Dear Doctor and Therapist — Please Have Mercy
Dear Doctor and Therapist —
I sense your frustration with me. I would be frustrated with me too if I were you. As a psychiatric nurse I had patients like me — seemingly unwilling or unable to heal despite the best efforts of the medical and mental health professionals who try to serve us. We are the Debbie Downers and those accused of self-pity and lack of willpower. We are often labeled with borderline personality disorder or worse. Most of us are women, but some of us are disadvantaged men who channel their frustration into fear instead of rage. As people-pleasers, we rarely express obvious anger, but the pain and the shame that we wear on our sleeves can be overwhelming for professionals who haven’t lived through the darkness that we have experienced.
What I didn’t realize as a privileged practitioner with ample support from my family and community, was how badly our systems treat people without resources and/or support. Until I became a disposable and expendable human being in 2020, I had no idea what it felt like to be betrayed by every system designed to help the most vulnerable amongst us.
Being on the other side of the psychiatric bed has been an enormous wake up call for me. Being othered and rejected for the simple crime of being deeply depressed is a pain rarely experienced by people with relative privilege. If you have a spouse, parent, sibling, friend, or therapist to vent to and to comfort you when you are feeling low, then you can’t know the desperation of having nobody to call, nobody to put down as an emergency contact, nobody who will care when you admit to feeling suicidal, nobody to feed your cat or take care of your children if you get admitted to the hospital.
Nobody to call in an emergency.
Let
That
Sink
In.
I’ve called 988 countless times in the past three years. The first couple of times the responder was helpful, but every other time has only made matters worse. The people who answer those calls count on the caller having a support system outside of the emergency response system. They are prepared to safety plan with a person who has people in their lives who care about them. What they are not prepared for is someone who has been forsaken by their family, by their friends, by the medical system, by the legal system, and by law enforcement. The only resource available to desperate people in pain is inpatient admission to an overcrowded, underfunded, and poorly staffed psychiatric facility.
Those of us who know the routine know that voluntary admission becomes involuntary commitment as soon as we walk through the door.
Voluntary or not, few people come out in better shape than when they went in.
In our community the dreaded acronym is DCR — Designated Crisis Responder.
The DCR will conduct an evaluation and investigation:
Interviewing all reasonably available family, friends, or others.
Interview the person after informing them of their involuntary treatment rights.
Consider all available less restrictive treatment options.
Determine if the person meets criteria for involuntary treatment.
If the DCR finds the person meets the criteria for involuntary treatment, the DCR will work to find an available treatment bed.
If there is no available involuntary treatment bed, then the DCR will not detain the person.
If the person is detained and admitted to a secure withdrawal management and stabilization facility, the person will likely go to court at the end of 72 hours and the court will decide if the person meets criteria for a commitment order for up to 14 days of further treatment. During this time, the person will be introduced to substance use treatment.
At the time of discharge from secure withdrawal management and stabilization, the person will be referred to the appropriate level of care such as intensive outpatient or residential treatment, which may be court ordered.
Like many people with significant trauma, I don’t have a substance use issue, but high, drunk, or not, we are all treated like criminals instead of like vulnerable human beings in need of kindness and compassion.
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My first involuntary commitment was forced on me by my family four days after discharging from a voluntary admission at the infamous McLean Psychiatric Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts.
McLean was a Shangri-La compared to my involuntary commitment at an obscenely abusive facility in Dartmouth, Massachusetts.
Once a human being has been subjected to this degree of dehumanization by their family, their friends, and by the systems designed to help people like us, we rarely recover.
It took me a very long time with many betrayals along the way, including a suicide attempt and another horrific involuntary commitment, but I finally did start to recover in the spring of 2025. I formed a deep friendship with a felon I’d met at a grief retreat. David’s traumas mirrored mine in many ways. He was a Christ-like Christian who seemed remorseful and reformed. He became my rock. I trusted him more than anyone else in the world. He held my heavy and helped me through the worst moments of despair.
A volunteer position at a local non-profit became a minimum wage job that gave me meaning, purpose, and supportive co-workers as I clawed my way out of the abyss three years after being bullied out of my last nursing job.
In March of 2025 I hired two therapists that I thought I could trust. I saw them three times a week for five months as I got back on my feet, moved into a nice apartment, and prepared to return to school at Simmons University for a Masters of Social Work degree. I was grateful and proud. With the help of trusted friends and professionals I’d finally pulled myself out of the darkness. I had real hope for the first time in a very long time.
And then the ground fell out from under me in the worst way possible.
