People Don’t Recover So Spectacularly from Criminal Psychiatry (Actual Violations of the State Mental Health Code): Fallout (Part I).
By Gina Fournier
People Don’t Recover So Spectacularly from Criminal Psychiatry was published on the Mad in America website. It summarizes the first part of my story: setup and suicide swatting by my employer, police abduction from home and the week I was held illegally by the Catholics of my youth, in a criminal mental ward, at a Catholic hospital, in Livonia, Michigan. The hospital was built by the old-world nuns who ran St. Michael’s grade school and defunct Ladywood High School, which I attended. People Don’t Recover So Spectacularly from Criminal Psychiatry (Actual Violations of the Mental Health Code): Fallout (Parts I-VII) cover the retaliation and negative fallout I have been forced to endure in lieu of equal protection for criminal psychiatry, including jail time. Thank you for reading.
The federal government has no idea how many Americans are involuntarily committed to a psychiatric ward each year because no statistics are gathered. There is no federal mental health code and there are no federal psychiatric wards, like there are federal laws, federal prisons and federal tallies of crimes.
Hence, the United States also does not have any idea of the number of Americans who may feel they were abused at a psychiatric hospital in any of the fifty states, which have the unchecked power of jailing citizens, with no set release date. It’s worth noting that The World Health Organization considers involuntary detainment to be torture and a human rights violation.
I agree. I’ve come to the belief that mind rape is worse than sexual rape (short of murder), for one thing, because recognition of psychiatric crime is decades behind recognition for sexual crime. Women recover from sexual rape to become lawyer and governor. But what happens to people who feel harmed by psychiatry, whether through violation of state law or violation not recognized by law?
Criminal psychiatry needs brand name familiarity and its victims, including me, deserve the recognition and justice we lack. Criminal psychiatry is not “forensic psychiatry,” like the name of the state hospital in Saline, Michigan, for the detention of those deemed criminally insane by psychiatrists and courts. The term I’ve been using, “criminal psychiatry,” refers to doctors and hospitals committing violations of the state mental health code — in my case, criminal violations, in Michigan, protected by state government, under Republicans and Democrats, since 2013.
I’ve yet to encounter a story like my own. I did not seek psychiatry, but it still destroyed my life.
~*~
Maliciously, on February 22, 2013, I was suicide swatted by my former employer, Land of Motown Community College (a pseudonym), on a day I said on Facebook I was trying to “save my life” from the school’s ongoing psychological attack.
The school had decided it needed to silence my views on the reading crisis (too many students learn to graduate without doing it), the poor performance of the school’s remedial English program, and teacher vs. teacher bullying over the creation of annual course schedule. A psychological attack, as if designed by Vladimir Putin, had been launched nearly a year before, on April 13, 2012. After seven years on the job, to my face, I was accused of being suddenly crazy dangerous and potential school shooter material, based on pure fabrication only, by an HR lawyer. I was hounded with forced hack shrinks. A progressively aggressive battery-fire of official letters first falsely accusing me of being suddenly crazy dangerous, then a bad teacher. I was removed from the classroom with police escort and put on Family Medical Leave against my wishes. My pay was stopped, but I was not fired. I was held in limbo as the school waited for me to crack.
~*~
On February 22, 2013, in the St. Mary Merciless emergency room, had I been allowed phone calls, as required by state law, I could have called my lawyer to corroborate my story. However, in violation of state law, I was not allowed phone calls. That’s criminal psychiatry.
I never met and was not ever evaluated by the white male emergency room doctor who away signed away my life as if he had evaluated me, and thus he committed perjury. That’s criminal psychiatry.
I was shackled, drugged, knocked out and transferred from the emergency room to the psych ward unconscious, without evaluation, by a first-year intern, who did not sign the required clinical certificate submitted to Wayne County. That’s criminal psychiatry.
Even after the hospital recognized I was not suicidal, I was kept, in total for a week, unnecessarily, to essentially bilk my “Cadillac” teacher’s insurance. That’s criminal psychiatry.
Unlike some victims of sexual abuse and rape, because I was 48 years old when this series of crimes happened, I have been telling my story as a psychiatric survivor since Day One, but I have not been acknowledged, or released from my cage. Equal protection has been denied by the state of Michigan. That’s criminal psychiatry by God in the United States of America, allowed by my government to grow into mental torture. And it’s not ok.
In your God, I do not trust. Jesus, the poor sot, in today’s terms, was the first DSM schizophrenic with delusions of being god. People do not rise from the dead and ascend to heaven, thirty-three years after virgin birth. The state of Michigan has no right to let criminal Catholics, who believe in what they call faith, but what I consider to be delusional beliefs, to psychiatrically mislabel me “delusional” (spelled incorrectly).
This feminist female was never crazy dangerous or in need of removal from society.
~*~
Like most Americans, my liberal-leaning, Ann Arbor lawyer did not understand the terrain of psychiatry.
In 2012, almost a year prior to suicide swatting by Land of Motown Community College, he counselled me to attend hack shrink assessments, as the school requested, based on its empty claims that I was suddenly severely mentally ill and dangerous. Yes, my sick husband needed the health insurance provided by my job, so there was some merit to keeping my employer happy, but walking into a psychological trap was still a huge mistake.
My lawyer, perhaps as a man, unfamiliar firsthand with the reality of misogyny in America, did not realize that no matter what I said, the school’s mercenary doctors, The Wolf and The Terminator, would tear me apart and use the DSM against me, as they were hired to do.
Just ask the ghost of Elizabeth Packard. Within the history of psychiatry and psychiatric lock up in the United States, it has been too easy for a husband to lock up his wife in an asylum, should he no longer want her around, or find her views uncomfortable.
