People Don’t Recover So Spectacularly from Criminal Psychiatry (Actual Violations of the State Mental Health Code): Fallout (Part IV)
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.
It was clear the locals wanted me, the crazy crying lady, gone, and they were willing to try a variety of measures to get rid of me.
I needed help, but not the help given. I needed an end to mental torture and justice for criminal psychiatry, which had been denied disingenuously by the state Republican AG. I needed the record set straight: I never was evaluated by the white male doctor who, on paper, locked me up. I had been set up by my employer to silence me, when I was not suicidal. The Livonia police botched a bogus welfare check request, which was actually a suicide swatting call to dispatch.
I needed my real story to come out. I still do.
~*~
Despite widespread particularly rural poverty in the area, the multi-county health department, District #10, came down hard on me. They condemned the cabin, concurrent with the retaliatory PPO granted against me. The PPO was initiated by an underling cop, Lying cop #2, serving under my suicide swatter cop, Lying cop #1, both employed by Land of Motown Community College.
The District #10 sanitation officer was accompanied by county sheriffs. He taped a yellow sign on the door, which pronounced, “condemned.” I could be arrested for living on the property, according to county statutes.
After the authorities left, I immediately removed the sign. I did not need a visual reminder. I too well knew that my life had been transformed into a dangerous place to be.
Risking jail time, of course I stayed in the cabin because I had nowhere else to go.
~*~
It was in my own interest to stay on top of circumstances and maintain sanitation best I could.
To flush the toilet, minus working plumbing, I used what I called the “gravity flush.” A neighbor gave me a bunch of industrial white buckets, which I filled with another neighbor’s winterized well-water. I carried the buckets back and forth from the cabin to the neighbor’s well, uphill.
I fought the order to condemn the cabin. At a hearing in the Mecosta County Building, where I also fought the taxwoman each year, I was greatly outnumbered by country administrators. I was told my pictures of clean plumbing could have been taken at another house, despite the fact that the home in my pictures matched the picture taken by the sanitation officer.
The sanitation officer had taken one picture of feces inside the toilet before I poured water down the toilet to flush it. He did not take any pictures of the many buckets of water waiting ready. There was nothing unsanitary in the picture he took.
The sanitation officer, last name Earnest, was married to the county taxwoman, last name Earnest, who ran for office as a Republican.
Sanitarian, Randy Earnest, first contacted me with his business card while his wife, Sherry Earnest, was in court with me fighting an extension on my back unpaid property taxes, which was denied.
It was February 22, 2017, the fourth anniversary of illegal looney bin lock up.
~*~
Of course, the lying cops were never really afraid of me at all.
In mid-August 2017, a week or so before I was arrested for violating the PPO against the Land of Motown Community College cop I had not stalked, the dirty cop and his lying wife taunted me from their driveway while I painted my civil rights protest signs at my driveway.
You killed your husband, you poisoned him!
The husband shouted, as the wife filmed. I didn’t have my camera on me. I had not poisoned my husband.
The pictures taken by the wife of me clearly standing in front of my own home, not in the couple’s driveway, turned up in my arrest report, which said I violated the PPO.
I had not contacted the couple and had stayed away from their property, just as I was ordered.
On Twitter, I had blown steam and referenced the lying cops through code names, on my own account, which was difficult to access around the lake. I needed to walk around the main road and try to piggyback wifi from a neighbor in order to maybe connect. I erased such posts usually, but forgot two. The lying cops had to seek me out to read my social media accounts, which they did. Likely they were directed by Land of Motown Community College, which admitted to following my social media accounts, beginning back in 2012.
~*~
I don’t know if I can ever find the words to explain the explosive cacophony of emotions that comes with my story.
But please understand, I would never risk seeking a therapist to blow steam.
Mental health so-called professionals have the power to misunderstand, misinterpret and take away your liberty, forever, so I’ve been forced to manage mental torture on my own.
~*~
I almost forgot. It’s so fucking painful.
Panic attack. This hell will never end. Crying in my home. Right now, as a write.
