Lunar Roses

Cindy Powell was a 51-year-old woman who had a hard life. She was an abuse survivor living in dangerous on-the-edge poverty whose mother, her entire support system for the past several years, had recently died. Ms Powell was, understandably, in significant emotional distress. She had a diagnosis that was theoretically enough to get her mental health services, but unfortunately for Ms Powell, the psychiatric label stuck to her and her records was “Borderline Personality Disorder.”

If you haven’t been around the block a couple of times, you might innocently assume that this diagnosis has to do with symptom clusters and how best a person bearing the label can be helped in her distress. The fact of the matter is that a diagnosis of “Borderline Personality Disorder” is shorthand for “untreatable pain in the ass.” [Don't believe me? Hear it from a psychiatrist.]

Three days before her death, Cindy Powell drove herself to the emergency room to have multiple self-inflicted wounds stitched up. She stated that she wasn’t suicidal, so the hospital didn’t choose to hold her. Could they have held her? Yes. I can tell you from direct experience that an ER doctor, in Oregon, faced with any kind of self-harm behavior, can decide a person might be a threat to herself, get another doctor in the ER to sign a paper with him, and Cindy Powell would have been sitting on the psych ward. She didn’t want to be held, and the hospital didn’t want to hold her, so she was sent home.

The next day, Ms Powell overdosed on her psychotropic medications and apparently drove herself to the Emergency Room again. She was “discovered” in the waiting area just before six that evening, out cold and breathing shallowly. She was treated, and a day later was awake and speaking. What she said was, “I have nothing.” She expressed a desire to die.

Ms Powell was told she would be transferred to a local psych unit, and spent several hours telling the nurses and her doctor that she didn’t want to go there. Her doctor wrote: “She, I think, really is very manipulative wanting only to be taken care of, but refusing any direct care claiming that she wants to kill herself.”

She was just claiming that she wanted to kill herself. Natch. Cindy Powell was a “Borderline,” so the idea that she would actually kill herself was, pfft!, not even a consideration (though people with that diagnosis do kill themselves, in large enough numbers to alarm anyone with a beating heart).

That may be why, when she was being transferred to the other hospital, no, zero precautions were taken. She was on her feet, fully clothed… and perfectly capable of escaping the people ostensibly “guarding” her during the transfer. They didn’t follow when Cindy Powell ran away, ran upward, to the balcony from which she threw herself — to her death. No doubt this was just another bid for (undeserved) attention.

You can read the whole horrifying story in Ms Powell’s local newspaper.

But wait. It gets worse. Our pals and neighbors at the misinformation machine known as the Treatment Advocacy Center, an organization dedicated to stripping people with mental-illness labels of our civil rights, decided Cindy Powell would make an excellent pawn for their game. In an entry titled “Cry For Help Ignored,” TAC linked to the above newspaper article, but didn’t bother themselves too much about the actual facts of the incident.

TAC’s main point was this: Because Powell said she didn’t want to kill herself and told a nurse that she never had a desire to hurt anyone else, St. Charles’ staff couldn’t keep her, Henderson said. Three days later, Powell committed suicide.

While not precisely a lie, it does rather conveniently overlook the fact that Ms Powell was, in fact, in hospital care when she killed herself. Furthermore, she was taking her medications and actively seeking help, calling the local crisis line several times in the last days of her life, and before that attending therapy sessions at the local mental health bistro. [One wonders what "direct help" her ER doctor thought she was refusing.] TAC focuses on the fact that Ms Powell was sent home after she had sliced up her arms, insinuates that her life would have been saved if only it were easier in Oregon to hold people for psych evaluation against their will.

This kind of misinformation and spin is typical of TAC, but in this case it’s especially low. If TAC would really like to “eliminate barriers to the timely and effective treatment” of mental illness, maybe they should start with questioning why a woman crying out for assistance and blatantly and admittedly suicidal, because of her label was scorned as being merely manipulative and “cared for” with such distaste and incompetence that she killed herself in a hospital she’d come to voluntarily for help.

Cindy Powell was a human being who lived and suffered and died tragically. Cindy Powell was not your pawn, Treatment Advocacy Center. Shame on you.

Alison at Charlottesville Prejudice Watch has something to say about this, also. Thanks to her for keeping an eye on TAC and calling bullshit on them quite frequently.

Go in peace, Cindy Powell.