Mona Daniella was loved very much, and she was a wonderful person. After years and years of misdiagnosis, she came out a shell of what she was when she first went in for treatment in 3East in McLean Hospital. She had depression but she was a bubbly person, full of life. All her friends from McLean Hospital, from other treatment centers, hospitals, college, choirs, and other activities have told us about how she was the one who gave them more support to go on than they gave her, she helped and kept telling them not to give up, to keep going on. Her friends have told us was a role model for them, because she had survived the worse, and she was resilient.
We would like to remember Mona the way she was before she had gone into McLean Hospital, considered the "Ritz Carlton" of psychiatric hospitals in America. We were also strongly encouraged to write about it, in the hope that it might help prevent what happened to her to other patients. HIPAA Laws need to be changed. At least when it comes to mentally ill patients. Parents who pay hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars for their children's treatments are completely left in the dark. The vast majority of parents don't find out about what went on unless their children tell them. Doctors and institutions use HIPAA laws to their advantage, "Psychiatry possesses a built-in capacity for abuse which is far greater than any other area in medicine." (Medicine betrayed: the participation of doctors in human rights abuses. Zed Books 1992). There is no accountability; in America mentally ill patients have less rights than chimpanzees. They have no rights. No one believes in them. When they attempt to say something, their treaters say they are delusional, or hallucinating. After all who will people believe in? "Prestigious doctors", "highly recommended", and "talented" with their degrees, who published books and articles or mentally ill people whom they drug half the time? It happened to our daughter Mona. Mona has always been terrified of state institutions. In state institutions, there has always had rampant allegations of abuses, of extreme poor conditions - unsanitary and overcrowded conditions, lack of communication to patients and family members; physical violence and sexual misconduct and abuse, inadequate complaints mechanisms, fear and humiliation in the misuse of seclusion, over use and abuse of ECT, psychiatric medications and other treatments / punishments, interrupted lives and lost potential, and continued stigma, prejudice and emotional distress, acute trauma and PTSD. Sociologists and others have argued that such institutions maintained or created dependency, passivity, exclusion and disability, causing people to remain institutionalized. (Medicine betrayed: the participation of doctors in human rights abuses. Zed Books 1992). We had promised Mona we would never send her there. We knew it would have meant a death sentence. Once one of her treaters told her she was going to send her to a state institution, and she better sign the form. She had called us frantically crying, frightened, and told us what was going on. We asked her for the name of that person. When we called the person, she laughed, she dismissed completely what Mona had told us by saying she was "delusional and hallucinating". Mona didn't lie. She wasn't delusional and hallucinating either. We told her to hide that paper, and give it to us once we would be there. We dropped everything, and drove for nearly 5 hours to Massachusetts. When we arrived to the hospital we saw Mona, she gave us the paper, and I put it inside my bag. We had a meeting with the director of that unit, together with that treater. The treater was surprised to see us, she didn't know why we had come since she had told us on the phone that Mona was "delusional and she was hallucinating", and she hadn't told her anything about signing any paper. When I pulled that paper from my bag and asked "Am I delusional and hallucinating too? What am I holding in my hand? Is this an illusion, an hallucination?" She turned white. The director apologized and took Mona's case. Despite being treated for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars - in a private hospital in Belmont, MA - McLean Hospital considered the "Ritz Carlton" of psychiatric institutions, Mona went through hell. There was lack of communication to us, her parents. Her treaters used the HIPAA Laws to their convenience. They never told us what was going on, which we are still earning piece by piece. But they weren't shy to trash her, to tell us how "difficult" she was. To begin with, had they not misdiagnosed Mona, had they not given her the wrong treatment for years and years in a row - Mona would not have been a "difficult" patient. She would have been alive today. In fact it was the worse treatment for her condition - OCD, as per the team treating her before she committed suicide. My point being, mentally ill patients have no advocates. More often than not, their treaters get away with everything. Doctors treat them, or mistreat them, without impunity. The doctor who treated our daughter in 3East in McLean Hospital, was promoted to be the Director despite the gross mistakes she committed when treating our daughter. Those mistakes led Mona to continue to receive the worse treatment, which made her condition even worse - that is why by the time she left the hospital, Mona was a shell of herself. One of her friend wrote the following in an article, after visiting Mona in the hospital: "...I can't help but think of my friend and how lost and alone she is right now. I imagine the reality she's lived for four months - medication, doctors, the cold clean halls of the hospital. Head banging, cutting herself restraints, more pills..." [my interjection: those traits were acquired from other patients] In New York, last October, Mona was diagnosed correctly. Her new treatment helped turn her life around, and her improvement during this past year was amazing. Finally she had a life. She lived for an entire year. She became independent, and an activist again for many causes. She started to write again when last year she wasn't able "to write one word" (Mona had said that), she joined a choir - she loved to sing; she had so many happy moments. She traveled to Israel, she was applying to Columbia. She wanted to live, and had beautiful dreams. She had been yearning to live a meaningful and a happy life. |
Mona Daniella as a child
But the past kept haunting her. She was tormented by the tremendous suffering, All the torture she had gone through for years and years at the hand of her handlers, the treatments - or rather mistreatments, in the end they took its toll. She had flashbacks, complex PTSD from the trauma and the abuse - she was assaulted in many mental institutions; all that haunted her. She was hurting. In the end she was tired. She wanted to rest. And now she is resting. She didn't live forever.
Mona wrote: "Even though I've survived everything up until now, I'm pretty broken..." Mona wrote the following, about what she went through in those hospitals: “…Eventually, I grew too old for adolescent programs and found myself in hospital wards full of patients who no longer expected to get out, and doctors who no longer cared. I was restrained for self harm, then again for locking myself in a restroom, then again for not following directions. Up to six members would pull me down onto a bare mattress in the quiet room, and wrangle my limbs into leather cuffs, which would keep me still until the injected sedatives took effect. This is how I spent my early twenties.” |