[Trigger and content warning]

Due to my experience with my former work partner, I became suicidal and was voluntarily committed to a hospital on November 24, 2016. The words ‘we’re going to numb you’ sounded like a solution when they were proposed to ‘take the pain away’. But has anything been solved since 2016?

For the record: this is not an anti-medication post. Prescription medication for mental health issues such as depression can be incredibly valuable and if you are suffering you always should speak to a doctor about this. Don’t let this post scare you to seek help.

I recently went off all my doctor administered medication in order to prepare for trauma therapy. It took 3 years before I was given permission to receive that therapy.

‘Get as emotional as possible’ was the assignment to be able to finally do it. Getting there took another year of preparation: evaluations from and interviews with different mental health professionals and analysing which traumas had to be treated to achieve the best results.. It all sounded so promising.

However, I left the specialised trauma clinic I was receiving treatment at recently. I left after I was encouraged, during an EMDR session, to torture one of my abusers.

‘Fantasy revenge’ apparently is a therapy technique that works very well for some people to overcome post-traumatic stress disorder, but it clearly wasn’t for me. I didn’t respond well to the suggestion. I won’t go into too many details, except that it involved a flight response and that people at the clinic then tried to keep me there while I told them explicitly I wanted to leave (which I was allowed to), and when they tried to prevent me from leaving, it made it all worse.

I learned a lot about myself that day. For example, that I am very much able to say (and scream) no these days, when people cross my boundaries and I feel unsafe. I was happy to find out that my family and friends understood my reasons for leaving the clinic.

After this recent event, I started evaluating the mental health care I received since 2016. Specifically: the medication I was given. It’s something I want to shed light on, because I think it’s an important part of my journey that might help others understand the paths I’ve walked.

The biggest problem in my situation, is that many diagnoses I received, were given in hindsight in the beginning of 2017, because they were originally missed.

In November and December 2016, my health care professionals at the hospital were very much focused on the ‘suicidal autistic person’ that was hospitalised. I was indeed a suicidal autistic person, but there was more. By the time those helping me realised (and diagnosed) what I had been going through was actually acute stress disorder followed by post-traumatic stress disorder, it was a little late: I had already been put on so much medication, which looking back, begs the question: was it the right thing to do?

I was given an anti-depressive (Zoloft) that to put it metaphorically, made me able to see, smell and touch a cookie, but I wouldn’t be able to taste it. Emotions were still there, but felt very foreign and strange and confusing. I responded very badly to this all. It caused a burst in energy. I would almost say I became manic for a few days, but it wouldn’t be the right word to describe it. The right word would probably be: I became ‘suicidally euphoric’ temporarily. Everything became dark humour and seemed ridiculous. I very publicly started to joke about suicide and started putting balloons all over the hospital department because it seemed to make sense: visually making it a happy place, because it all was visually as depressive as I felt. Another autistic patient and I used the hospital to play hide-and-seek, and that was essentially the beginning of my road down the mental gutter. Because soon the Zoloft had ‘settled’ and the ‘suicidal happiness’ and ‘mocking the system’ disappeared and the nightmares escalated and I became scared of falling asleep.

The crying started. Lots of it. The fear became overwhelming.

I was given a tranquilizer called Alprazolam (Xanax). This reduced my ability to talk clearly, move my body properly, communicate effectively, recognise danger signs in time (let alone respond to them quickly), made me drowsy, and overall was horrible. I probably fell down the stairs more times between 2017-2019 than in the ten years prior and was constantly spotting bruises due to accidents.

I was also given an anti-psychotic named Seroquel and was given this off-label to deal with my sleeping problems. In other words: a medication usually used to treat schizophrenia or bipolar-disorder, was given to a non-psychotic person to help her sleep. It apparently was the go-to medicine at the hospital for most patients who had nightmares and were restless at night. Everyone was pretty much on Seroquel, it seemed.

The short-release version of Seroquel is pretty bold: I would take it and within 15 minutes just dropped down sleeping. The problem for me, was that I would then be stuck in nightmares, for hours. So while this medication did help me to fall asleep, the PTSD nightmares and sleep paralysis could then take me hostage and I would barely be able to wake up from it. Being unable to wake-up from your nightmares is pretty shit. Apparently during them I would tighten my muscles, clench my teeth and grind them, cry and talk about ‘darkness’, which I found out through a sleeping-app that recorded me at night (including my cries).