I was even suicide swatted on the morning of my arrest, August 25, 2017.
Just before noon, two MDHHS representatives and a Mecosta County Sherriff came to my house trying to rile me up.
Is there any other welfare recipient who was informed that her benefits were extended in person, in advance, with police escort? Most are notified through the mail, I presume.
Was the plan to either take me to the looney bin or arrest me?
I think the plan was to either take me back to a looney bin or arrest me.
Later that day, on a beautiful late August afternoon, after I cut the lawn of the half acre lot with a borrowed lawn mower, I was arrested.
I filmed both interludes that day. Otherwise, I might not even believe what has happened to me.
~*~
For the second time in my story, I was handcuffed, but this time as an alleged criminal perpetrator.
~*~
Michigan State Police took me to the Osceola County jail. I was put in a holding cell, booked and then transferred to the women’s dorm.
The woman’s dorm was sealed with a metal door and reinforced with cement block walls painted white/beige. Multiple bunk beds were aligned along the walls. In the middle of the rectangular room, metal tables with attached metal stools were bolted to the floor. The cell featured an open-air bathroom and shower.
My nightmare created by criminal psychiatry had sunk to another depth of hell.
By seven thirty pm, as I arrived, the other jailbirds were already in their bunks watching TV. Dazed and despondent, I headed for the back of the room, away from the television, but I could not escape the locked room or its glaring fluorescent lights. With my back up against the wall, I sunk to the floor, distraught.
I was soon pulled from the women’s dormitory and put in solitary confinement for crying. Another depth of hell, so soon? A female jail guard opened the door to the small private cell and threw in one of Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander novels. It was additionally upsetting to think I’d kept in solitary confinement long enough to read that very fat fiction book. Another depth of hell.
I was let out of solitary confinement that night and returned to the women’s dorm, where I stayed for a month, because I could not make bail, as the locals well knew.
~*~
As I made myself settle into life in jail, I sought a routine.
I got up early to do the cleaning duties jailbirds were supposed to share, so I could control the tv for a few minutes a day and catch the news. Otherwise, the jailbird who ran the place preferred reality tv cop shows and zombies, never Turner Classic Movies.
I watched the state AG who initiated retaliation up north, Bill Schuette, announce his run for governor while incarcerated. Trump had endorsed his campaign.
~*~
There is much I can say about being housed in a rural county jail for a month.
The most salient point for this narration is that jail as a detention center made more sense than the Catholic mental ward, though I belonged in neither. At the Osceola County jail, at least we got some fresh air and a view of the sky, during exercise jaunts in a human animal pen. Fresh air was withheld at St. Mary Merciless.
~*~
Two law firms served indigents. The other jailed birds, including repeat offenders, indicated that I had been assigned the weaker law firm of the two available.
The same judge who declined to view evidence for the PPO hearing was assigned to my felony stalking case.
My court appointed lawyer was a talker with an occasional nervous twitch in his eye, who at first said he’d get me out soon and have the charges dropped, no problem.
~*~
A few weeks into my time, my court appointed lawyer stopped talking my calls and changed his story. I needed to take a plea deal, he said.
I truly thought a plea deal meant, “I’m not guilty, but I can’t afford actual defense.”
I said I wanted to risk a court trial, but my court appointed lawyer effectively coerced me into a plea deal by refusing to prepare for a court trial.
~*~
Though I had not talked to my estranged Catholic mother since 2012, I asked mother for bail. I wrote her. I called her using the jail pay phone. My silent benefactor had put some funds in my jail account so I could buy a phone card.
My relationship with my mother was never good because she had internalized the sexism of the Catholic Church. When psychological attack struck, overwhelmed, I put my mother on hold, I thought temporarily.
Now an old woman in her 80s, my mother said she’d ask my brother, her only son, if she could give me bail money.
I wish I had never asked. Asking my mom to bail me out of jail reinvigorated our separate stands.
While wearing orange jail garb, holding the jail pay phone receiver to my ear, instead of “Yes, I will bail you out,” I heard my mother nag: “The family is Catholic!”
