DR. CHILDRESS: We will take one more person before the break and we will take a truncated break which we have earned by virtue of running overtime.

Is Ms. Shalmah Lee Prince here?

Ms. Prince, thank you for providing written testimony to us.

MS. PRINCE: My name is Shalmah Lee Prince and I am here today with my husband who has taken his vacation and we have driven about 500 miles from Cincinnati to be here today.

This is hard. Okay. It is very, very hard to do this because I was used in research with 309 other people whose names I have with me but they are not here and you have families and it is unfortunate that people whose mothers and fathers have come and done and tried to fight for them and speak for them because it is very hard to say I have a mental illness and I was used in experiments and something was wrong. No one believes you. You have no credibility at all. None. And it makes us perfect research subjects. We have no credibility.

I have bipolar illness and the owner of the Washington Post has come out and said that her husband had manic depression and committed suicide as a result. I am not dumb. I am not imperceptive. All throughout my medical records it says patient very, very insightful. But I never ever, ever suspected that I had been set aside as a research subject in the unit that I was in with primarily Black patients, two Whites all times and ten Blacks at all times, locked in 24 hours a day, not allowed out. My mother could not get me out. I could not get out.

But it is treatment. "She is very, very sick. She is so, so sick." And it was experiments, being genetically reengineered, being washed out, being given a combination of psychotic drugs that created psychosis, induced psychosis. They had the right combination for the design of their study. We were totally abstracts. We were not persons. We were not talked to. We were not looked at. We were given no therapy. None. Psychotherapy has been shown to work. I heard Mr. Temple say here this morning. Yes, talking to people really helps. It is really effective.

For 45 minutes every Friday we were taken to the little room and said, "You are really angry at your mother, aren't you? You are really angry at your father, aren't you?" We felt so bad. We felt so bad. There had to be some reason why we felt so bad but we did not know why.

So for ten years I thought what happened to me in there, what happened in there, I was in leather restraints for three days, four point leather restraints, while people were invited in to watch me and to look at me and my behaviors were recorded every 15 minutes. My sleeping. My eating. My hostility. My choreic movements.

Huntington's disease was part of the study.

I cannot believe that NIMH authorizes this. Have I written a person of the state? Yes, the head that evaluates these programs and okays them for Medicaid said they were fine.

I would like to read what each doctor said the risk of a washout is and, yes, washouts are terribly dangerous. You are never the same again on lithium if you are taken off cold turkey which I was and billed $30,000 for the experiment.

Dr. Garver, the lead researcher now at the Dallas VA, was asked about patient risk in a sworn deposition and he said, "They might have a delusion and act in irresponsible ways so as to harm themselves or someone else." He went on to say, "Well, conceivably some patients because of delay in initiation of medication would have a delusion they were capable of flying out a window and injure themselves." I guess they would, wouldn't they?

I guess they were not surprised when a male patient beat me up or when I took a table and tried to throw against a window to get out, or when I took an overdose of medications after going home.

Dr. Jack Hirschowitz (?), the unit chief now at Mt. Sinai and the Bronx VA, stated in his sworn deposition, "The risk of a drug free washout period for any psychiatric patient would be that their illness is not being treated so that as a result they could potentially harm themselves or potentially their illness could get worse."

I want to know one thing. Where are the Black people in this room today? That is who is primarily being used in Cincinnati and they do not even know it.

Martin Nemolar (?), a protestant minister imprisoned during the German's dehumanization movement, said the following: "They took the socialists. I was not a socialist so I did not speak. They took the union tradesmen but I was not a union tradesman so I did not speak. They took the Jews but I was not a Jew so I did not speak. And they started to take me away and there was no one left to speak for me."

Well, there are people here speaking today and I cannot tell you the effort it took for them to get here or how hard it is to talk about being decisionally impaired particularly when it is your child.

Please listen and please do not say you cannot do anything about this. This is terrible what is happening. It is terrible.

Thank you.

DR. CHILDRESS: Ms. Prince, we thank you very much for sharing that story. We know how painful it was.

Are there any questions?

MS. PRINCE: Well, I would like to answer the question that is not going to be asked and that is what would help the psychiatric patient with the enforcement of regulations.

People may have psychiatric diagnosis but they do know when something wrong is happening. The problem is people do not believe them and there is no one to tell. I have written OPRR and it is very difficult to sit down and type a credible letter to OPRR. For the normal person who is used in this kind of research they cannot do it. So it is a closed circuit. It is a dead end street. You are not going to hear about the abuses because the people that are being abused that know they are being abused and even suspect the type of abuse that is going on have no one to tell and no way to tell it.

I mean if I had been given a card when I left that unit that any federally funded research, any NIMH, any NIH research, that each person has to be given a card with an 800 number, if you feel in any way that this research was not helpful to you, if there was abuses of any kind, please call this number. Because it is the patients that know and it is the patients that can speak up. It is just that no one believes us.

Thank you.

DR. CHILDRESS: Thank you. Trish?

DR. BACKLAR: This is not a question but I would like to confirm what you just said. Many people when they are psychotic know who is being kind to them.

MS. PRINCE: Right.

DR. CHILDRESS: Thank you again.

We will reassemble in seven minutes at 25 to 11:00. We earned a break but not a long one.

(Whereupon, a break was taken.)