
Wednesday night, hours after I had lost my old room. Richard and another, male patient who has since
left were harassing me a lot that night.
I had gone to the nurses’ station three times in maybe 20 minutes to ask
that the harassment be stopped. The
third time that I went to the nurses’ station, Alexis, the staffperson whom I
had asked for help because the nurse, Jude, was on the phone, said that she had
just spoken to Richard. I said “He just
did it again.” That is something that he
does a lot; one of his favorite times to harass me is right after a staffperson
has told him not to harass me.
Instead of having another, more serious talk with Richard,
Alexis started screaming at me. She
screamed “What do you want me to f---ing do, tell people to never f---ing
cough? There’s nothing I can f---ing do! You have to drop this s---! Get out of my f---ing office!”
I stood there in the doorway, silent while she screamed at
me in front of another patient who was in the nurses’ station, Jude, the nurse,
who did nothing to stop Alexis’s verbal abuse, and everyone who was in the
livingroom/kitchen which is right next to the nurses’ station, including
Richard, who was ecstatic.
I had not raised my voice or been rude to Alexis. She began screaming at me with no provocation
at all.
While she was screaming at me, I took out my cell phone and
started to record her tirade. I was able
to record the last part of it, when she was telling me “This is crazy, get out
of my office, THANK YOU (sarcastic)” and slammed the door in my face.
Alexis had already gotten another job; this past Wednesday
was her last night at the unit. She
probably thought that she had nothing to lose by screaming at me the way that
she did. It wasn’t the first time that
she had been verbally abusive to me, but she hadn’t been that way for a while
before I lost my old room.
It is getting late and I have to leave this report where it
is for now. As I write these sentences,
a female patient who got to the unit a few days ago is coughing loudly from the
livingroom. Deva, the evening nurse, has
already spoken to her tonight about trying to be more considerate with her
coughing.
I am concerned that I will be made to leave the unit
immediately because of the video that I filmed of Alexis screaming at me. Months ago, when I was a 3-5 day patient and
had not yet gotten a respite bed, I filmed a couple of videos of the dirty
walls in an empty, patient room. The
walls of patient rooms are dirty in almost every psychiatric facility. It’s because mental patients are stigmatized
and even the places that are supposed to care about them tend to be negligent
about hygiene for those patients. I was tired
of it, and I published the videos online.
They did not show anything except the walls of that room, and there was
no sound in them except for my talking.
Someone who is probably an anonymous, online stalker that I
have had for almost two years contacted the health center and said that I had
published videos of the unit online. The
police have told the stalker to stop contacting me directly; after he was told
that by the police several times, he did stop contacting me. However, he might not have stopped calling
places where I live or where I often am to tell them whatever horrible thing he
can think of.
Before I got the respite bed, Ms. Smith said that I could
not film anything at the unit. I obeyed
that restriction. However, when Alexis
started screaming at me this past Wednesday night, I thought “I have had
enough. What do I have to lose? Someone who can stop this has to have proof
of how I’m being treated.”
This afternoon, I tried several times to send a copy of the
video to (the contact person at the Office of Investigations), who graciously
talked with me when I went to the Lindemann Center and asked the security guard
if I could speak with someone at the Office of Investigations. I don’t think I was able to send the video;
my email keeps saying “Delivery Failure.”
I have it, though, and can show it to anyone at the Office of
Investigations in person.
When I got to the unit tonight, I was given forms for
Vinfen, which suggests that perhaps the many emails that I sent to support
people outside the Quincy Mental Health Center about my situation, including
the ones in which I was screeching “I said I’d sign up for team services and
they never got back to me, and now Ms. Smith (yesterday) told me that I have to
leave the unit by May 18th” might have had a positive effect.
I have to stop writing for now. I will try to finish this report
tomorrow. I can hear a new, male patient
snorting outside my room; he has done that several times tonight.
____________________________________________
June 27, 2015
To be continued.
Copyright L. Kochman, June 27, 2015 @ 1:22 p.m./edited @ 1:34 p.m.
