The FINAL Lockdown

PART I

You better watch out. You better not cry. Because I assure you, I am an expert in such affairs. They may lock you up and throw away the key, and you will have me to remember giving you a fair warning about it. We are living in ominous times, and we are not free. First off, let’s get one thing perfectly clear: I am NOT crazy. I am very smart. And that is the subject of my book that I’ve been writing for over 10 years. But I can’t get this thing out fast enough before my civil liberties are violated once again in this country. I am at the mercy of the hands of the psychiatric institution, and I have nowhere to go but downward if I do not get my name cleared from this oppressive and domineering structure and fight its savagery like a pillaging barbarian through the streets of Rome.

It was the night before St. Patty’s Day a few weeks ago when I was perusing You Tube late at night. I clicked on one of those computerized meditation videos in my You Tube recommendation list that help you sleep: “4 Hour Healing Sleep Music: Regenerate Your Cells; Delta Binauralbeats; Solfeggio 528Hz” from the PowerThoughts Meditation Club. We experience delta waves when we are in a deep non-dreaming sleep, and they are believed by some to provide access to the mind of Infinite Intelligence. So I thought to tune in to relax. I then happened to glance at the “Up Next” column beside the video I was about to watch and couldn’t believe my eyes. I had never seen such a listing. Within that list of Binauralbeats music, was a recorded audiobook of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. I felt sick. What if I had chosen to listen to this sleep meditation music, and then suddenly drifted off, and as the videos continued streaming from my “Up Next” column, Hitler’s words began blaring through my subconscious dream state? And since there is very little or no recall of memory from people experiencing delta brainwave activity, I wouldn’t be consciously aware that I heard those words but they would be imbedded in my unconscious. It was like lacing our brain patterns with white noise and then severing our spinal cords.

I’d like to say a few geeky words about recommended YouTube videos. Before the You Tube system generates recommendations, it identifies related videos watched in a given session after the user watches a given video, and computes a relatedness score for these videos. Then, after drawing data from content data (like titles and descriptions), the system then combines these parameters with a user’s activity on the site (like favorites, likes, and view time) to create what is called a seed set. It then, traces paths of related videos out from this seed set to generate recommendations. A vector is created that represents all of the videos a user has watched. You Tube then compares this vector to vectors of other people to try to find a close match. If you are a close match, then videos that one person watches are likely relevant to the other person.

In non-nerd language, given what I saw laced through those cyberwaves with Hitler rising to power right before my very eyes, was the following question: Who the hell is watching these videos whose vector is likely to correspond with my vector? Yes, I have some of these digitalized meditation videos assigned to my playlists, but the Fuhrer’s? Even further, right beneath his book was a slowed down score from Mozart. I always had a problem with this idea about slowing down classical music. It’s like playing a record backwards, it’s going opposite the direction of a piece of art inspired by God. If you can picture for a moment Tom Hulce in that movie, Amadeus, the madness of his genius was pouring out of him directly through the frantic pace of that tempo—that’s just inspired stuff that comes from something beyond our human capacity of understanding. Why fool around with that? Especially during sleep? It’s meant to sound like it sounds. I would be afraid to listen to that.

So how did my Jen Siciliano vector—created through data drawn from my likes and playlists and my user activity on You Tube—connect with a vector that would generate those recommendations? In other words, boiling it down even further—how did You Tube’s algorithms lead me to Hitler? Especially when the name Steve Perry is in half of the titles in my video playlists. It’s a glitch. It doesn’t make sense. And it challenges the laws of quantum information processing. You can call me paranoid and mentally ill, but when I see incongruence, I ask the question “Why?” It’s called critical thinking. Something I had learned was important somewhere in my schooling growing up, which doesn’t size up to anything particularly applicable today.

