Medication Nation

This is one of the best websites that I have ever seen to advocate for the rights of patients. Having been a victim of repeated psychiatric abuse in Sacramento County where the entire system seems to be "broken," I cannot tell you how desperately a website like this is needed to safely bring people together to make changes. The mental health system in Sacramento is in an extreme crisis state and beyond anything I have ever experienced in other counties. When I was 5150'ed, I was first taken to the Downtown Sac Jail. I was placed in a single cell where three woman police officers held me down on the cold cement-- with handcuffs and leg irons on, and stomped on my hands and feet. I was screaming in pain and crying out for help for them to stop. An older male officer walked by and I expected, of course, that he would intervene. But he did nothing and kept walking. I looked up at one of the female officer's face-- and she seemed to be enjoying what she was doing. In fact, she was smiling and happy while sadisticlly abusing a mental patient in handcuffs and leg irons. I felt like I was going to go out of my mind from the abuse. They then threw me into the "padded cell" and later, I was taken to Ward D in Sierra Vista Hospital (after going first to SCMHTC.) This was the second time I had been to Ward D of Sierra Vista in several weeks. Ironically, I had been arrested going to the Capitol to report that I had been raped twice at Sierra Vista Hospital and no one had done anything. Because I did not know whom I could trust, I was attempting to go to a Senator from my old District who was a friend of my physical rehabilitation physician...Instead of getting help, I got arrested, then subjected to police brutality in the Sac Downtown Jail, and then I thrown back to the acute, out-of-control, unsafe Ward D where I was twice sexually assaulted the first time. During my 2nd stay, since my period was weeks late, I was terrified that I might be pregnant from the rapes. Of course, I reported this but I am sure that it was written up as a "delusion and psychosis." And, of course, no one did anything....So, I had someone called the Sacramento Bee to bring out an investigative reporter....More on that later.

It doesn't just SEEM to be broken, it IS. Or rather, perhaps it is not in fact broken, but performing in exactly the way that it was designed? To crush human lives and souls, and to spit them back out into society with only a bottle of pills to give them hope. What a crushing defeated hope...

Sacramento PD have a hideous reputation for brutality and corruption as it is, this just reinforces their cruelty. They treat human beings like animals or worse yet vermin.

You MOST CERTAINLY were not deluded or psychotic, but I can only imagine how you must have felt. I know how thoroughly destroyed I felt while in SVH, and if it had been worse I might have just spontaneously died... It is so unimaginably horrific... I am almost always at a loss for intelligent words to say about it. If I ever seem insincere it is only because I am fighting not to unleash a page full of obscenities and pure hatred. :'[