Please note: due to pervasive sexism, it has never been easy for a wife to lock up her husband, say due to physical or emotional abuse.
The plan may have been ad hoc, but Land of Motown Community College wore me down, then set me up for a life sentence with psychiatric stain and stigma, and my lawyer helped. My sick husband died anyway because even with medical insurance, quality care is not guaranteed.
~*~
In 2013 and 2014, after illegal detainment and loss of my liberty, I sought new legal counsel.
Repeatedly, I was told my first civil rights lawyer screwed up my case. No other lawyer wanted to touch a tainted case. When Land of Motown Community College launched its attack, my first lawyer should have countered the empty accusations hurled against me more strongly. I was told by other law firms what I’d already figured out, that I never should have been counselled to attend mercenary hack shrink appointments.
I found out that medical malpractice, in effect, does not exist for average people in Michigan, due to financial disincentives for lawyers, put in place by conservative lawmakers and in held in place by conservative courts.
And the biggie: civil protections for victims of psychiatric crime are almost nonexistent. Once locked up, a person loses their autonomy and is likely discredited forever.
Calling it a useless gesture, my lawyer had filed a federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) claim three months before suicide swatting. My claim explained that I did not have a mental illness. Instead, the school was retaliating, which is not the usual means of invoking the Americans with Disability Act.
The EEOC did not take action on my behalf. (It usually doesn’t.) The EEOC did open the door for a court case, but I could not find replacement legal representation.
Recently, I was informed by the EEOC that Land of Motown Community College never shared any documentation to support its defamatory claims against me.
~*~
Unlike many survivors of sexual abuse, I began telling my story immediately. However, without acknowledgement for criminal psychiatry and justice for violations of the mental health code, things have only gotten worse for me.
As planned, a month after I talked my way out of St. Mary Merciless human trafficking mental ward, I was forced to quit my tenured 100K a year teaching job at Land of Motown Community College. I wasn’t being paid and due process was being strung out. I handed them what they wanted, my resignation (it’s difficult to fire a union teacher), but one can’t remain, on paper, employed with an employer willing to resort to psychologically abuse and criminal activity, in order to silence.
After psychiatric detention, I was ordered to appear at a due process hearing in the same building with my suicide swatter and campus police headquarters. I had separated from my lawyer and did not feel safe attending the meeting.
Maybe I should have simply not shown up for the due process meeting and forced the school to finally fire me (which would have improved my legal standing), but nothing causes madness like involuntary and unnecessary time in an insane asylum.
Actually, I use the term looney bin, spelled like the Warner Bros cartoons, but don’t take offense. In my case, the wardens were looney.
~*~
I needed to stay in the area and settle my newly deceased husband’s estate, a huge job, though his estate was tattered and sinking middle class.
Meanwhile, I could find no other work. Box store managers did not want to hire a former college English teacher, with more education, who mysteriously left a well-paying lifetime position.
My finances drained. I lost much needed transportation.
Eventually, all people in my former life left my side, as I continued fighting to “save my life,” while others wanted me to move on. Those around me and onlookers seemed to want me to simply forget about criminal psychiatry.
~*~
My full story does not fit comfortably into any short form. People can’t handle my truth because telling my true story makes me sound crazy, as designed.
In September 2015, two and half years after illegal and retaliatory psychiatric detainment, I could see I was losing my battle to “save my life.” But what had happened to me mattered. To remain vocal and promote my story, to continue fighting for myself, peacefully, I installed a civil rights protest.
In desperation to end mental anguish, I spray-painted the metaphor “Jesus raped me” on the exterior of my home in Garden City, Michigan, which was in foreclosure due the poverty that accompanied criminal psychiatry.
The phrase grew out of my life experience raised and violated by Livonia Catholics, with inspiration from crucifix scene in The Exorcist, in which the devil in Linda Blair rapes the 12-year-old with the most sacred image in Christianity. Both the very popular book, by William Peter Blatty, and movie, directed by William Friedkin, considered the scene to be masturbation, but I disagree with that label. Young girls coming into their sexuality don’t seek pleasure with sharp objects that make them bleed.
My installation was covered by local, state and local affiliates of national news, but, no big surprise, not in a positive fashion.
No press interested in covering the salacious angle — not the local Hometown newspapers, The Detroit Free Press, the CBS local affiliate, MLive or Fox News Detroit — was willing to conduct a sober sit-down interview and report outright my claim that I never met the white male doctor who signed the clinical certificate to lock me up at St. Mary Merciless. Through their reactionary, conservative coverage, Hometown newspapers, now owned by USA Today, protected the Catholic Church, not me. Other press followed suit through reprints and spineless reporting.
To further explain my metaphor and expand my message, I removed the doors from the house’s interior and created more signs, which I displayed on the front lawn. “Got Civil Rights?” “This Could Happen to You!” The state AG at the time was Republican Bill Schuette. “Bill Schuette, Bust Pope?” Pope Francis had left Vatican City and was visiting the United States. “Investigate Livonia Catholics,” I pleaded.
When the crew for Fox News Detroit showed up, I told them I did not want to appear on camera. I wasn’t wearing make-up or professional clothing, I wasn’t prepared for an interview, and I was ill-composed. I was caught up in mirth, which escapes me now, and laughing strenuously at the next-door neighbors having a fit over my civil rights display. The family feud with the neighbors pre-dated my dead husband’s birth, almost 60 years prior.
Purposely filing a sexist hatchet job, Fox News Detroit filmed me, despite my wishes not be filmed, and aired the footage. Their newscasts reputed that I was mentally ill and that the local Garden City Police were helping me find mental health resources, neither of which were correct. Gawkers followed me on Facebook because of this new coverage, which was apparently broadcast beyond the metro Detroit area.