Then I realized who might be watching similar videos I had posted but were fans of such things, but that in my research, I considered savage. Because my playlists include things like Transhumanism and the Human plus breed that is being created in Artificial Intelligence right now because they are associated with subjects in my book, Not As Crazy As You Think, which is an anti-psychiatry book I had finally completed over the course of the last 10 years, based on my heinous experiences with the system. I also have a Nazi propaganda film on one of my playlists about the elimination of the “mentally ill” called, “Nazi Eugenics – Life Unworthy of Life.” Yeah, it’s real. Watch the 30 minute video when you get a chance and learn something new from my eyes:

You see, not everyone is aware of the great influence Naziism has had on the growth and prosperity of American psychiatry. And no, I’m not a Scientologist. It’s called knowledge gained through my one true life. My life that contains experiences within it that are real, not imaginary. It sounds too much like conspiracy theory? Well, as I have learned, the term “conspiracy theory” is used to silence those who have connected the dots. Who have made an intelligent conclusion based on reliable facts and then drawn upon circumstances in real life that stand to prove these facts. So call me a theorist, fine. But the truth is the truth.

The philosophy that guides psychiatry is the same kind of Master Race ideology that underlies the pseudoscience of Eugenics, a practice that Hitler directly supported. Hitler was very impressed and inspired by the American Eugenics program, and declared Eugenicist Madison Grant’s book, “The Passing of the Great Race or The Racial Basis of European History,” as his bible. The Eugenics movement started in the late 1800s and was driven by the concern that people who had poor genes were reproducing faster than those with superior genes. So as a logical course of action, those with better genetics needed to guide human evolution towards a more superior genetic composition for the future benefit of humanity, which resulted in sterilization of certain populations starting with whom they deemed “the mentally ill.” By the early part of the 20th century, Eugenics had spread to almost 30 countries, most notably the United States under the American Eugenics Society where forced sterilization was widely practiced. The Eugenics movement in Germany was led by a boatload of physicians and psychiatrists as they sought to make a biological, medical connection to support such ideologies. German psychologist, Alfred Ploetz, was one of the leading pioneers in the German Eugenics movement and in his book, The Fitness of Our Race and the Protection of the Weak, he shared how to control the population of the genetic inferiors. In 1905, his brother-in-law, psychologist Ernst Rudin, established the first organization for Racial Hygiene. He had stated, “All nations have to haul around with them an extraordinarily large number of inferiors, weaklings, sickly and cripples…through wise legislation on sterilization we would also be able to pursue rationally the best avenues for breeding.”

Hitler hailed Eugenics as the science that would rebuild the German nation because it gave the Nazis a medical justification for their genocidal practices. The Nazis funded their programs and gave them political support. Said Hitler, “He who is not healthy bodily or mentally is not allowed to perpetuate his malady in the body of his child. The right of personal freedom recedes before his duty to preserve the race.” Close to 40% of German psychiatrists joined the S.S. by 1943. And the mentally ill, in fact, were the first to be sterilized and then murdered in the Nazi death camps. Their T4 Tiergarten Strasse program murdered over 70,000 people in psychiatric hospitals who were considered “mentally ill” by the state.

So, having done so much research for my book over the last ten years involving these correlations, I was naturally disturbed by what I had seen on You Tube and felt deeply inspired the next morning when I committed to writing and collaging about my findings. That particular day my son woke up telling me he wasn’t feeling well and that he wanted to stay home. I had no problem with that, but it proved to be dreadfully dangerous to me on that given day. I set him up with snacks and video game time and worked away with new ideas fueling my inspired writing. Throughout my creatively whimsical process, I noticed my family kept calling me on my phone but I ignored their voicemails. “Oh, God,” I thought. “I’ll deal with them later. I have to finish writing these ideas down before I run out of time before my gig starts at 8pm.” I had secured a great bodypainting gig for that night, one that I had scheduled three months earlier and that I had been organizing for weeks. I had a model coming down from Albany for the event and one coming from Manhattan to be painted for a local clothes designer’s birthday party at a restaurant in Westchester where I had worked before. I was the entertainment. So I ignored a few calls. They did sound a little worried, but that was a standard possible mood from them. Everything worried them about who I was, and I was used to it. I carried on. I knew what I might have been in for, but I stayed in the zone because I was working through ideas that were directly linked to my book. I needed to finish before I had to run to work.

