Hello everyone, this is Refried Bean. I am a writer for teens and young adults. I have a hundred books available on amazon. I went to social work school at NYU and am an LMSW in NYC.

I am using this website to publicize abuse towards me that puts my readers at risk by damaging my life and mental health advocacy.  I am part of three mental health programs that use escalation strategies to make clients have to go to the hospital if there is something they have not done well enough in the program.  For housing, sometimes it is about inspection or taking medicine. At the day program it could have to do with attendance or paperwork, and at the hospital the threat is to send you to jail if you are not an easy enough patient to manage.

This is scary when you are dependent on these resources and are at their mercy. The usual situation is that you have failed to do some aspect of participation, as petty as washing a dish or avoiding a boring group. They want you to make their job easier, but it is hard because you are actually disabled, and that is why you need their help. So what they do is establish a series of threats to force you to do things that ordinarily would be low stakes behaviors. And here is where it gets abusive. In most cases, you are not already a danger to yourself or others, so they can’t send you anywhere involuntarily.  So how can they threaten that? Somewhere along the way, they determined that the easiest fix for that is to just go ahead and make you a danger to others or yourself.  And what out of those two gives them more power? Obviously anger towards them is going to make them seem more innocent if anyone ever challenges their mistreatment. So they provoke you past any capacity to recover on your own from the emotional abuse. I should list the strategies they use, like getting too close to you, getting the janitors to wake you up with offensive music, staring at you while you swallow your pills, and all kinds of other toxic things that sound so innocent in court. The main common thing is that it makes you feel bad psychologically, and they have been trained to do it. A subpoena might expose the escalation orders, but a patient is still at a great disadvantage from how common these practices are. The agencies assume that anyone would side with a worker against a mentally ill person if it is ever legally confronted. But some people do side with justice and humane treatment, and I am reporting this practice as inherently abusive. I also feel that in my own life, it is not just a legal issue, but criminal.

Friday, a worker at my day program got in my way on purpose and was less than a centimeter away to try to make me feel bad.  And it worked. I felt bad for the whole day. I reported her abuse to an outside agency and later realized it was because I did not turn in my signature sheet for attending groups. No one told me. I just had to figure out over the weekend that the paperwork problem was probably their reason for torturing me. And why is that my responsibility anyway? I don’t get a paycheck. And if I did, I would probably be told clearly what the issue is instead of having to guess why someone got in my personal space as a violating act of degredation. It will be interesting to see if they deny that the physical blocking happened, or will try to say she was just doing her job.

At my housing, I had about five workers who used to make me feel bad on purpose, and it made me severely suicidal when it happened. This impacted my sister and nieces as well. I was sent to the hospital and my medicine that I was happy with for fifteen years was changed to something that made me gain weight and have worse health problems. I will never be the same, and sometimes I wish I had not stayed alive during the other suicidal times of my life. This is where it starts to harm readers and those influenced by my facebook pages that have over 60 million views.

At the hospital, the nurses “mistakenly” had my seizure medicine downstairs instead of at the correct medicine counter, and a worker grabbed my wrist as if he was going to assault me.  Why? Because I had not taken my seizure medicine. This was their escalation process used as a power play.  Possibly they were establishing their hospital as an experience of torture so I would be sure to always take my medicine in the future. But the erosion that it does to my determination to stay alive is a foolish trade-off. And most people would already have known that anyway just by telling the truth and treating others with respect. This isn’t that advanced of an ethical challenge.

I believe this escalation process is inherently abusive and should have already been prohibited by law. I think I could win a lawsuit against all three of these places with any decent lawyer who isn’t discriminated against along with me for my schizoaffective disorder. In some ways, the fact that I am dependent on these mental health resources weakens my legal position and means that I would be more likely to win once I am not “voluntarily” choosing to participate and be a client. They can say, “Well don’t live there, don’t go to that program, move back to South Carolina where people don’t even believe in mental illness.” But in the big picture, my dependence on the mental health treatment is one of the strongest factors in why it is abusive for them to be allowing and even instructing unlicensed low wage workers to make me feel worse on purpose. Imagine going to the hospital with a broken arm and they break your other one just so you know who is in charge.

Right now, I am not listing the names of the three places, but if my life ever gets better and I am living somewhere else, I think it could be my moral responsibility to sue each place for about ten thousand dollars and a court order to stop this harmful practice.

The other interesting thing for my case is that I am a writer and expect to be a public figure after I die. I spent twenty years surviving depression and wrote books to encourage other people to stay alive. Now that is in jeopardy and I absolutely believe these people are child abusers. This website used to say “Child Abuse Registry,” but I ran out of money to maintain the site and had to redo it.  So now this is it.  I feel that it is unwise to say how much my mental health advocacy has been compromised and replaced by total despair and devastation on behalf of all suffering people.  Not just the mentally ill, but anyone who tries to get help from people who created a system that in the end, benefitted only those who are willing to lie, cheat, steal, and kill.

Probably a lot of mental health people would claim that these practices are standard and the ends justify the means. But we already have a glimpse of “the end,” which for many people has already been a literal end to their life. How many people is it? Some mental health workers have quite a tally, even if it was months later, or a list of people who could have read a life saving book by Refried Bean.