This DID Happen. It Happened To Me

Wasn't it caused by bread mold?

You're a talented writer. Have you considered investigative journalism? You'd be fantastic! Keep writing.

Send me the link that you like best.

Yes, I remember this! It was one of the first cases I reviewed when coming to terms with what happened to me. I read about it, then watched the film, and in doing so, healed that much more. But, my heart also broke in the same degree of measure for the family accused.

I became addicted to prescription opioids shortly afterwards. My way of trying to gain back control of the high functioning life I'd had prior to the psychiatric abuse I'd suffered, was to take more Rx pain medication so I'd be able to go to grad school, carry a full class load, work full time, have private clients on the side, train for marathons and mini-triathlons, and still have a robust social and romantic life, as well as volunteer. This is what I'd had before I'd been snatched by the Evil Doctors I'd been living life full tilt, and I'd be damned if I'd let Them take it away from me afterwards.

But, when, one day returning from a training run, I bent down to retrieve a heavy textbook on the bottom shelf, my back went "pop!", my boyfriend gave me 2 Vicodin every 2 hours instead of what I wanted to take, which was 1/2 every 6-8 hours. He'd not hear of it, and told me that taking it the way he was giving it to me was perfectly ok. It was only later that I'd learn that he was an alcoholic, from a family of addicts, and had no capacity to understand how to properly use any drug, prescribed or otherwise, alcohol included. So, I got hook, and good! And because of it, I never had to deal with the extreme pain of what had happened to me, nor did I graduate from grad school, only to drop out 2 months before completion. I lacked only one course, 3 credits of a 64 credit/3 year full time program. Addiction robbed me of that, an addiction created so I could live my prior life full tilt, the way I'd lived it before. I was an addict on the back of the psychiatric abuse.

Things have just gotten worse. The financial settlement that bought me my house didn't cure the pain. I continued to live the life of an addict, without drugs, and without any program of recovery for over 14 years. My health deteriorated with each passing year, and since there weren't any drugs in pill form, I became an alcoholic. I had my one and only blackout, woke up in the ER & walked my still sodden butt into AA. The steps are my only path out of the pain which has fueled my addiction since 1991. I've let these events destroy my life, and no amount of money can cure that or retrieve those years for me.

Mine is hopefully a cautionary tale, told with the intention of helping. Maybe it will, maybe it won't, but it needs to be known, it needs sunlight and air to heal. Darkness and damp no longer work.

I feel for you. Yet, I have compassion for the doctors, too- even the psychiatrist, M.D., who misdiagnosed me (but definitely NOT the psychologist, PhD, because she WAS in fact evil as she was out for power, and her motivation was to manipulate and hurt people). Many of those docs are addicts themselves, but aren't willing or even able to see their addiction. Freud abused cocaine. When I went to Hazelden, I paid 3k extra to be part of their super special elite "Health Care Professionals" treatment group, which was comprised of a bunch of us totally f'ed up doctors, nurses, mental health professionals and "healers" and was facilitated by the former physician to the Green Bay Packers who treated the team for substance abuse while in active addiction himself.

Self knowledge avails us nothing! As you also well know, being a pill head like me.

These docs who misdiagnosed us are addicts, alcoholics, and humans. When they forget their humanity or cannot see it, that's when they put their patients, those humans in their care, in mortal and psychic danger. When they invest themselves in their perspective to the exclusion of all others, damage is almost certain. When they must be right, when they are rigid, when they place themselves above anyone else, even their "underlings" like nurses, psych techs and psychologists, anyone with less education and training than they, then they do more harm than good. Even if these docs defend themselves with the argument that it is systemic, that it's not their fault nor their personal responsibility because "that's just the way things are" and "the system is set up that way" or other such copouts, then I refer them all to Stanley Milgram and his experiments from post WWII which researched the level of compliance those "in charge" embrace in the name of conformity and the surrendering of personal power to the system at large. This is how people die. This is how worlds are destroyed.

You'd think we'd have learned our lessons, but apparently not. And I always felt that my experiences in this regard feel eerily similar to those of concentration camp survivors.