And then suddenly, just as I was getting ready to take a shower so that I could hit the road, I noticed my parents on my porch, and within seconds they barged into my home with desperate looks of fear plastered across their faces. Having caught me in the act of being creative, my parents were convinced that it was definitely time to drag me away to the loony bin again.

“Oh no, what’s going on now?” I thought to myself in an encroaching panic. I had seen those looks in their eyes before, and I knew I was in for trouble.

“You have to come with us, Jennifer. We called your psychiatrist, and he wants us to take you into the hospital for bloodwork.” With my past experience I knew this phrase was a decoy. I never was released with just blood tests alone. I had a record—a mental illness record—put on the books 20 years ago with the heinous label of bipolar disorder affixed to my name—one I have been trying to fight to get removed from my records for the last two decades, and which is the subject of my book. I couldn’t believe want was unfolding right before my eyes.

“Ma, I am NOT crazy. When are you going to stop this nonsense? A=A, for Christ’s sake! Crazy equals crazy. Not crazy equals not crazy. Wake up from the brainwash, Ma!”

My father chimed in, “We don’t think you are crazy, Jennifer. We are just trying to help you. You are going into an episode.”

I tried to make him stop carrying on, “Daddy, think about what crazy means. Nazis are crazy. And crazy equals crazy. When are you going to wake up?”

I wasn’t completely convinced that they were my enemies yet, but something alarming was taking place because as time began to move more slowly on my side, they appeared frantic to me as if their time was speeding up. My commitment to my work was somehow in their brainwashed minds a symptomatic emergency. I was looking tired, which indicated I had little sleep from the night before, which to my parents, was clearly a sure sign my bipolar symptoms were coming on. And I was using words like “Nazi,” which to them could only mean one thing: Our bipolar daughter’s mind is entering fairy la-la land again.

“We talked to your psychiatrist, and he wants us to take you to a hospital for blood tests,” they both told me pacing nervously about my kitchen, like they had a very important task at hand. They were in some twisted myth in their imaginations that they were saving society from my creative mind that when it would explode into clarity, they always presumed was lunacy.

“I am not going anywhere. You come into my house and demand I should leave with you? For what reason?”

“Why weren’t you answering our calls?” cried my mother. Um, because you are frickin’ annoying? I am a grown woman of 45 and if I don’t answer my parents’ phone calls to this day, I am chastised and suspected to be going into an “episode.”

“Because I’ve been writing and I wanted to concentrate and not be disturbed!”

“Well, your psychiatrist said to bring you in.”

“On what grounds?”

“Jack called Joe, and he said he was scared of you.”

Oh boy. Because I was so involved with these ideas, collaging away, trying to organize my thoughts about them, furiously scrawling down notes on scraps of paper throughout my house, I was compelled to focus resolutely on the task while my good little boy enjoyed watching TV and playing video games for the good portion of the day. Usually, if I was writing and having a randomly explosive creative session during the day when Jack was in school, it would be no big deal. I talk to myself a bit, walk around, smoke a cigarette, and laugh to myself when a good sentence strikes my imagination before I write it down. All of these actions inside the creative process of a writer are normal. Yes, normal. My brain is functioning normally when I go about taking such actions. Ask any true writer around you. The process can appear, well, a little nuts. If Jack were in school, it would have been just another one of those days where, after working with this kind of inspiration, I’d wrap up my day’s progress, pick him up at the bus stop, and continue the day as a doting mother, providing snacks for my little guy and helping him with his homework. But because I was in a deep, concentration zone and wasn’t giving my son my fullest attention, plus he witnessed my laughing out loud with a comment here and there as I was amused by my own creative genius, Jack was a little befuddled. So he called his Dad. And his Dad, well he had been through some crazy inspirational states I’ve been in before, and because he was so busy at work, instead of getting in touch with me personally, he called my parents to check up on me. And so, the nightmare had begun.

