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| Lomond Ward - my plan for internal redesign sent 17Oct12 to Management |
My first experience of this ward was in 1995 when I took my oldest son in there, sent by our Cupar Doctor/GP. My son was in a "psychosis" and needed help. No other option but psychiatry. I was broken-hearted when my son phoned me at Discovery Christian Camps (Dundee), out at Glenshee, and I realised what he would have to go through, because I'd been through it myself, twice, in 1978, 1984, as a psychiatric inpatient in Hartwoodhill, Lanarkshire.
However I had no personal experience of Stratheden Hospital in 1995 although we lived on Elmwood College Farm and had often walked through the old asylum grounds with our Jack Russell dog Toby, bought sweeties from the shop, played tennis on the old courts, past the mortuary. My oldest son practised driving through the grounds before gaining his license, aged 17 in 1993.
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| selfie taken 14 April 2020 on walk through Stratheden Hospital grounds |
I became aware of the failings in Lomond Ward when my oldest son was a patient, particularly in 1996 when they gave him one shock treatment/ECT which led to a critical incident, ambulance to Ninewells Hospital and we were sent for. Fortunately he survived and we didn't have to raise complaints with the Mental Welfare Commission although I did complain to the Lomond Ward Senior Charge Nurse about poor nursing care. She eventually became SCN at Weston Day Hospital, Cupar, her husband the General Manager at Stratheden Hospital.
I have no doubt that my raising a complaint in 1996 about Lomond Ward nursing practices meant that it was very risky for me as an inpatient in March 2002 when my two older sons took me in there, experiencing a menopausal "psychosis". My card was marked "Troublemaker".
You have to go through it to know it. I've always said this and it was true for me that week of being a mental patient for the third time. Voluntary then detained for 72 hours until I swallowed their toxic chemicals, Risperidone antipsychotic. I was warned that if I didn't take their drugs then I wouldn't get out.
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| Stratheden Hospital signposts 14Apr20 - no Lomond Ward notice |
In March 2002 the Nurses put me in the end female dorm down long corridor where there was a young male patient in single room opposite and I remember waking up one morning to see this man coming out of his room, no nurses around. I slept in my clothes, the Nurses wrote this in the Notes as if it was a sign of madness, whereas in truth it made complete sense. Antipsychotics are strong sedatives, given to control mental patients, against our will if we resist. I had capacity when experiencing psychosis and retained this when drugged by psychiatry. I count myself fortunate to have good recall, managed to avoid ECT in 1978 when it was rife in mental hospitals. I'm a survivor of Psychiatric Abuse like my Mother before me, also my 3 sons, my Dad and two wee sisters.
I swallowed the Risperidone under coercion as a Loam & Wart inpatient in 2002 because I didn't want forcibly injected with antipsychotics which could render me more vulnerable to predatory behaviour. I knew this from my previous inpatients stays at Hartwoodhill, observing how female inpatients formed liaisons with male patients, having unprotected sex outside in bushes. Very risky behaviour then and now, patients without full capacity, women being taken advantage of. You might describe it as free sex, unpaid prostitution. I do believe that some men become inpatients for that very purpose and can name one of them from 2012. Predatory men and uncaring nurses, a recipe for disaster.
Clinical Psychology had been training the Loam & Wart Nurses in Mindfulness/ACT (acceptance and commitment therapy), I heard this from the Senior CP based at the hospital. So the Nurses were trained to switch off in 2012 when I witnessed various concerning behaviours, putting patients at risk of space invasion, of absconding and ending their lives before time. It was one of the reasons I persisted with involvement in DClinPsy user/carer groups at both Glasgow and Edinburgh Universities, to speak out and to witness what went on, to try and see the training materials, to understand why psychology had taken the wrong path in Scotland. I only caught a glimpse of Edinburgh's ClinPsy training programme, never saw the Glasgow stuff although I did read enough of the Professors' "academic" articles to know it was gobbledegook or nonsense language.
I am sure that many women will have left mental hospitals with sexually transmitted infections, maybe not knowing how it happened, where they caught it, being out of it on psychiatric drugs. Men also but I'm more concerned about the women, mothers, sisters, daughters. A SAMH supported accommodation Manager said to me at a St Andrews "peer support" event a few years ago that many of the women they worked with couldn't remember what happened to them when Lomond Ward inpatients. I believed it. A travesty of healthcare treatment. A scandal. An outrage.
I got no response from NHS Fife General Manager Stratheden Hospital regarding my plan to redesign Lomond Ward internally, to make it safer for female patients althought the Estates Director Jim Leiper authorised many external improvements to the former asylum grounds and to the fixtures and fittings inside. But they didn't change the internal workings, I think because it would have been an admission of guilt on their part, for having allowed scandolous behaviours to go unchecked in their "healthcare" buildings for decades.
And so the statutory agencies in Fife did their very best to frame me for Psychiatric Abuse, investigating me rather than Nursing practises, and accusing me of causing my son "psychological harm" when I advocated for him in both IPCU/Ward 4 and Lomond Ward/Loam & Wart in February and March 2012. Ten years after they put my life at risk as an inpatient due to poor nursing care. Nurses used the diagnosis pinned on me by Dr Stephen Carey (after I overdosed on Venlafaxine, suicidal impulse side effects) to justify their sub-human treatment of my son in the old IPCU/Ward 4 locked seclusion room. Saying I was a "difficult and demanding Mother" and that there was a "family history of Schizoaffective Disorder".
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| Express article Sunday 5 October 2014 |
Summing up as to why Lomond Ward and other inpatient psychiatric wards are such toxic environments. It was a gateway to worse treatment, in the locked seclusion room IPCU Ward 4, then being a long stay patient in rehab wards or death by suicide. I have to be honest, speak plainly, no beating about the bush. My sons and I could have been statistics, very easily, there but for the grace of God sort of a thing. If any one of them had died and I was left then my life would have taken a much different turn, no rest from campaigning for justice and until the culprits were arrested and locked up for their crimes against humanity. If I had been taken then eternal rest.
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| cross-stitch I did in 1990's to 2002 before needing specs, now I knit, sometimes sew |
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| into handknit socks these days ... |
