Tortured by the Mental Health System Due to Misdiagnosis of Schizophrenia

My name is Andrew Seefeldt and I have been a victim of horrific abuse by the mental health system of Australia for over a decade.

I received a misdiagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia due to psychiatrists repeatedly mistaking my behaviours and actions that actually resulted from severe abuse and neglect (both as a child and adult) for “symptoms” of “paranoid schizophrenia.” They also mistook my claims of more recent sexual assault as “paranoid delusions” and “psychosis,” when in fact they were true. As a result I was, and to this day still am, being injected against my will with antipsychotic depots.

I am still trying to escape the psychiatric imprisonment I have suffered enormously from, involving forced drugging, repeated abductions (by police, paramedics and mental health workers) and the many involuntary hospital admissions I have endured. I have been injected against my will with the antipsychotic depots paliperidone and olanzapine for a total of over 10 years, under the thumb of Community Treatment Orders (CTOs). This resulted in horrific side effects that amount to physical and psychological torture.

Here are some examples of the times I have been kidnapped from my home by mental health professionals:

On the 16th of January 2024, I tried to get help from police for my historical sexual assault, and I suppose the police didn’t believe me because of my mental health history and thought I was suffering a “psychotic” episode, because they had an ambulance arrive instead of the detective I requested. The paramedics lured me into the ambulance by telling me I was going for a voluntary “assessment,” which would only be “overnight,” but they tricked me. Once I was in the ambulance they revealed that I was being detained involuntarily under the Mental Health Act and I was imprisoned in the mental hospital against my will for three weeks.

Another time when I refused to receive my antipsychotic injection under the conditions of my forced treatment order, the mental health team called armed police who broke down my door with a battering ram and arrested me with guns drawn. Despite having committed no crime, I was frog-marched into an ambulance and taken to a mental hospital, held against a wall by police officers and injected in my buttocks with an antipsychotic depot then imprisoned without leave for six weeks.

A third time I was kidnapped was due to me losing weight because I deliberately went on a diet, and police opened my door and walked into my home without needing a warrant simply because the mental health team thought I was too mentally incompetent to properly feed myself adequate food, and I was imprisoned for a week of “observation” after being placed in an ambulance and strapped down with restraints.

Because of the unexpected involuntary commitments which caught me off guard and disrupted my life, they revoked my welfare payments because I didn’t fulfill my biweekly reporting habits (by reason of being imprisoned in a mental hospital), and I have been unable to get them back. I am living off of my meagre savings now and when my money runs out I will be destitute and unable to pay my rent. They also refused my repeated requests to access my own medical records and to receive a full-panel hepatitis test (I became infected with hepatitis D following childhood sexual abuse and have been unable to receive any treatment or follow-up since being diagnosed in 2012).

While in hospital on several occasions when I refused the antipsychotic injections, I was picked up and carried by nurses down the hallway in front of the other patients and taken to a room in the high-dependency unit of Canberra mental hospital. There I was violently pinned down on a mattress on the floor and injected in my buttocks with antipsychotic depots and sedatives while I was screaming desperately for my partner (they didn’t bat an eyelid).

Another time I was pinned down on the floor by security guards while a nurse pulled down my trousers and injected me in the buttocks with antipsychotics while I was screaming “You’re RAPING ME, you’re f***ing RAPING ME!” Obviously, as a victim of sexual assault, having my trousers pulled down to expose my buttocks and being injected in my backside with a needle caused me to feel extremely violated, hence my very understandable reaction.

In addition to the violent forced injections, other times I was simply not given any option, such as when several nurses ominously surrounded me and said the “doctor” was waiting to speak to me in what I knew was the injecting room, in an attempt to trick me and lure me to my doom. I knew I had no choice but to get injected or face another violently forced injection, so I resigned and accepted my fate.

When I was allowed back into the community as a voluntary patient, I was still a prisoner of the system. The mental health team repeatedly came into my backyard without my permission and when I refused to show up for an antipsychotic injection, they threatened me with an “Assessment Order” (kidnapping and imprisonment in hospital for “assessment”) if I didn’t receive the injection. I was officially a “voluntary” patient for a number of years and compliant with the injections because I had no choice. Despite this, when I made any hint that I didn’t want to take the olanzapine they threatened to put me back on a forced treatment order if I didn’t comply. If I didn’t go along with the treatment they would say I have “poor insight” into my “schizophrenia” and therefore cannot be trusted to voluntarily accept the injections, and didn’t have the mental capacity to consent to voluntary “treatment.”

They also stated that I was “treatment-resistant” simply because I voiced my objection that I was not a schizophrenic, which they said was a sign that my “schizophrenia” wasn’t responding to treatment because I didn’t have the “insight” to realise that I was schizophrenic. Yes, that is seriously the reasoning they use.