“So you already spoke to my psychiatrist? He’s MY psychiatrist. He’s supposed to be MY advocate, not yours. I’m going to call him myself.” I was preparing for the worst so I was going to fairly warn him that I was going to be writing down everything that happened because having finished my book and was still patiently awaiting an agent, I knew it was only a matter of a short time before my voice against this institution was heard out there in the wider world outside my uneducated parents’ living room with FOX news blasting 14 hours a day. I knew that my civil liberties were again at risk and I saw him as being directly associated with that. I got his voicemail, and I knew everything could be traced if he wanted it to be presented to the authorities, and I wanted him to know in full transparency that whatever he said could be used against him. I said, “I heard you spoke to my parents, and I just want you to know that you are being recorded. I am protected by the United States Constitution. Anything you choose to say going here forward can be used against you.” I was making it loud and clear that I was willing to battle hard if I had to this time, I was willing to put on the gloves and slam the blows because I had just about enough of this intrusion in my life over the last 20 years with these repeated unnecessary hospitalizations. Of course, in not speaking to me directly and in hearing only my voicemail, he must have assumed I crazily thought I was a secret agent for saying such a thing. I hung up the phone.

“Jennifer, we are not leaving until you get into the car with us,” they relented.

“Well, you can wait here all day, but I am getting ready for my gig.” I ignored them and as I took my shower I heard them carrying on, riling in anxiety, crying out to the gods, asking why, oh why, do they have to put up with this in their lives? Why can’t our daughter just behave like everyone else and be normal? They had simply had enough of my ways. When I finally got out, they said, “OK, we spoke to your psychiatrist again and he said if you don’t come with us, to take you into the police station.”

I could not believe my ears. He spoke to them directly twice and not to me at all? And knowing that he only heard that threatening voicemail sounding grandiose and paranoid—and rightly so!—I knew I was being completely misheard and wrongfully judged. Now I knew I was going to be persecuted. There was nothing left to do but comply with this idiotic program. The last thing I wanted was to bring the law into this, because as bad as the psychiatric institution was, they were at least predictable. I had no idea what massive monster the law had grown into as of late, and I was terrified of what they would do to me for being overly creative. “Fine, fine. I’ll go with you. But I am only going for bloodwork. Then I have to get to my damn gig!”

Jack didn’t know what was going on. He only saw his mom upset and tearing up. This was the backdrop of my life and Jack before had already witnessed all hell breaking loose when my family—and his father—had insanely overreacted to my sanity. I told him, “Jack, no matter what they say, I am not crazy. I am very smart. And someday you’ll see that very clearly. Hopefully someday soon.”

“I know Mommy, you’re like me,” he said holding my hand tight in the backseat of my parents’ prison vehicle.

I was brought into the emergency room of the hospital for “bloodwork” and the ol’ procedure had just begun. I was used to this. No questions asked of me except my age, weight and date of birth. Separation from my parents was imperative, who were usually the oppressors in the matter as this brainwash of my craziness had continually been beaten over their heads over the years. The next thing I knew I was brought into a sort of detention room, and yet, the excuse for bringing me there was to get “bloodwork.” I saw the standard cameras in the room and I knew I was being taped. It was becoming dreadfully obvious to me with every passing second that I was going to have to write about this mess in order to give the truth to the world about what was, in fact, really happening to me. Which was a denial of my civil rights as an American—NOT an episodic breakdown of a mentally ill person that they had begged me my entire life to buy into. So I said, “I am just reminding you and being fully clear here. Everything you say here is being recorded. I am protected by the United States Constitution.” Like I had told my psychiatrist, I now told Dr. Katherine Harding, the psychiatrist who stood before me in the emergency room at Northern Westchester Hospital in Mount Kisco, who was now given full control over my life with her limited interpretation of who I was as a human being, and who, I honestly believed (and still do so a little even now) was a clone because that robotic tone in her voice had less vocal inflection than Siri. I meant it what I said. I knew full well what was going on was another incident of the revocation of my civil liberties, and I felt she should know that in my future writing about this sham, anything she said could be used against her. But again, to a psychiatrist, that statement sounded as if I believed myself to be rigged with recording devices on my body as a secret agent with my satellite crew nearby watching the goings on of this fiasco through the TV.

“I’m tired of this Nazi system,” I mumbled under my breath.