The side-effects of Seroquel were next to this, weight gaining. I gained 20 kilos in 3 months because I was too tired to move during the day. This made me even more exhausted: excess weight. And also, even more depressed.

To fight these side-effects, I was among others put on Topamax, an anti-epileptic, while I’m not epileptic. Topamax appears to have as side-effect for some that you lose weight, so it seemed like a good choice. Except it made me impulsive. Incredibly emotional. Made me want to hurt myself.

I was also put on Ritalin, a medication meant mainly for people with ADHD, while I don’t have ADHD. The ‘upper’ was meant to give me back the energy the Seroquel (a ‘downer’) had been slurping out of my body. The side-effects of it? It created a bold ongoing energy and amplified a specific autistic trait of mine: hyperfocus.

At the time people were spreading lies on the internet about me, and there were even people pretending to be me, and I became obsessed with the online abuse and injustice I was facing. When anonymous accounts tell you things that happened to you didn’t happen - it’s a cruel kind of gaslighting, especially because you don’t know who’s doing it.

I started to fight the online abuse. Due to the Zoloft, Seroquel, Xanax and Topamax on top of the Ritalin, you can maybe imagine what I became: an activistic weapon. An autistic person with a medically induced super hyper-focus and elevated impulsivity and emotional outbursts. Now add to that PTSD trauma trigger responses and you can imagine the situation: screaming on the internet when people targeted me, CAPSLOCK, calling out everyone including their mother for the injustice in the world, CAPSLOCK, and fighting the injustice I was facing.

I started researching the patterns of it all, the patterns of injustice, and started to fight for other victims. I tried to hold abusers and politicians and companies and governments accountable for their actions, started hammering on enablement and complicity, and questioned everyone who supported abusers and didn’t call out the obvious, etc. Every time I would receive a hateful anonymous message or found a new page where my name was smeared, I would lash out online and call out my former work partner and his fans for the defamation he had caused. This became a daily thing when I started receiving death threats for breakfast and messages for dinner saying I should kill myself.

It pissed off a lot of people who absolutely had no idea what was going on and didn’t take any effort to research the situation and instead believed the lies. It also drew even more (anonymous) people towards me who sadistically enjoyed seeing me struggle and turned triggering me into their hobby.

There were people - mainly others who recognised themselves in me - who saw my trigger responses for what they were and did see through it all. These people were the first who started researching my story, backing up the evidence of the online abuse I was facing, started calling it out. That was the good that came from all of this.

Due to these strangers, activists started amplifying my voice, journalists started investigating my story, strangers on the internet cried with me and disclosed their own traumas in private (which triggered me even more and turned me into the full-blown activist I became around 2018), and when the first news article appeared on my situation and I testified against the police publicly in September (2018) concerning their mistreatment of victims, slowly more order was created in the chaos for those on the outside, and more people started taking me serious after seeing the inside.

Meanwhile, mentally, I was falling off a cliff, obsessed with the lack of justice in the world and all the people who ignored this. I read the news about it daily and info-dumped it on anybody who wanted to listen to what I had found: babies raped in India, parents who had tortured their children in America, a conviction rate in rape cases of less than 2% in Northern Ireland.. If I wasn’t researching the news, I was researching the law and International Treaties and statistics which only made me more hopeless when comparing them to news articles. Governments worldwide were shitting on Human Rights, the Istanbul Convention, their own laws that were made to so called ‘protect’ their citizens, etc. As an autistic person who appreciates fairness, clarity and rules, seeing so many people break them on a daily basis, was infuriating. Seeing so many people victimised by a system, sickening. Where is all our tax money going? Surely not to protecting the vulnerable and justice!

Physically I started feeling more ill by the month. My once very regular 5 day period became irregular and menstruating for 2 weeks in a row became the new normal. Headaches became the new normal. Constantly taking pain relievers, also.

I started growing lipoma (benign tumor made of fat tissue) as a result of the medication weight gaining and eventually needed surgery in 2019 to have one removed from my back. Seeing the ‘the light go out’ during general anaesthesia and it being turned ‘back on again’, made me feel unreal, and didn’t help my mental state at the time.