The only way to get the doctors off my back was to comply with the forced injections and lie through my teeth that the injections (“meds”) were “helping.” I couldn’t even tell them the full extent of the side effects because they would, believe it or not, increase the dosage (due to me being “treatment-resistant”), put me on other antipsychotics with even worse side effect profiles, or put me on even more drugs to counteract the side effects — drugs which themselves cause even more side effects.

I have suffered in silent torment from horrific side effects directly caused by involuntary administrations of antipsychotic drugs which were given against my will by means of a Community Treatment Order, and as I mentioned, several of the injections were forced upon me in hospital using violence. The side effects I have suffered include akathisia, a rash that permanently scarred my face and chest, tardive dyskinesia, and chemical castration, including loss of libido and little to no orgasm with only a small amount of clear semen. The worst of the suffering was the pronounced, unbearable akathisia caused by olanzapine, which amounted to chemical torture and for which there was no remedy.

The antipsychotic depots also caused me to sleep for up to 20 hours each day, and over the years I have been on them I have lost several thousand hours of my life due to excessive sleep — hours that I will never get back. Following the injections I would drink a dozen spoonfuls of instant coffee powder and still pass out due to the overwhelming lethargy caused by the olanzapine. After the injections I would fall asleep for three days straight, awakening only for a few hours each day in a lethargic daze. Obviously this made it difficult to drive a car or hold a 9-to-5 job.

While on the olanzapine depots they test my blood for monitoring purposes due to the deleterious effects of the injections, and the psychiatrist said I am “starting to go down the path of developing diabetes.” I read online that antipsychotics cause previously healthy people to develop diabetes and I’m absolutely terrified by this. I am still being injected with antipsychotics (olanzapine at what I believe is near the maximum allowable dose) against my will at the time of writing and there is no end in sight, save for living in a tent in the forest (which I have done previously to escape for a brief moment) to hide from the mental health professionals who have made my life a living hell. The worst consequence of the forced injections is suffering akathisia out the ass. Akathisia is a hellish condition that feels like literal torture.

My akathisia manifested as a nightmarish discomfort all over my body, especially my legs, which made it unbearable to lie down. It feels similar to how I imagine being trapped underground in a confined space, such as a coffin, would feel like. Often in the days following the olanzapine injections I would wake up repeatedly throughout the night in sheer agony, and the only relief I could find would be to bolt up out of bed, run outside and pace around moaning and swearing in pain.

Eventually it got so bad that I couldn’t sleep at all for approximately 40 hours following the olanzapine injections, and every time I fell asleep I would immediately jolt awake, like a shock to my system, with extreme akathisia all over my body. At the worst of it, the akathisia caused me to lash out violently due to the unbearable feeling of torture all over my body, and I beat my arm with a drum stick until it was swollen and bruised. If the doctors found out I did this, they would have misinterpreted my self-harm as a further symptom of my “mental illness” and increased the dosage of the antipsychotics, resulting in even more akathisia. This amounts to nothing less than chemical torture and a human rights abuse.

During these worst periods of akathisia I became addicted to tobacco due to smoking compulsively in a vain attempt to mitigate the effects of the olanzapine (I had read medical journals which found that smoking tobacco reduces blood-plasma levels of olanzapine by 50%, but it turned out to be ineffective in my case). I also tried self-medicating with recreational drugs because the propranolol and benzodiazepines the psychiatrists provided did nothing to alleviate my suffering. They repeatedly refused to take the most glaringly obvious course of action, which would be to STOP INJECTING ME WITH POISON (antipsychotics).

I suffered akathisia out the ass while locked up involuntarily in the high-dependency mental unit of Canberra hospital and placed back on the olanzapine injections after my brief escape (as I mentioned, I escaped the psychiatrists by hiding in a tent in the forest). All I could do was walk around in circles for 12 hours a day during my six-week imprisonment.

The police think my non-existent “schizophrenia” makes me a danger to the community, and the mental health system shares my confidential medical records with police here in Australia. If I don’t show up for my injections I’m subject to police arrest and kidnapping from my home, which has happened on multiple occasions. Even as a voluntary outpatient I was still forced to accept the olanzapine injections, as I would have been put back on the forced treatment order if I didn’t go along with it. I was trapped like this for several years, even when not on the CTO, so as you can see there’s nothing “voluntary” about being a voluntary mental patient.

My mistreatment by ACT Mental Health has been nothing short of a human rights abuse, and recently they extended my forced treatment order for yet another six months. In total I have been injected against my will on over 120 occasions and for me there is no end in sight.

I managed to capture one of my forced antipsychotic injections on camera, which you can view here:

Only God can help me now.