Mom choose to defend the criminal Catholic church who had violated me, not me.
When I explained what had happened to land me in jail, admittedly a long and difficult story to hear, in return mother admitted she had talked to my nemesis, the HR lawyer at Land of Motown Community College, who designed and executed the witchhunt, back in 2012. She said he told her I was messing with the lives of my co-workers. Apparently, she chose to believe him. My mom did not recognize the inappropriateness of her treating Land of Motown Community College as if I were an enrolled K-12 student and she were a parent of minor at a parent/teacher conference.
After offering my mother co-ownership of the cabin, she responded by talking about her separation and divorce from my father, back when I was thirteen, thirty-five years earlier. Like people talk about pets, and young girls naively pledge their lasting love, my mother protested, as if trapped in Hallmark movie. She thought my dad was her “forever” husband.
My brief and desperate hopes of a reunion in order to save my ass from jail were dashed. Earlier, when I needed him, my husband had freaked out and died, and now my mother was disturbed by Catholicism, toxic and no help. Talking to her again, from jail, added hurt to hurt.
The people deigned closest to me had actually gone mad, while I had been slapped with a false rap of insanity that had been allow to mushroom cloud.
~*~
When family doesn’t advocate, no one advocates.
~*~
Ironically, in jail, I attended bible study sessions, centered around reading Rick Warren book’s The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For? (The irony.)
I did so just to leave the women’s dormitory. The room where Bible studies convened once weekly for an hour featured a window that slid open a crack. Under the circumstances, seeing a glimpse of end of summer tree leaves, green and reassuring, made the objectionable Christian content worthwhile.
As well, in somewhat refreshed surroundings, I could feed my mind. I condemned anew the nonsense of Jesus as god believers falsely calling me crazy, though I kept my complete thoughts and my metaphor, Jesus raped me, to myself. The Bible ladies had given me a composition notebook and pencil on my birthday, which occurred in jail, unbeknownst to them. I greatly appreciated their gift. Paper and pencil are not free in jail. Nothing is.
To their discredit, the Bible ladies did not seem to know that one could be detained in jail only because one can’t afford bail before a trial or plea deal. The Bible ladies assumed we jailbirds had all done something very wrong and needed Jesus to redeem us, guilty without need of proof.
Unfortunately, only Baptists showed up to preach to inmates. If Muslim, Buddhists, Quakers, Jews, Sikhs and devil worshipers had volunteered to preach at the Osceola County jail, I would have welcomed all religions and anti-religions. I would have played along like the omnist narrator in The Life of Pi, just to move my body from one room to another.
A friend had loaned me a copy of The Life of Pi to read while I was held prisoner at St. Mary Merciless.
~*~
While in jail, I received word that I lost my appeal with the District #10 health department over my toilet.
Rubbing my nose in my loss, the unkind second MDDHS representative showed up to visit me in jail to report that she could not help me with my plumbing, if I remained incarcerated.
But she hadn’t been helping me with my plumbing at all.
~*~
After about three weeks, my court appointed lawyer talked up the plea deal and release with a leg monitor, as if they were positive things.
I was adamant there should be no leg monitor attached to my body. My body had endured too much trauma and violence due to unchecked criminal psychiatry: hand cuffed by police twice, shackled hand and foot by the first-year intern in emergency room at St. Mary Merciless, committed, then incarcerated because I asked for equal justice, thrown in solitary confinement, body searched in the Osceola County jail, all because I thought Roman numeral outlining was old school.
In front of jail video surveillance camera, I flashed a hand-written sign, If I’m tethered, I might finally crack! I was sure wearing a tether would break me.
As I was about to be released on a personal recognizance (PR) bond, I reaffirmed there should be no leg monitor, but my sleazy court appointed lawyer hemmed and hawed. After he split, I was informed that a leg monitor had been ordered, which is standard.
Somehow, I played on a jailer’s fatigue on a Friday afternoon (certainly not his sympathy) and got out of jail without a leg monitor, which I could not afford.
Tethered enough as it was, psychologically, I returned to the cabin where I could be jailed again for simply trying to be.