Spark Central, Jessica Kaluza, Simmons University, Family Court, my attorney, Frontier Behavioral Health, the Spokane Police Department, David Saugen, New Love Coffee, the Christian community, the judges, the doctors, the therapists, the mental health counselors, the politicians… it was a tidal wave of betrayal and abuse. It started with a drip and ended with a tsunami that encompassed every system in the city where I had raised my beloved daughter. The massive wave of hate and shame took my daughter with it and left me entirely alone with nobody to call when I felt suicidal. 988 was my only option, and I knew better than to trust 988.
I’ve been struggling with obsessive suicidal thoughts for weeks. I’ve tried to be as honest as I can, but I can’t risk another inpatient admission with nobody to discharge to. Today was a routine checkup with my primary care doctor. I haven’t seen her in over a year. I’m good at pretending to be ok when I’m absolutely not. I’d been dreading today’s appointment because I knew we wouldn’t be talking about my physical health.
Sure enough, I admitted to my deep suicidality and the doctor had no choice but to call in the behavioral health team from Frontier Behavioral Health. Samuel and I had met a few weeks ago when he’d shown up at my apartment for a wellness check. Thankfully, he agreed that inpatient admission would not be beneficial for me today. We came up with a bogus safety plan to appease the power-holders, but we both knew I was lying. I don’t fault Samuel or the doctors. We are all forced into untenable decisions where bending the truth becomes necessary to avoid harmful interventions, but it doesn’t have to be this way!
With commitment and conviction, we can make our systems more humane, but the commitment needs to come from those who hold power. Victims can’t effect change when the power-holders refuse to take responsibility for their harmful behaviors. Victims can’t even hope for change when those with power are also the abusers. We desperately need truly good doctors, nurses, pastors, therapists, police officers, attorneys, judges, and politicians to step up and take a stand — a real stand, not just a performative stand for likes or votes.
The first step towards meaningful change has to start with holding every abuser accountable every time they abuse, no exceptions. Abuse is always abuse of power. If we don’t have power, we can’t abuse it.
If we abuse the power that we have, we are abusers. If we use the power we have to empower others towards change, we are healers.
I’m home alone, no safer now than I was this morning, but I’m still alive.
I don’t want to die, but I desperately want to stop the pain. I don’t how to do it. I’ve been trusting the professionals for years to help me feel safe. They have failed me as they have failed so many others. Our systems aren’t designed to help people like me. Our systems are designed to make as much money as possible off the suffering of human beings. It’s grotesque, but until privileged white people take responsibility for the harm they are doing to the rest of us, disposable people like me will continue to suffer and die at obscene rates.
I know I seem crazy, but I am not. I am deeply deeply traumatized by a system that rewards abusers at the expense of their victims. I currently owe my most recent abuser’s attorney $2000 for contempt of court, but given that David Saugen already ripped me off to the tune of $60,000, I’m not inclined to pay the ridiculous fine. David is a registered sex offender who groomed me, used me, abused me, betrayed me, and discarded me. He has his own pain and darkness, but that’s no excuse. He needs to be held accountable for his crimes. David wants to be held accountable, but the insanity is that the system is choosing to reward him for his abuses. David’s betrayal is the number one reason that I’ve been suicidal every day since he filed a protection order against me in early December. Instead of holding him accountable for his crimes, the court has chosen to punish me.
Make it make sense!
Why am I the criminal and all the abusers are my victims? What crime did I commit? Suicidal thoughts are not a crime or a sin. I want help. I need help. I deserve help. I admit it.
Please understand that my inability to regulate comes after years of significant psychological abuse and betrayal by multiple individuals and entities. I have never purposely harmed anyone, and an will to take responsibility when I cause harm by mistake.
Prior to 2020 I was a successful, respected, and well-adjusted nurse and mother before being pathologized, stigmatized and dehumanized by Kaiser Permanente Psychiatry. I have spent thousands of dollars and countless hours trying to heal from years of trauma, but my family, my friends, and the system have betrayed and forsaken me. My significant suicidality is the result of abandonment by the system. I have three abusive protection orders and a false claim of abuse and neglect of a vulnerable adult against me.
Nobody cares. Nobody is interested in defending me from the real abusers. The therapists, attorneys, judges, and pastors are the abusers. They hold all the power. Victims of abuse hold none.
The legal, law enforcement, and medical systems in Spokane have failed to protect me and my child again and again. Any mother who had suffered the loss of her child to the abusive systems would be as traumatized as I am. The judgment I sense from mothers who feel superior to me is my biggest heartbreak. I don’t mean to be difficult. I desperately want help and have sought it consistently for the past 6 years. I realize my suicidality makes people uncomfortable, but having to lie to avoid inpatient admission is terrifying. I want to be honest AND cared for. I don’t know what that looks like. I’m trusting the professionals to know.
I don’t want to die. I just want to stop the unbearable pain. I want a safe safety plan. Please help me.
Tara
