Retraumatizing the Victim: Traumatized by Treatment, Ignored by the Mental Health System

By Ann Jennings, Ph.D.

Editor's note: Stigma can take many forms. When diagnosis and treatment themselves are stigmatizing, the consequences are devastating. In the case of Ann Jennings' daughter, the outcome was tragic.

My daughter Anna was a victim of early childhood sexual trauma She was never able to find treatment in the mental health system. From the age of 13 to her recent death at the age of 32, she was viewed and treated by that system as "severely and chronically mentally ill." A review of 17 years of mental health records reveals her described in terms of diagnoses, medications, "symptoms," behaviors, and treatment approaches. She was consistently termed "non-compliant" or "treatment resistant." Although it was initially recorded, her childhood history was dropped from her later records. Her own insights into her condition were not noted.

When she was 22, Anna was re-evaluated after a suicide attempt. For a brief period, she was rediagnosed as suffering from acute depression and a form of post-traumatic stress disorder. This was the only time in her mental health career that Anna agreed with her diagnosis. She understood herself, not as a person with a "brain disease," but as a person who was profoundly hurt and traumatized by the "awful things" that had happened to her, including sexual torture by a male babysitter.

Invisibility

For nearly 12 years, Anna was institutionalized in psychiatric hospitals. When in the community, she rotated in and out of acute psychiatric wards, psychiatric emergency rooms, crisis residential programs and locked mental facilities. Principal diagnoses found in her charts included: borderline personality with paranoid and schizotypal features, paranoia, undersocialized, conduct disorder aggressive type, and various types of schizophrenia including paranoid, undifferentiated, hebephrenic, and residual. Paranoid schizophrenia was her most prominant diagnosis. Symptoms of anorexia, bulimia, and obsessive compulsive personality were also recorded. Treatments included family therapy, vitamin and nutritional therapy, insulin and electroconvulsive "therapy," psychotherapy, behavioral therapy' art, music and dance therapies, psycho-social rehabilitation, intensive case management, group therapy, and every conceivable psycho-pharmaceutical approach to treatment including Clozaril. Ninety-five percent of the treatment approach to her was the use of psychotropic drugs. Though early on there were references to dissociation, her records contain no information about or attempts to elicit the existence of a history of early childhood trauma.

Anna was 22 when she learned, through conversation with other patients who had also been sexually assaulted as children, that she wasn't "the only one in the world." It was then that she was first able to describe to me the details of her abuse. This time, with awareness gained over the years, I was able to hear her.

Events finally became understandable. Sexual torture and betrayal explained her constant screaming as a toddler, her improvement in nursery school, and the re-emergence of her disturbance at puberty. They explained the tears in her paintings, the content of her "delusions," her image of herself as shameful, her self-destructiveness, her involvement in prostitution and sadistic relationships, her perception of the world as deliberately hurtful, her isolation, and her profound lack of trust. I thought with relief and with hope that now we knew why treatment had not helped. Here at last was a way to understand and help her heal.

The reaction of the mental health system was to ignore this information. When I or Anna would attempt to raise the subject, a look would come into the professionals' eyes, as if shades were being drawn. If notes were being taken, the pencil would stop moving. We were pushing on a dead button. This remained the case until Anna took her life, 10 years and 15 mental hospitals later.

The tragedy of Anna's life is daily replicated in the lives of many individuals viewed as "chronically ill." Their disclosures of sexual abuse are discredited or ignored. As during early childhood, they learn within the mental health system to keep silent.

Silence

A wall of silence isolates childhood sexual abuse from the consciousness of the public mental health system. No place exists within the system's information management structures to receive this data from clients.

The mental health system viewed Anna and her "illness" solely through the lens of biological psychiatry. The source of her pain, early childhood sexual abuse trauma, was an anomaly - a contradiction to the paradigm, and so could not be seen.

As a result of this paradigmatic "blindness," conventionally accepted psychiatric practices and institutional environments repeatedly retraumatized Anna, re-enacting and exacerbating the pain and sequelae of her childhood experience. The table following this article illustrates that retraumatization.

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Written Fall 1994. Reviewed: 04/2006