More pills were tried, eventually I became terribly scared of the Xanax and Topamax due to the side-effects, so I went off them, tried other things. It was just pill on pill and trying new pills for the side-effects of those pills.

Daily events started to merge at night with traumatic memories from the past. Even a simple argument with a family member could turn into a horrible abuse nightmare where a family member would change face with my abuser and hurt me. My days started consisting of constant flashbacks to events that transpired in 2016. Names of places, objects, books, films, even certain English phrases, could instantly put me in a PTSD episode that in the beginning lasted for minutes, eventually hours, and finally weeks.

I started developing extreme startle responses, sometimes between 40-80 times a day. My body was put in a constant fight-or-flight state due to the ongoing adrenaline boosts. A fork suddenly scraping a plate while having dinner with family, a plane flying over, someone moving suddenly towards me, crackling of plastic, high pitched sounds, all these things would cause startle responses. It was exhausting. I dreaded going outside to meet people, because every time I did those I met got really worried about me when they saw these responses. It was embarrassing. I started wearing noise-cancelling headphones everywhere to escape sudden sounds, constantly having a number on repeat playing on the background, so I could focus and stay calm.

When I went into anaphylactic shock in 2019 as a result of an allergic reaction, the ambulance had to take me to the hospital because the first shot of epinephrine (adrenaline) they gave me at home, didn’t work. The doctors didn’t understand why, even until this day. They had to give me two shots eventually and a bunch of other medication, telling me later they thought they were afraid of losing me. Could it be that due to having been in a constant state of elevated adrenaline in my body these last few years, my allergies had now become life threatening because the life saving epinephrine I sometimes need, was not working well anymore, because I was constantly in a fight-flight response? It seems unlikely but still, I became terribly scared of my PTSD as a result.

And then the PTSD got even worse. I had been refused trauma therapy for years - even by a second opinion - due to ‘repeated and secondary traumatisation’ the ongoing criminal case concerning my former work partner was causing. Professionals said since the case was ongoing, it would undo trauma therapy and could potentially make my PTSD worse. For years I felt forced to settle for this: the non-treatment I was receiving.

Meanwhile, I was called every name in the book online, which all originally started since my former work partner had spread lies about me in his fan-club and to his social network. I started calling him names too, screaming on Twitter that he was dragging the case on and on because he refused to voluntarily turn up for the police interrogation, and by doing so, was undermining my recovery. I started asking for help publicly.

My former work partner obviously didn’t care. While I was battling the defamation and bloody PTSD, he went on holidays to the UK, Germany, Serbia, and even America, all paid for by his fans, of which I all was informed of by his former friends who showed me the evidence of it. He ran from the criminal case and ignored all the requests from his (former) fans and people in the public eye, to turn himself in.

That was until in 2019 the police finally managed to get in contact with him and warned him: if he wouldn’t come over for interrogation at this point, they would file a European Arrest Warrant. His reply? He made demands. He wanted to see the case files before coming over. He also wanted a lawyer present. The police - who told me in confidence they absolutely don’t agree with the Dutch law over this - were forced to hand over the files my former work partner demanded. Apparently in The Netherlands, suspects in a criminal abuse case are allowed to see the evidence in the case against them - including the criminal complaint - before interrogation.

You read that right. Suspects in such a case here, are allowed to prepare themselves before interrogation. So before a suspect is even asked ‘Where were you on this date and this time and what happened’, they already know what a victim exactly described happened that day. The suspect is given all the tools to defend themselves and make-up a story if they want to.

After my former work partner demanded the case files, he was finally interrogated in October 2019 - 3 years after he abused me the first time. He used his right to remain silent when it came to any question about the abuse. He said things such as ‘no comment’ and ‘I don’t want to answer that’ concerning questions such as if he raped me (rape here refers to the Dutch criminal code of rape, which defines rape as any kind of sexual penetration while using violence or threat).

The waiting for this interrogation which he managed to postpone for years, an interrogation during which he essentially said nothing, was among others what prevented me from getting proper help for years. When I found out his answers in it, I was floored. Was this the reason why I was forced to put my life on hold for years? For a man only to stay silent? I had been prepared for everything by professionals: that he would potentially lie in the interrogation and that I had to be interrogated again as a result and show more evidence in the case to prove he lied; the ‘repeated traumatisation’ everyone expected. Only that repeated traumatisation didn’t happen in the shape of him denying the crimes. It happened based on him staying silent and holding me psychologically in his power until he did.