“What are you saying about the Nazis?” she asked me.

“I’m calling it a Nazi system because I am marked. I have a number. I am a Jew.”

Dr. Harding then said, “Jew? Why are you using the word Jew?”

“Because like the Nazis gave their marks to the Jews, I have the mark of bipolar disorder attached to a pharma code that you guys gave me 20 years ago. So I have a number. I am a Jew. These are called concepts. Nazis oppress Jews. I am a Jew,” I repeated.

She appeared nervous, and she took a long look at me, as I looked straight into her soulless eyes. Then she left the room. A nurse then came in and told me to remove all my clothes and put on some inmate’s garments. “Why do I have to put these on?”

“The psychiatrist wants you to change.”

With humiliation I knew where this was going, and I did so reluctantly and with an attitude that was beginning to weaken as they started cracking their whips. “Don’t you think what they are doing is wrong? There is no reason for this,” I said to her. The nurse looked meek and a little afraid. “For what? For what reason? There is no reason for this,” I repeated.

She answered dejectedly, “I know, I know.”

I then said to her, “As a woman of color, I think you should care. Isn’t there a way to stop this nonsense?”

“Well, not anymore,” she answered. “Things are different now. There’s nothing anyone can do.” She sounded like she was holding back a whimpering sadness. I was about to put on the top garment when she said, “You have to take off your bra. Hospital policy.”

“What? Why do I have to take off my bra?”

“It’s just one of the rules.”

“I don’t see the point in taking off my bra, it’s not a breast exam,” I was feeling more violated as each leg of this new protocol was unfolding. “This is completely unreasonable.”

She left the room to see if the doctor would allow it as I stood there shirtless and in blue concentration camp pants, my hands cold as ice and shivering because there was no heat in the room. When she came back she said with a tinge of pity, “You have no choice. You need to take it off. It’s policy.”

“You gotta be kidding me,” I said.

“Sorry, I have to stand here until you do it.”

Wow, talk about instant degradation. How far can you break down a Jew before they take your God away? I couldn’t believe the blatantly inhumane way I was being treated. In any hospital emergency room, taking off an undergarment was never asked of you. Certainly not demanded of you. Did they think I was going to strangle myself with it? I almost wished I had suicidal tendencies. It would put a final end to these ongoing nightmare atrocities that were the tapestry of my life. I then turned with disgust toward the camera, dropped my bra in front of it and said, “There. Now I have my bra off. Is everyone happy? I am a true Jew.”

The situation I now found myself facing was increasingly becoming darker and more ominous to me, threatening me on a level of oppression I had never known before. What was really going on here? I have been trying to get a damn agent for my book for over a year regarding this pathetic life story of mine, and I can’t get it published fast enough before another violation of my civil rights occurs again. How many times do I have to be pulled away from my life into their insane program of rat cages and zoo bars before anyone gets to hear what I have to say about this insanity? I have to have it happen again and again forever until the day I die with my son continually taken away from me in the process? People, wake the f*** up! They are tearing apart families over this lunatic program. For what?

Dr. Harding walked in again acting a little differently, like she was changing her strategy and said, “Now all this stuff about Nazis and Jews, you know we are trying to do what’s best for everyone, right?”

Did she just say, “we?” Remember, I thought to myself, they are being recorded.

I tried my best to keep up with the clone and said, “Well, what is the purpose? I mean, really, what is the purpose of what you are doing? Just tell me why you think I need to stay? For what? What is the reason? Why do I need to stay here? Just let me go home with my family. I want to speak to you together with my family so that I know what is being said.”

“Your family is being held in the other room. We are talking to them and they are concerned.”

“Concerned about what? I’m reminding you that I am protected by the United States Constitution, and you have no right to put me away for a reason that cannot be explained to me by even you.”

“We looked up your records. You have a history of living with bipolar disorder.”

“Yeah, I know, that’s the mark you gave me 20 years back. I don’t see my personality as a disorder. I see it as a gift,” I said.

“Well, let’s just agree to disagree on that, shall we? You’ll be staying here and I am the one to make that decision. I am a doctor, after all.”

