I have PTSD. For 10 months, I received psychiatric treatment from a hospital's inpatient or partial inpatient ward.

I was overmedicated and prescribed drugs that were doing much harm to my mental health and physical health. However, the psychiatrists told me, "You need to be on these drugs for the rest of your life."

Many of the other PTSD patients were also being overmedicated. However, I was one of the few lucky patients who had other counselors providing me real therapy, one-on-one patient-center counseling.

I felt like a zombie on those meds. The other patients looked and acted like zombies, too.

With the support of my husband and under the care of the hospital, I indefinitely stopped taking all psych meds against medical advice. (I continue with the one-on-one counseling.)

I don't think the proper treatment for PTSD should be doping patients up on tons of drugs. How will PTSD patients ever learn to cope with PTSD while being zombies on meds?

Emotional pain must be addressed, not numbed. Pain-killers, sleeping pills, sedatives, and etc., only add to the PTSD patient's avoidance of dealing with the trauma. Thus, sedating PTSD patients is a major abuse in which that hospital is guilty of doing to their mental health patients.

If I could stand in front of those psychiatrists today and tell them how wrong they are for what they did to me, what they are doing to their PTSD patients now . . . . If I had the courage to write THE WASHINGTON POST . . . .