The ‘treatment’ I received until that point, was ‘sit it out with pills’, while having a psychiatric nurse available to me on a weekly basis to talk to me and whenever I needed to speak over the phone. My nurse visited me at home so I didn’t have to leave the house. Thus, I could happily avoid the world and its people physically, which my PTSD liked a lot.

Psychotherapy was declined because I am autistic and apparently it ‘doesn’t work on autistic people’. Or so two psychologists said. Occasionally I had to go to the hospital to see a psychiatrist to find the ‘right’ medication constantly. Multiple psychiatrists actually, because the hospital changed psychiatrists every year. The only stable factor in my mental health plan was medication and my psychiatric nurse - who’s been with me since 2017.

Hundreds of panic attacks and PTSD episodes and thousands of flashbacks and nightmares later, in the beginning of 2020, I couldn’t take it anymore. At this point I had developed complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The good intentions of not treating the PTSD to not make it worse, had escalated to cPTSD.

I told my psychiatric nurse that I wasn’t sure I would survive 2020 if I didn’t get treatment - and he completely understood and was fed up too with the ‘waiting’ I had been subjected to. I made it clear to everyone around me I needed to at least try trauma-therapy and was sick of the medication and the waiting. Since my former work partner was finally interrogated, I knew this was the moment to pursue the therapy, since the case couldn’t possibly take much longer. So plans were made.

Eventually in late summer I went off all my prescribed medication to give the planned trauma therapy the best chance. I suddenly felt and experienced the full spectrum of my own (not-chemically enhanced or reduced) emotions again - as well as my thoughts.

Unfortunately for me during this time, everything that could go wrong went wrong (Murphy’s law huh?). I found out my own government was lying in the criminal case concerning my former work partner, even going as far as manipulating evidence in the case.

I fell into the worst derealisation episode as a result of feeling all my emotions again not amplified or numbed, and my own government being a fraud, during the summer of 2020.

Derealisation is when you feel detached from your surroundings, your body. People and objects around you may seem unreal. You're aware that this altered state isn't normal. You know it’s happening and you don’t lose sight of reality (don’t confuse derealisation with psychosis), but it’s still absolutely terrifying.

My brain tried to cope with reality, all my emotions, by telling me it wasn’t real, that I wasn’t real, my life wasn’t real, that this was just some sort of nightmare I had to wake-up from. People told me my life seemed like a movie at the time, and it actually started to look like one too.

To me, things would look flat and 2D and less colourful (de-saturated): as if I was on the outside looking in, watching a screen. My body felt numb. I felt less pain physically. The nightmares were terrifying, even more horrible than before. The flashbacks became almost constant. I barely slept. It all caused major panic attacks and (again) me being unable to sleep. While I was trying to do normal things, I constantly saw 2016 flashing in the background.

I had had smaller derealisation episodes before, but nothing like this: 2 months of it. My family worked over-hours to keep me calm, constantly reassuring me it wouldn’t take long before it all would stop. My new psychiatrist diagnosed the episode as a consequence of getting off the medication: I was now experiencing the CPTSD in full and just had to get through it until December, when I would go in for trauma-treatment. My psychiatrist gave me the option to go back on medication - but I wasn’t allowed to use anything numbing because then I couldn’t go to the treatment center. So I declined. Everyone around me encouraged me to start fighting now: for my brain. For my health. For a life without medication. So I did.

At the middle of October 2020, after having gone off all the meds and roughly 2 months of derealisation, I had my first ‘clear’ moment in 4 years. For a few days, the derealisation stopped, and finally I experienced my ‘point zero’: my consciousness without the chemically-elevated emotions that had now evaporated, and all the suppressed feelings that had come to the surface. A moment I wrote down:

It’s October.

I look in the mirror. My hair is long.

How come it’s so long?

I had extensions. But these aren’t extensions.

This is my own hair.

I feel the strains. They are real. This is real hair.

What the fuck happened?

I look at my phone. Check the date.

It’s 2020. It’s 2020?!

I look at myself. See my lips moving.

I listen to the woman who tells me to stay calm.

‘Pieke, you went missing.’

Pills. Trauma. Blood. Betrayal.