“But what do you have on me? Do you need to see my resume to see that I am a successful woman in my field, that I am a contributing member of my community? You know nothing about me so how can you make decisions regarding my life? I am one of the executive board members of Lake Lincolndale Property Owners’ Association, I have proven myself in my career and in my success with professional relationships and dear friends on every level. Doesn’t that factor in? Do I need to bring every one of my friends in here to vouch for my character? I want to know, what is the purpose of this? What is the reason? I want to speak to another person. I want my voice to be heard!”

“I am the head doctor on this unit and I am managing your case.”

“What you are doing is wrong,” I said.

She responded, “If you feel you’d like to put your wish to be discharged in writing, we will review it and then you can take it to court next Friday and…”

I cut her off, “Woah, court? You have already decided that I’m in for at least a week until next Friday? For what? Just tell me, for what? For what reason are you doing this? For what reason?”

“Your parents are concerned.” She spoke to me like I was a young girl of 20.

“I’m a 45 year old grown woman. My parents cannot put me away in your prison camp for no good reason. I wish to speak to them.” She ignored me. Over the years my poor parents had been brainwashed to such a degree that they couldn’t even see me anymore as their daughter. They had been told by the psychiatric institution to watch vigilantly for my behaviors, for triggers of a relapse in my “bipolar disorder.” This atrociously savage think tank had successfully trained my unsuspecting parents to believe that it was the best thing to do for the safety of society at large to barge down my door of my own home, grab the Jew as quick as they possibly could, and then with the threat of punishment of criminal law, lock me up in an asylum. And this wasn’t the first time.

I knew what I was up against with my previous experiences with this institution, so seeing as the headmaster clone wasn’t budging I had no choice but to comply because non-compliance can be held against me in a court of law. But I knew it was a hoax and a crime. They didn’t need to explain to me why they were putting me away in a mental asylum and taking me away from my son, but I needed to appeal to a judge in a court of law next week and somehow explain how I got myself in there? Well, if I had to, I had to. But this so-called medical system was a disgusting sham.

I said, “OK, I’ll stay the night, fine. But I know my rights. I can get out tomorrow in 24 hours if I so choose.”

“Well, I as the psychiatrist treating your case, will determine upon further observation when you are ready to go home.” Who the hell was this witch to tell me that she had the right to be the only one to have say over when they let me go home? That only she had the authority and the expertise to conclude if I was a good enough mother to see my son again? I was caught in a Twilight Zone episode from hell.

“You have no right to do what you are doing because it is unconstitutional and illegal.”

“There is nothing we are doing that is illegal. We have every right to retain you. We are completely protected by the law in retaining your rights.”

It was true. The standard “voluntary” admission to a psychiatric hospital is usually just an agreed to involuntary admission because refusal of voluntary psychiatric treatment or hospitalization, in their eyes, shows a lack of a capacity of the mentally ill reject to consent to what’s best for him. According to their view, the majority of people suffering from severe mental illnesses show limited insight into their illness. They believe that if a manic individual denies that they have any kind of problem or illness that needs treatment, that is actually a symptom of the illness itself. Because they manage to convince others that our insight is lacking, civil commitment may be initiated by others who are concerned about our behavior—as in this case, my asinine parents—whether they be family members, mental health providers, or the police. In fact, the power of the state is obligated to make the decision that is in the “best interest” of the individual by most clearly reflecting the choice that the individual would have made if she were “competent” to do so. The state has the authority to act on behalf of the protection of society and the general welfare of its citizens against the individual. Just the very label of a mental illness somewhere in one’s medical record could be a prerequisite for civil commitment.

The following is a copy I received of the “Notice of Status and Rights: Emergency Admission” under Section 9.39 Mental Hygiene Law. Notice how this “emergency-status” language has in truth, not from some paranoid delusion within my “mentally ill” imagination, come to strip me permanently of my rights as a citizen of the United States of America supposedly protected by the American Constitution:

There was nothing I could say to stop this hospital from seeing this so-called “episodic incident” as an emergency because of the severity of that bipolar label. By law, the institution and the power of the state have more rights than I do as an individual. And that tiny label tagged to my name determines how every “normal” human being in their system—the doctors, the state, and all others that believe them—sees me. As having a mentally ill mind. And that disgusting truth is a stone-cold fact.

