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7/20/2015 ~ Although I live every day of my life with what Haldol did to me, reading my description of its forced administration nearly two decades ago fills me with revulsion.
For many years if I drove near UNM I would break out in a cold sweat.
What happened was that I asked a bankruptcy clerk for a copy of a filing of mine, but they couldn’t find it. That was around 1998. I remarked to the clerk that if things that were supposed to protect me continued to fail me there was going to be a day when I would kill myself. The clerk went to the chief clerk and said I’d threatened to kill myself. He called the police.
When I went out to the hallway, which was wide in the old Albuquerque Bankruptcy Courthouse on Gold, the hallway was filled with police with guns. I was taken to UNM’s mental health facility. My rights were never read to me.
When I told the people at UNM about myself and how I’d been protesting abuse by IRS, I said they could see a story run by US News & World Report, using some of my experience. The mental health staff reported this saying that I’d found an article about someone with the same name as mine and I’d begun to think it was me. My picture hadn’t been run with the story.
US News & World Report piece about Abuse by IRS ~ Read more.
I made friends with nearly everyone in the unit. One roommate of mine helped me rearrange the furniture a bit and was super nice, though she didn’t talk. Staff told me she was catatonic. I found that hard to believe since she was so responsive when I wanted to communicate with her.
One evening I saw a man with her. She looked wary and didn’t want him to touch her. He looked threatening, so I told the staff. They said, oh it was all right, it was her husband and he brought her in every so often. She was going to have electric shock therapy. They also said she didn’t speak much English so they couldn’t really tell what she was saying.
I was horrified.
She did not want the electric shock therapy. Next morning at breakfast she was not given anything to eat or drink in preparation for the electric shock. She wanted some of my orange juice and I said fine. She drank some and staff went into hyper mode: Now she couldn’t have the treatment at the time it was scheduled.
Another person in the unit was a young fellow who’d thrown himself in front of a bus when his girlfriend broke up with him. He was really nice and had come to rethink what he’d done. It had been, after all, painful.
One day in a group therapy session the therapist disputed his name. She wanted him to stop going by the name he had been known by for many years. It was a regular name, but something like Fred James. She insisted his name was James and that was how she would address him, until he pulled out his driver’s license which in fact showed that his last name was James, not his first name.
And on and on.
When it became clear that they were thinking of forcibly administering Haldol to me, I called a man from USA Today whose aunt had painted a large canvas I had, as well as another smaller one. I had called her one day to see if she would buy one back. When I told her my name she said, “Oh, are you the Karen Kline in the US News & World Report article about IRS abuse?”
I was stunned. I mean, how on earth did she come to guess that? Which of course I asked, right after I said that I was. Turns out her nephew had worked at US News & World Report at the time and had told her about the story and me, since I too lived in Santa Fe.
I forget his name just now, but he kindly spoke with me for long enough for me to explain my predicament. I wanted him to help me by verifying who I was. He said he’d like to but there was this big story about to break and he had to get back to it. It was about President Clinton and everyone in Washington was focused on the story because it was big.
That evening news broke about Monica Lewinski and President Clinton. I should have told the staff after I called USA Today, what I’d been told, but I hadn’t. They mostly hadn’t believed anything I said, so I guess that influenced my decision not to tell them. After the news I realized it might have been convincing if I’d told them prior to the news.
Every one of my friends was released, even the ones who said they were not ready. The next day I was forcibly administered Haldol. They threw me to the floor, yes, “threw”. I had black and blue marks from the force, and injected me with Haldol, then put me in solitary.
I will add that when I was taken from the courthouse I did not have a gun, a knife or any plan to kill myself or hurt anyone. If you look at my site you can see that hurting people is not what I am about.
From then until now I have not been able to feel things the way I used to. There was a long time when it was like there was a glass partition between me and things I wanted to think about, I couldn’t get to them. I could observe them at a distance, but not feel that they were a part of me or my reality. Now I avoid trying to have feelings that are associated with experiences and things. Yes, tears still come to my eyes, but the reaction has a separateness from feelings.
Psych drugs not guns cause violent shootings ~ Read more.
Psych drugs and shooters (cases) ~ Read more.
Research shows that nutrition works better than medications with longer lasting results. This is true for ADHD, depression, psychosis, etc. when it comes to mental health:
The surprisingly dramatic role of nutrition in mental health – TED talk by Julia Rucklidge …
Artwork at top is from a page on Pamela Spiro Wagner’s site in which she talks about Haldol ~ Visit site.
UNITED STATES BANKRUPTCY COURT
DISTRICT OF NEW MEXICO
MOTION TO NOTE MONTHLY PAYMENTS OF FEES.