Cold turkey off meds.

4 YEARS.

My God.

I really went missing.

I cannot for the love of God describe exactly what it feels like, ‘waking up’ from all that crap which I fell into immediately after going off the meds, to only then find out how I had truly been feeling all these years. I’ll try to describe it.

I was horrified. ABSOLUTELY HORRIFIED.

I opened my Dropbox and suddenly realised what dark hole I had created these last few years: TEN THOUSANDS of printscreens and videos of online violence and death threats and diaries and criminal complaints and images of websites and documents and recorded telephone conversations with the police and government organisations and messages and communication and everything I thought I had to capture to protect myself. Folders linked to other folders and dozens of IP addresses that targeted me via my website coming from Reddit that I had tried to trace and unmask and link to a bunch of Reddit accounts targeting me. Communication with hackers who tried to help me. A whole lot of anonymous warnings from people spanning years, pointing me to message boards and communities where I was targeted. All these files were hidden in dozens of folders filed with hundreds of keywords to be able to find them - some even coded, because they concerned confidential information from other activists or victims.

I then went through all my Tweets and things I wrote the last few years and I could not recognise the person who wrote them. Was that me? That was me. But who was that me? It sounded so unlike me.

I could see the person who wrote those things was extremely traumatised when she wrote it all - impulsive, emotional, triggered, trying to make things clear she couldn’t really get across properly due to the medication she was on. Walls of text going into extreme detail. Chaos. My name in the newspapers. My name in the newspapers. My name in the newspapers?? I was there, right, when all that happened? I could remember the interviews, the hundreds of documents and dozens of videos I handed over to journalists, but it almost seemed like someone else gave them.

The true realisation of all that. The actual realisation of that. Seeing four years of your life suddenly for what they are, while not being chemically enhanced/numbed by medication. Holy shit. I was in survival mode for 4 years. I had created a warrior. But I’m not a fucking warrior.

I wrote down how it made me feel:

But where was I?

And who was she?

These last 4 years

What happened to me?

And what happened to you?

I’m looking in

From the outside

And I’m the outside

looking in

because we made the inner like the outer

and the outer like the inner

the lower like the upper

the female and the male

into just a single one

made eyes instead of an eye

a hand in place of a hand

a foot in place of a foot

I’m looking in

from the outside

and I’m the outside

looking in

The dark side of justice

incredible numbness

was losing everything

including me

And then came the realisation: I lost myself in 2016. I went missing.

Not just literally - because I did disappear right before I was hospitalised and drove to Norway in a state of distress - but also figuratively.

The result of losing myself is that I am now a whistleblower. That was another realisation that blew my mind, as I skimmed through the e-mails of journalists and politicians. Seeing - and truly realising - that I apparently had ‘achieved’ things. Political discussion, because I had screamed on the internet so much, people couldn’t ignore me anymore.

I don’t think I could have done anything I did these last few years, without losing myself. Someone took place of me for a very long time who was able to survive the hell - a person so under the influence of meds, she was able to do what I couldn’t back then. I was too afraid to fight my abuser. I was terrified of him. I was afraid of how he made me feel like I had to kill myself. So I allowed doctors to drug me and turn me into someone who could fight him.

I don’t recognise that person now. But it was me. And I’m sorry about that. I’m not sorry for the good things I was able to achieve - holding a number of people and even a government accountable - but I am sorry for not having been able to do all that, as who I used to be.

Now - there’s a lot to say for being angry when facing injustice and that at times it’s good to be angry when fighting injustice - but I think I hurt myself the most in it all. I was a person researching fireflies before. I was a person making things glow in the dark. I was a person who preached ‘third, fourth, fifth, sixth’ chances and always seeing the good in people.

I started depending on doctor’s administered medication and a mental health system that maybe sometimes isn’t as amazing as it seems and far more flawed than we all dare to recognise. I started to think like one of my abusers: that nothing meant anything and we’re all going to die, and if I meant nothing, I might as well before I die take down as many abusers, complicits and their enablers as possible.