She was preparing to hand me a pill and said I should take it. “I’m not taking any other medication. I am already taking my medication and I am not taking another.”

“Well, it’s an anti-psychotic. I think you should take it.”

“No. I will not take it. I’ll agree to an increase in my sleeping med, Seroquel, but nothing more. I don’t need an anti-psychotic, for Christ’s sake.”

Thank God I knew my psych meds. Once you go on, you can’t get off. And if you wanted to, you’ll have up to at least 6 months to a year of first convincing your psychiatrist that you don’t need it and then weaning off the brain poison before you started at square one again. Years of my life had been wasted on this course of action involving my own brain that in the name of “science,” the psychiatric institution had hijacked as its own.

The headmaster appeared frustrated with me because I wasn’t complying to her stick in hand. She left the room and shut the light. There were no windows and it was pitch black. I laid there pathetically humbled, brutally beaten psychologically, spiritually weakened, freezing in that cold empty room alone. I begged them to at least get in touch with my models and client at the bodypainting gig I was expected to be at that night. But no one listened. No one asked for their contact information. And my client was never notified that I wasn’t showing up. As if a grown man’s birthday party didn’t matter, but putting a grown woman away as fast as they possibly could was the most responsible thing the system could do for the benefit of the larger community. I begged the nurses who wandered in and out to get someone to call my models who were traveling hours to meet me, but I lay prostrate in inmate’s clothes with my voice trailing off into a dissipating ether as they chose not to hear. No one cared. My life and people within it didn’t matter. They weren’t real. Only the threat of my potential imagined violent actions implied by my wretched label kept me there. But nothing in the real world was committing me. In my real life. I was nothing to them. Nothing more than a number.

About 30 minutes had gone by and then a nurse came in to inform me they already had made my bed in the asylum. They took away all my belongings—necklace, clothes, boots, personals, IDs, bag and phone—even socks and my hair rubber bands that I kept on my right wrist. Stripped of all dignity once again, I entered the hellhole with my voice unheard and my personhood disrespected. The sad thing was, I couldn’t write that damn book fast enough, because every time I was in the thick of it—because of the brainwash that had been ironed into the minds of my loved ones—there was always someone lurking behind the corner sizing my behaviors up to match what this stupid paragraph described me as in their psychiatric bible, The Diagnostic Manual for Mental Illnesses (or DSM), for when I needed to be admitted again. And again and again. It just never stopped. But this was my life as a Jew under their Nazi medical program. And there was nothing I could do.

I thought of Elie Wiesel, the Romanian-born American Jewish writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor, who in his Nobel Lecture given on December 11, 1986, said a thing or two that made some sense about this sentiment at hand: “Each one of us felt compelled to record every story, every encounter. Each one of us felt compelled to bear witness…we thought it would be enough to tell of the tidal wave of hatred which broke over the Jewish people for men everywhere to decide once and for all to put an end to hatred of anyone who was “different”…the people around us refused to listen; and even those who listened refused to believe; and even those who believed could not comprehend. Of course they could not. Nobody could. The experience of the camps defies comprehension. Have we failed? I often think we have.”

No, Elie. You have not failed. They have failed. They have failed you as they have failed me—the sleeping masses. I cried softly and felt his words seep into the bottom of my soul. I began to split off into my own mind for I felt protected there as this “real” world around me was devolving right before me into a zombie apocalypse with the clones in charge hailing the Furher’s name and gassing us “mentally ill” nutjobs during that long night as we filed in one by one. What was this world coming to? I couldn’t bear the violent cruelty of it any longer. I never did see my parents again that night. And I knew that sadly, going forward, this psychiatric institution had permanently destroyed the relationship I had built with them over the years for good. They had succeeded in separating kin. But Elie told me to be strong. I may have been entering their concentration camp as a marked Jew, but now, there was nowhere they could hide.

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