Anna feels people with mental health difficulties face the view that their testimony is not reliable
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Anna was born at the end of the 1950s. She had a range of physical and developmental difficulties, including problems with hearing and speech which made it difficult to express herself.
She experienced a catalogue of abuse, in the family home and in psychiatric institutions. She now works as an advocate for vulnerable people.
Anna describes her childhood as ‘very difficult’. She was regularly sexually abused by her older brother, and this caused her to self-harm. She recalls one occasion when her mother found her and her brother together in bed, and blamed both children. Her mother told them it must never happen again but did nothing to prevent it and the abuse continued.
When she was aged between 12 and 13, Anna was excluded from school because of her special needs, and this made her more at more risk from her brother. The abuse escalated, and she began running away from home. Unable to fully express herself, she was seen as ‘a difficult child’. She was referred to a psychiatrist and at the age of 14, admitted to an adult psychiatric ward.
Anna describes a difficult time there, particularly as a young person on the unit. She was allocated a single room on the ward, which made her vulnerable to abuse.
Soon after her mother left on the first day a male nurse insisted on watching Anna undress and get ready for bed. Two days later the same nurse started to touch her breasts when she was in the shower. She remembers being completely terrified and freezing, feeling unable to do anything about it. That night the nurse came into her room and started to touch her genital area, telling her not to say anything.
The abuse made Anna scared of going to her room. She tried to resist going to bed, feeling safer in the communal areas of the ward with other patients. One night she and another patient were the last two left awake in the ward when two male nurses insisted that Anna went to bed. They gave her an injection and Anna says she woke up during the night to find one nurse raping her.
Petrified by what was happening, Anna told her mother she was not safe and needed to come home. She was taken to see the doctor and tried to explain that she was scared of the nurses as they were ‘doing bad things to her’. The doctor told her she was very sick and likely to be in hospital for a very long time.
She says: ‘I felt because I’d tried to speak out I was being punished.’
Anna relates that she was so scared of what might happen that she escaped from the hospital. She ended up in a long way away with no money, no proper clothes and slippers on her feet. She had not eaten for a long time and was suffering after-effects of medication. She was picked up by the police and after several days in a police station taken to an adult court and remanded to a prison for assessment. She was not charged with any offence.
At court a social worker insisted Anna be taken to a young people’s assessment centre where Anna says she felt a lot safer. She was subsequently taken back to court where the magistrates realised there was no reason for her to be there and allowed her to go home. Anna describes feeling ‘caught up in a system where people did not know what they were doing’.
Completely overwhelmed by being at home, she took an overdose and ended up in intensive care, and then another adult mental health unit. Here she was poorly looked after and left in her bed for long periods of time, heavily medicated, without food or water. She remembers getting out of bed to try and fetch a drink of water and being so weak she had to crawl along the floor. A male nurse shouted at her and kicked her.
She was also abused by a male nurse who said he would give her permission to go out of the ward only if she allowed him to touch her. He then touched her breasts. Anna describes how she felt yet again there was no escape from abuse, no matter where she went.
Anna’s experiences, on top of mental health difficulties, have had a profound effect on her. She has a complete distrust of medical professionals. She feels the only support she received was from other patients in hospital.
She considers that her physical, learning and communication difficulties were poorly understood at the time – she was told that she was mentally ill and needed to take drugs. From her teenage years she was regularly prescribed antipsychotic medication and she has had further spells in hospital as an adult, including under a mental health section. She has suffered PTSD symptoms.
She says that although the medication helped her to cope with what had happened by ‘dumbing her emotions’, it affected how she could function in her daily life for many years.
When she was in her 30s, Anna gave birth to her son who was born with severe developmental delay and physical disabilities. She believes this is a result of the medication that she had been taking, unnecessarily, for years.
She describes her son as ‘an amazing and brilliant young man’ of whom she is extremely proud, but she still suffers significant guilt that her long-term medication could be a contributory factor in his disabilities. She managed later the ‘extremely difficult process’ of withdrawing from the antipsychotic medication and gave birth to a healthy child.
Anna feel strongly that people with mental health difficulties are not believed, and this makes them very vulnerable to abuse. She says: ‘The system does not protect people in this situation in the way that it should. There is such an imbalance of power; children are powerless in the systems which should protect them.’
Anna now works successfully to protect vulnerable people. She is involved with mental health and welfare rights advocacy and contributes to policy and practice development as a member of a governmental advisory group.
She adds: ‘What happened to me will always have an impact, but it won’t overwhelm me like it might have in the past.’