I’m nitpicking every consultation and discharge summary. I'm looking for errors and recording them in a word document that I will attach to the Request for Correction to Personal Health Record form.
The hospital offered to correct my records twice before, but I did not have the courage to go through with it back then. Now I do and it hasn’t been easy reading through the documents. A lot of memories and feelings are surfacing. At times it’s overwhelming. I am also learning new things about what happened and why I was so poorly treated. I also discovered some disconcerting content, that I always suspected was present in my records. -- Assumptions about me were made based solely on my race.
Here are my first findings of discharge summary #1:
The disturbing content I have found in my records mentions that I grew up in a First Nations community and that my parents, specifically my father, were alcoholics. “The patient’s family history is significant for alcohol abuse in her father.” This is not true at all. The same psych resident wrote: “The patient also has a history of sexual abuse and physical abuse in the past.” She did not add anymore information to support those claims. None of this is true. She wrote in the social history portion, “The patient grew up on a reservation in Quebec and describes feeling “different throughout her life". She left it at that, not even bothering to explore why I felt different.
I felt a multitude of emotions as I read through the document. Anger and disappointment seem to be the strongest ones followed by sadness, disappointment and remorse. It is hard to understand why the staff psychiatrist and the resident were so willing to conclude that I was abused and came from a dysfunctional family. I suspect it is institutional racism, something I always felt even all those years ago. I know it is all due to my Cree heritage and where I grew up. Once they knew that, it made them myopic and it started a cognitive bias chain reaction.
Apparently all Indigenous people are drug addicts, child abusers, alcoholics, lazy unemployed bums who live dysfunctional lives. This is far from the truth.
They were too quick to judge and use assumed facts to diagnose me with a personality disorder (Axis II). I always suspected this was going on or as I prefer to call it - shaping the patient into the diagnosis.
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I’m in Ontario, Canada where there has been a lot of discussion about Indigenous people and the negative effects of colonization. Last fall there was a shocking incident in Quebec where an Indigenous lady died in hospital. Nursing staff said things to her that were very unprofessional and based on Indigenous stereotypes. Shortly before the lady died she recorded the interaction that was later shown on mainstream media. This incident, the recent discussion on residential schools, and my interactions with psychiatry made me wonder about the content in my records, specifically how much my Cree heritage influenced their assessments of me.
When I was assessed for autism spectrum disorder my mother attended one appointment, where she discussed my developmental history. She brought up my hospitalizations, specifically how bad I was treated along with my family. I remember her stating how she felt harshly judged and felt it was all due solely to race. It turns out she was correct.
There is definitely institutional racism and stereotyping, along with a lot of cognitive bias in psychiatry. My records support these observations.