Having been put in the position recently during a therapy session where I was encouraged (in a fantasy) to torture my former work partner, really was a wake-up call. During the whole session this is when I cried the most - and I cried loud and hard and it became a very public and embarrassing situation when I tried to escape the clinic. I cried because I didn’t want to torture him. I cried because all I ever wanted was his recognition concerning what he had done to me and not be in a fucking chair, encouraged to chop off his body parts in a fantasy session. I cried because I felt forced to speak out against him to defend my good name. I cried because I knew it hurt a lot of people, including him, when I spoke the truth. I cried because I never wanted to speak that truth but felt forced to. I cried because I spoke that truth in an absolute suicidal state while hospitalised and drugged and felt like I had no other option. I cried because the result of all that, was that next, I couldn’t stop speaking the truth. I then had to prove that truth also.

I cried because it took my damn government 4 years to recognise that truth - a truth which the man in question still has not recognised, until this day.

I cried because I just wanted the pain to stop and for people to ask for forgiveness and to seek redemption and to stop hurting each other.

I’d still rather see a now-monster become somewhat human again, than stay a monster forever.

And the hardest thing about wanting that and waking up to all of this? It’s the part where I need to accept that we can’t always get what we wish for.

No matter how noble our wishes are.

No matter how beautiful the idea is of seeing someone take true accountability.

No matter how potentially healing it could be when a person admits their abuse, and truly gives their victim the chance to forgive them.

Sometimes we have to accept that there are people around us who will never ask for forgiveness or at the very least recognise the full extent of what they have done to you. And that is the truth I have been running from for 4 years.

I’m glad I woke up, to realise that.

I’m also sad, I woke up realising that.

And this is all very hard to admit, and to show this vulnerable side: that for me, recognition from my former work partner was so important, that I literally fled from the reality of never getting that recognition because I refused to accept it.

I had hoped he would have given it to me, that recognition, and not the government of The Netherlands instead, as they recently did.

Because I had hoped on a different ending to this story.

And the me from 2016, will probably hope for that until forever. The me who can’t let go and has been stuck. The me who still wants to hold on to the idea that people might seek redemption. The me that’s reliving the most traumatising time of her life, over and over again, when someone she loved betrayed her after abusing her, and then tried to make her feel she wasn’t real, worthless, and spread lies about her.

I hurt for that me every day. I wish I could go back in time and hold her. Tell her she meant something. That she shouldn’t allow someone unstable to take that reality away to only then be numbed for 4 years to not face the pain.

Because numbing the pain, in the end, might make it worse.

I think it truly does, and I’m an example of it.

So I guess this is the point where I take accountability for that.

If the man who abused me can’t face reality, I will. And all I want to say to him right now:

I’m sorry you can’t face the truth. I’m sorry you are so broken you can’t even come to terms with what you have done and it took a government and thousands of people to recognise your abuse.

I’m sorry for what happened in your life that you resorted to the one you’re living now. I’m sorry you believe you have to numb the pain with alcohol still. I’m sorry I couldn’t stop you in 2016 from doing that. I’m sorry that due to it all, you managed to hurt the person you claimed you loved - me.

I’m sorry I hurt you for saying the truth, because I never wanted to hurt you. I’m sorry you turned me into someone who hurt you too by speaking the truth. I just wanted you to be a better human being and for you to stop spreading lies about me and for you to seek redemption and face accountability. I’m sorry I called you names after you and your fans spread lies about me. I’m sorry you corrupted me.

I’m sorry that you never truly believed in yourself. I’m sorry you never believed you were worthy of love and that you felt you had to manipulate people to care about you and that you assumed the worst when you thought you had lost me and probably went into survival mode too, became paranoid, started projecting everything you did on me, and stopped seeing who I was because you were so blinded by self-hate.

I’m sorry that I wasn’t able to save you from that. I’m sorry you also aren’t able to recognise that. I’m sorry I felt forced to get that recognition from others, due to everything you did, and because you weren’t able to give it to me.

I’m sorry you believe you are not worthy of forgiveness or seeking redemption.

I still believe you can be a better human.

But I will also accept that maybe you just can’t be and my hope you could be was probably based on illusions.

And that realisation, in all of this, is the most heartbreaking part. Because I never truly stopped caring. I never truly stopped believing in you, even though I told you I did.

Everything I did these last few years, was in fact because I believed you could be the man who took responsibility, and be an example to people everywhere.

But maybe it’s time I stop believing that.

And I’m sorry for that, too.

Pie

This article is part of a series. Please see The Dark Side of Justice for more information.