Hospital Review: HBM in Worcester Almost Killed Me

Hi all, first off, sorry for the appearance of my website right now. Something’s wrong with the CSS. I’m working on it.

So, I was recently at this hospital with the uncreative title of “Hospital for Behavioral Medicine” (or “HBM” for short) in Worcester. Suffice it to say, it was the single most traumatic event of my life. So, that was the last two weeks in June. When I got out, I still had enough of a glimmer of hope in humanity to write to the Department of Mental Health. So, I wrote this and sent it in to them:

https://apostateturtle.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/HBM-Complaint_final-redacted.pdf

I redacted it for blogging purposes but aside from the black marker, that’s what I sent. Honestly, I figured that they might or might not read it, but it seemed to be worth a shot.

So, on Friday 7/20, my landlady gives me notice to quit. Back in March I had sold my own blood to a plasma bank and spent countless hours on the bus to procure $90, which I then spent on groceries. When her maintenance issues caused the power to go out and all my food spoiled, I deducted it from my rent. I told her this innumerable times, she never said she had a problem with it. Meanwhile, the rent is supposed to be a third of my income, but she refused to adjust it to reflect my actual gross pay, so what she was charging was >100% of my income. So I was two months behind. A lot of this feels like it should be understandable, and I was going to pay her when she adjusted my rent because she never told me she was still mad about the groceries. Anyway, she ultimately decided to not adjust the rent, and sent me an eviction notice instead. A lot of this did directly tie back to my having been incarcerated at HBM, because that made all my paperwork late.

Monday morning 7/22, DMH calls and they’re extremely pissed because they felt like HBM did nothing wrong and basically if you’re a mental patient, you have no legal rights anymore. Now, at that point, after two weeks of torture in the insane asylum, I’d spent almost a month having PTSD full-time. I don’t even remember the past month very well, it’s just a blur of nightmares, trying to cope, etc. Once DMH called and said that they weren’t going to do anything (which it’s like, then why call?) this kicked into turbo mode. Nobody was going to stand up for me, so there was no reason the same thing couldn’t happen again.

My thing was, I had to just commit suicide or not. There was no way to talk to someone about what was going on. Even if you *67 a hotline, there’s the risk they can triangulate your phone and send you to HBM. Which, to me, HBM is most certainly a fate worse than death. So it’s not like I even really wanted to die, as much as I felt like it was the only way to really be safe from HBM. And there was nobody who I could safely reach out to.

Wednesday 7/24 I get a letter from social security that I missed a previous piece of mail and now they were cutting off my benefits retroactively starting in January, and I owed them almost $5,000. Which, as an aside, if you’re wondering why people are afraid to go back to work after being on disability, this is why: if you have a flare-up in symptoms, you have no income, no food stamps, and you lose your home.

Anyway, as strange as it feels, I think I would have been able to cope with all this if I weren’t having trauma symptoms 24/7. As it was, I was so afraid of ending up back at HBM, that I had the knife picked out for days. I went through constant drills in my mind as to how I could be unrevivable within five minutes if first responders were on their way. Because first responders meant a section, which would mean a bed search, which could mean HBM. And for literal days, I couldn’t breathe a word of this to anyone.

It just felt like death would be the only way to be safe from other people. HBM, the landlady, social security… none of them would be able to hurt me if I were dead.

Finally, my ACCS clinician told me that they had managed to put a note in my chart saying not to send me to HBM if I was ever on another bed search. I cracked, she sent me to the emergency room, and I’m back at McLean, where they actually help people.

There’s just no reason I should have had to go through all that. If other people hadn’t gone out of their way to ensure that I could safely go on a bed search, I would have been dead. The problem with HBM is that their existence makes emergency services inaccessible. I couldn’t tell anyone that I was suicidal, and I certainly couldn’t go to the emergency room, so I was left using services that are not supposed to be used in an emergency, and being forced to lie to everyone saying that I wasn’t suicidal. When I definitely was suicidal and desperately wanted help but couldn’t safely ask for it. Like this message to my poor psychiatrist:

Even resources like r/suicidewatch felt unsafe, because what if somebody figured out that it was me? I do want to thank the people at r/therapyabuse because they were the closest thing I could find to a confidant. I’m going to protect the other users’ privacy and just only quote my own self here:

So, when I tell you that Hospital for Behavioral Medicine in Worcester, MA is killing people, I hope you won’t think I’m exaggerating. Because of them, I experienced massive psychological damage, and then had no access to emergency services for almost a month. I mean, I happened to survive. It’s a matter of time until someone doesn’t.