The Psychiatric Hospital that Had a Dungeon
by Katherine Tapley-Milton
Twenty-nine years ago I was a prisoner in one of Canada’s oldest, and
most terrible psychiatric hospitals called Centrecare. Today, that institution has been demolished,
but my memories of the abuse I received there have not been. At the time I was
having a nervous breakdown and needed love and support, however Centrecare made
me angry and bitter. The psychiatrist I
had did the foolish thing of taking all my medication away at once, without
even tapering any if it off.
I
had been on huge doses of antidepressants, anxiety medication, and
antipsychotics that a psychiatrist had me on to try and control my
schizophrenia. Soon, I started shaking
and vomiting as a response to sudden drug withdrawal. The staff accused me of
making myself sick. After three months
of being violently ill I was almost dead. However, when I couldn’t sit up
straight in a chair, the staff slapped me around. One day as I lay on the bed my roommate
commented, “ I think that you are going to die.” I replied, “Yes, I think
you’re right.” The psychologist was a
nice guy, but he didn’t understand my condition. He kept yelling at me, “Katherine, stop
you’re shaking!”
I
never got any sleep at Centrecare and yet they wouldn’t give me any sleeping
medication or even let me have the light on to read. Also, when the psychiatrist overdosed me with
30 mgs. of Haldol my neck arched back and my eyes rolled up in my head. I spent two days staring into a light bulb
and could not move from that position.
It was pure, unadulterated agony.
Even though I pleaded with the staff, they would not give me the
antidote drug , Cogentin. Another
outrage was the fact that the psychologist did days and days of psychological
testing while I was grossly over drugged and falling asleep on Haldol. I kept telling him over and over that I was
too stoned to do the tests, however, he did not believe me. He tried to get me to retell stories, put
together puzzles, remember words and numbers, etc. and in the end told the
psychiatrist that I was probably brain damaged.
Embedded in my memory forever are all the horrible sounds of Centrecare
– the moaning, crying, screaming, and shouting that was always going on. There was danger too. One might get a punch in the head if you were
not careful. I remember that Centrecare was always permeated with a sickening
sulphur smell that came from the pulp mill across the Reversing Falls. I felt that as if I had died and truly gone
to hell. One man I talked to, who was in
jail, told me he was incarcerated in Centrecare’s forensic unit once. He vehemently declared to me that he was
never so damned glad to get back to jail in all his life. This ancient
psychiatric institution held in its walls over 100 years of human misery and
mistreatment. It even had a dungeon; a
testament to its barbarism. All that is
left of Centrecare is a grassy knoll now, but its victims are doomed to relive
forever the horror being abused there.