TO BE ABLE TO FILE ELECTRONICALLY
COMES NOW, Karen Marie Kline, pro se, and states: I get $598 Social Security now. They had said I’d get it in November, 2007, but it started in December. I called but couldn’t understand or remember why they said it had changed. I heat with candles. It was cold in December and January, but it is heat I can count on and I’m saving money. I should be able to pay my Chapter 11 filing fee over some months.
Because I am going into foreclosure again I will explain the things that are causing this extremely distressing event and I attach a copy of the Order from my Chapter 13 that I am relying on.
One thing is the violations of the automatic stay. They were shattering.
Another is my mental disability. It is hard to get accommodation. In my 1997 Chapter 11 I had difficulty thinking and could not keep two different hearings held on one day straight. I had difficulty thinking and talking at the same time, luckily the Court allowed me to read what I prepared.
Several things have contributed to my mental disability. In chronological order they are low vitamin B12, known to cause depression and cognition dysfunction; Haldol and possibly the associated trauma in 1998; and, falling and hitting my head on the brick floor in 2001 after I was living in hydrogen sulfide caused by the privy pit under my condo and I had begun to lose feeling. After my fall I have no memory of going for the x rays that are in my medical file, and since then my memory has ranged from nonexistent to impaired. I am very slow when I do and think things.
The Haldol experience was traumatic because of the force used to administer it and the fact that lies were used to justify the force as well as the Haldol which made me shuffle, blurred my vision and caused me to shake and have difficulty talking. The shaking is called tardive dyskinesia when it becomes permanent and then there is no known cure. I hope it does not come back.
When I was taken from the bankruptcy court’s clerk’s office to UNM Mental Health Center I was never allowed to face my accusers who said I had been barricaded in at the IRS building threatening to kill people. That was false, but I had an expensively dressed court appointed lawyer who trotted out the things she apparently always trotted out and it was decided to forcefully administer Haldol to me, which in some cases is known to cause death. I now understand why the other people at the Center thought the lawyer was a joke. But not funny.
Since the Haldol I have not been able to think in the same way I was able to think prior to that drug and experience. I can’t put things together the way that I was able to before. At first I had nightmares about not being able to get to my thoughts; I wrote some down. When I asked the neurologist, Dr. Baten, about it he said it could be the trauma or a physical change in my brain from the Haldol. I have tried to deal with the trauma but I still am scared a lot of the time which I understand is typical with post traumatic stress disorder. I have not been able to regain my ability to think complex things in the way that I was able to before. Now, if I can make a complex thing linear, then I can “think” about it, otherwise it’s as if it won’t fit into my mind.
I don’t know if Haldol does what it did to me to everyone, or if it does this when vitamin B12 levels are low and nerves are vulnerable, or if it did it because prior to the forced injections I was unable to sleep for five or six nights due to nasal drainage and UNM’s refusal to give me vitamin A which I have used for many years to control the drainage. UNM said that vitamin A is too dangerous. UNM’s statement in view of their use of Haldol in the absence of any testing gives insight into the woeful reality of “treatment” of mental disability and illness in the United States.
From my experience I must conclude that the kind of inhuman treatment without rights that I experienced is bad for society as a whole. How can any good come from destroying a part of someone’s mind? especially when the part that is destroyed is that used to evaluate and make connections between things. How many “mentally ill” mass killers were made incapable of using their working memories by so called “treatment” that has taken from them the breaks that would be put on by proper thinking and full ability to weigh things and consider connections and outcomes?
Because the Court by its nature is composed of influential people to whom others will listen when they will not hear my words of caution, if you have an opportunity to affect for the better the way that drugs are forced on people, please take that opportunity to promote reduction in the use of drugs which alter people’s minds beyond their control, and to stop drugging done without due process on the basis of unverified accusations from unchallengeable accusers. If it had been a traffic ticket I would have had a right to face the policeman who gave me the ticket, but because I was accused of a mental problem I was denied the right to face my accuser. The consequences of that to the rest of my life are appalling. But what is most shocking is that if this was done to me, in the way that it was done, then it surely is done repeatedly to many others.
When I was tested, thereafter, by the Division of Vocational Rehabilitation, my working memory was shown to be reduced by half.
In daily life as long as I am going along doing one thing I can manage. But when that thing becomes more complicated, as for instance if I have to call for tech support, then I can say what I have been doing, but when the tech gives me an answer, I can’t assimilate it. I can’t ask about it or discuss the meaning of the answer. If the answer is something with steps and the tech will stay on the line to help me from step to step, then I have a solution that may have taken four times as long as when I was mentally able, but which is nonetheless a solution.
