First Do No Harm: Mental Illness, Assault, and a Doctor's Privilege

Are you weary listening to all of our stories about the many ways we—women and girls, boys and men—have been harassed and assaulted and raped by mostly men in positions of actual and assumed power: our bosses, our teachers, our mentors, our priests, our boyfriends, our husbands, our brothers, our fathers, and in this story I’m going to tell you, our doctors? I’m weary, too, of my stories. Weary of carrying these smoldering shame stories that threaten to incinerate me if you see even one flame licking at the back of my throat. But also weary of telling my stories because you don’t believe me when I whisper them to you, not even when I place your hand on my forehead and chest, my skin burning your palm. Feel it? I say. I’m burning alive.

You pull you hand away and say I was drunk or crazy or drunk and crazy and making it all up or not remembering it right. But the body remembers when you tied me up, blindfolding me, let’s have fun you said, and even though I was queasy, I agreed but not to a beer bottle, cold and unforgiving inside of me. The body remembers when I was halfway passed out at a party, and you, another different you, ran your hand, warm but cold, up my thigh, under my skirt, over my ass, and then inside my panties. I feigned blackout asleep, hoping you were a nightmare. And when I told yet another different you, the you who was supposed to protect me and believe me because you said you loved me best and forever?

“You were really drunk,” you said. “What you’re saying is crazy.”

Crazy talk from crazy me. Anyone who has a mental illness knows the acute terror of having to find ways to convince all powerful doctors that what you say is true because when you have been diagnosed with a chronic mental illness, like bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, your truth, your words can be pronounced delusions, hallucinations, fantasies, projections, that is, crazy talk.

So I want to tell you one more story about how men misuse power and abuse our bodies because even though you’re weary, I am gutted by exhaustion. I have bipolar disorder and for a time was acutely suicidal—no medication offered relief from the ruminative voice in my head compelling me to cut my arms, swallow pills, and starve myself to death. My psychiatrist decided Electric Convulsive (Shock) Treatment (ECT) was my only hope. Desperate times, desperate measures, so I said Yes. A precarious “informed consent”: I remember a piece of paper I had to sign because my psychiatrist said ECT or else Warren State Hospital, 6 months minimum.

During a round of ECT (as if a blithe round of golf), you are first injected with a paralytic agent, all muscles immobilized so that you don't injure yourself during the seizure, and then second, with an injection of propofol—its twilight sleep wipes out all memory of the procedure.

Round #1, all I remember: lying in my hospital gown on the gurney in the OR, terrified because while I welcomed the sweet reprieve of anesthesia, I was bone shaking vulnerable. Stupidly, I’d watched a YouTube video of an ECT procedure: a woman on a gurney, a mouth guard between her teeth to keep her from biting through her tongue or breaking her teeth during the convulsions, but also gagging her.

My psychiatrist stood at the bottom of the gurney, tapping each one of my toes. “What’s with the color?” he asked. My toenails were painted black, a popular color at the time, but I couldn’t answer because the needle was already sliding into my vein and then all of me all at once went black hole black.

When I woke, he was again at the foot of the gurney, surrounded by residents and nurses, smiling and pointing to my feet. My toenails were now bubblegum pink. “Black was too depressing,” he said, “so a nurse had nail polish and remover and we painted them happier.”

I was groggy, so no way to feel my panic or register anger. Because they were smiling at me as if this was a consensual add-on ECT spa service, as if I had no sensible reason to protest, as if I could protest anyway because wasn’t I his suicidal patient and didn’t he have the power to commit me to a state institution? What else could I do except smile, be gracious, and nod Yes Yes Yes that’s so much better, I feel so much better now that my toes are fucking pink?

Later that afternoon, when you came to visit me on the psych unit, I showed you my toes, and with my shaking hands placed your palm over my heart which was beating wildly, and I said, “It hurts to breathe” because I was imagining what the doctor could have done to me when I was passed out, unable to move or speak. Because I was remembering what other men had done to me when I had been passed out or unable to move or speak.

You pulled your hand away, and looked at my toes, and said, kindly, trying to quiet my wild-eyed fearful wind-up, “It’s kind of funny, right?” Your didn’t mean to be dismissive in your kindness, only to put horror into perspective: suicide worse than a pedicure.

Maybe it was funny, maybe I couldn’t see how funny it was from deep inside the black hole, maybe when I emerged on the other side I would laugh at how funny it was. Which is what I’ve been doing ever since, telling you and another different you and another different you this funny story: A psychiatrist walks into an OR and assaults a paralyzed, passed out, gagged patient. Not assault? Crazy talk? Okay then, the doctor at the very least does harm.