Involuntary Treatment

[Michel]

Has anyone else been subjected to a very long period of involuntary treatment for PTSD? I have been for nearly three years. It's killing me to have for so long no freedom, no rights... I feel like I am the only one this has ever happened to and can't understand why I am treated so differently from everyone else.

When this started, I was in deep denial about my relationship with my husband and about his psychological abuse and menacing behavior. Maybe there were "brainwashing" issues. I was unable to take care of myself and possibly of my son (everyone says my son has not been hurt but I feel uncertain, worried). But I no longer am "incompetent" and can't see why, even now, I do not get to make decisions about my treatment, about my life. While I am kept in this unchosen, extensive, exhausting treatment, I cannot put my life back together and try to be a helpful part of my son's life - he lives with his father, who is the person who caused my trauma. Everyone who knows me knows this, but no one will help me move my son away from his father. I have talked to many therapists and doctors, called the state's Children's Services, talked to friends... My teenage son says his father doesn't treat him the way he treated me and he wants to stay where he is, with his friends, in a familiar environment...

The treatment I am forced to undergo and the barriers to living it creates causes me more pain than the PTSD.

I would love to hear from anyone with similar experience.

 

[AdamAnt]

Wow, Im sorry to hear you're going through that. I can't imagine how frustrated you must be. Can you say what lead up to you being so confined?

 

[Michel]

AdamAnt, I am so grateful to you for replying to this post. That's mostly what I'm writing to say. Your question is a very good one and a very difficult one for me to answer. I have never heard of anyone else being subject to involuntary treatment in circumstances anything like mine, or anyone for as long as I have been, and I still do not believe I know all of the reasons why I am treated so differently.

There was no specific event that led up to the loss of my rights to make decisions about psychiatric treatment. I have never been a "danger to myself or others." I do think that, when this began, I was most of the time in a dissociated state. Most relevant, I think, my son had gone to live with his father a couple of years before, after having lived with me for the four years his father and I had already been apart. I was unable to see my husband as someone who should not be raising a child. (My son, I should note here, is, as far as I know, doing beautifully apart from not getting in school the grades he is capable of. But he has a great deal of outside support.) At the time I thought his going to his father's would be best for my son. I had kept him away from his father for so long, people said a boy needed to be with his dad at his age, he would be returning to an excellent school near his dad, my husband said I was failing my son educationally, and I, already having problems with memory, concentration, and social life, I now know because of my experiences with my husband, believed I was failing my son. But I was unable to bring to bear on my "decision-making" that my son's father is a vicious man. I think now that my husband was, either through illness or intention, an exhibitor of multiple personalities. He would "switch" into a vicious psychopath and I would dissociate. Then he would be nice and I would "compartmentalize" so that all I really saw was the good part and "some anger problems," which were "not that bad." In any case, I don't really remember feeling like I had a decision to make. My husband had made the decision. But part of me felt the enormous problem that my poor little son was living with my husband and without me to oversee things. And I suppose I fell apart or disconnected from life or something - isolated myself except for work, which I did probably very badly and in a daze. Some have said I was the way members of cults become - like zombies. But it was torturing me that my son was with his father and I was helpless to do anything about it.

This helpless feeling was probably heightened by the fact that the one time during my husband's assaults that I dissociated in a way that felt like "leaving" the situation altogether (in such a way that a part of me split off and floated out the window) happened when my son was home and I could hear him in the hallway and could hear the anxiety in his voice over his father's violence but I could not get by my husband to go to him and comfort him.

But when the treatment started I had Stockholm's syndrome as well and was mostly terrified that my husband would get in trouble because I thought someone had the "false belief" that he had been hurting me... Then I became afraid my son was being exposed to his anger and tried to get my son back but nothing worked. I still try to convince my son to come away from his father... But now, of course, I am not really in a position to provide much of a life for him and because I am "in treatment" no one takes very seriously anything I say anyway.

I'm sorry that's such a jumble of an answer...This has been going on for so long and is by now too complicated to describe briefly...

But thank you for your sympathy. Thank you.

 

[catjudo]

I'm unclear, are you be forced to receive treatment or are you being confined such as in a psych hospital or someplace similar?

 

[Michel]

I am forced to live in a "care home" and forced to undergo very prolonged extensive exposure therapy, drama therapy, PTSD education... Excluding the education, these are so incessantly intensely painful I can do nothing else. I am not allowed a "vacation" from treatment. It is torture, truly. It may have helped me recover from my husband's abuse, but I can't imagine ever recovering from this. I also have a therapist and MD.

 

[catjudo]

If you do not believe this is the best course for you and you're not permitted to make your own health care decisions, who is making your care decisions? Is this "care home" a locked facility? If not (as it doesn't sound that way, but perhaps the name is deceiving) what is to stop you from leaving? What would be the consequences if you were to leave this place?

 

[Michel]

There is a complex story here, which I have described some in earlier posts. Before this started, I worked in the medical field. I can assure you that I am aware of my "rights." I can also assure you that I have absolutely no choice in the matter of my treatment and that I am not free to leave it. I have tried everything a person might try to assert my rights. It turns out I don't have any.

I think it is often just too difficult for people to believe that this is possible in the US. I would have thought so myself. It is not impossible; it is just rare.

I'm afraid I can't say very much more without giving up on anonymity.

 

[AdamAnt]

Once I had a friend who was an alcoholic. He got religion and went cold turkey from alcohol...within a week he was hallucinating, and when I took him to detox, they ended up sending him somewhere else for treatment. About a month later, they contacted ME about whether to release him or not. Scarey. Of course I said yes, but I wonder what would have happened if I'd said no. He obviously couldn't check himself out. I hope this isn't your situation.