Sometimes techs insist that the answer is too obvious for there to be a problem. The fact that it is not obvious to me is incomprehensible to them. For instance, I was able to make enough money to pay my mortgage each month by trading stocks. It was good exercise for my mind because of the different facets to a stock. But TD Ameritrade changed their Command Center which had helped me do things quickly enough to trade — loss of speed is a significant problem for me since the traumatic brain injury when I fell and hit my head.
Because I can write more easily and clearly than I can talk, probably because it’s slower, I emailed TD Ameritrade for tech support. I got misinformation and no solution to the problem of the new Command Center showing only the cents after I put in a change to my order. Because I couldn’t remember the dollar amount I needed to be able to see it.
After months of asking for help a day came when the market was going down too fast for me without Command Center to help me. I lost a few thousand dollars; worst of all was losing the way that I had been able to make money. After I could no longer trade profitably and my capital was no longer supplemented by $800 a month from trading, my capital didn’t last long.
Further, when PNM shut off my lights and heat it was on a day when I was going to make trades that would have made about $50 to $76 profit. PNM came unexpectedly, refused to give me two days to transfer money to pay them, and shut me off, leaving me without heat, lights, phone. At the time my legs were unexpectedly giving out which made walking to a phone hazardous, too hazardous, I felt. That was April 4, 2007. By the time the Easter weekend was over and I had found an old phone that didn’t use electricity I decided I couldn’t risk trusting PNM again.
My disability contributed to the PNM problem because I didn’t remember the time and I had the wrong amount of money in the bank to pay PNM, so I needed two days. Instead of granting two days PNM punished me for my disability and I had to live in cold that caused me to shiver violently, in the dark when without light I have severely reduced balance and I ended up with black and blue marks from bumping into things and falling, and with no phone to call for help for most of a week.
Now I have solar and heat with candles. The reduction in stress has helped my nerves – tetanus, which I had, is a central nervous system disease. I’ve regained some feeling and have less pain. I still don’t drive due to the way my legs moved involuntarily for such a long time: I don’t want to have an accident and hurt someone.
The reason it has taken me so long to do this is that something alwayscomes up to set me back. For instance, the City of Santa Fe would not grant me two days, either, and they shut off my water and I had no water for a day. I couldn’t take anything for pain without water, or even vitamins since without water they can damage the liver. After that I had difficulty controlling my fingers to type and talking was even more difficult. I’m still recovering and it’s been months.
Because all of the above is true I hope the Court sees that I need accommodation of my disability and that without it my disability will cause me to fail to properly prosecute my action for violation of the automatic stay. (As I understand it, this court being a federal court, is not bound by the ADA, Title II. So I simply wish very strongly for the accommodation I need.)
I need more time as an accommodation and I need to be able to file electronically. There is a new post office rule which says that anything 13 ounces or over must be taken to the post office to mail. My appeal brief was returned to my mail box outside my door because it was over 13 ounces. Now, mailing items with several pages costs me a minimum of $30 to hire someone to go to the post office plus the cost of the stamps. Sometimes I do not have the money for even the stamps. $30 would be a small amount of money but for the violations of stay that took such a huge portion of what I had.
I understand that the rules may disallow electronically filing anything with as many pages as my brief, but by being able to save along the way, when it comes to the large filings I will have been able to save the money to hire someone to take them and mail them at the post office for me.
I am sending in the form with my social security number with this motion, but not attached.
After I had the money from the sale of my single family rental I went through my list of creditors and paid them until the condo problem happened and I was overwhelmed.
WHEREFORE, I pray the Court grant, so that I can prosecute willful violation of automatic stay, accommodation of more time when it comes to things that are governed by time: twice the time would be a great help; and say that I can file electronically, and whatever other relief the Court deems to be right and just. Money Order for $150 was enclosed with Chapter 13 motion.
Respectfully submitted,
Karen Kline
xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Santa Fe, New Mexico 87507
xxx xxx xxxx
CERTIFICATE OF SERVICE: I caused a true copy of the above to be mailed today, February 26, 2008, to:
Deutsche, Richard Leverick, 5120 San Francisco Road NE Albq., NM 87109
xxxxxxxxx
Wells Fargo, Kelly J. McMullen, Shapiro & Meinhold 13725 Struthers Road,
Suite 201 Colorado Springs, CO 80921 xxxxxxxxxx
Wells Fargo, Sharon Hankla, Castle, Meinhold & Stawiarski 13725 Struthers
Road, Suite 201 Colorado Springs, CO 80921 xxxxxxxxxxxx