Dr. Daniel Joseph Finnin, MD

I arrived at Albany Med’s ER thinking “It’s okay to not be okay.” I left a trauma survivor. Dan Finnin’s work is an extension of the carceral state. :: I'll be the first to admit that I needed help. I was in a very similar position as Britney Spears, drugged to the point of disability by my abusive family who used mental health treatment as an extension of their abuse. I needed de-escalation, trauma treatment, and access to emergency housing to escape my abusers. I got the opposite of “help.” :: Finnin did not pause to de-escalate the situation or take the time to ask me detailed questions about what was going on and what environmental factors might be contributing to my extreme state. Instead, he did everything possible to escalate the situation. He spoke to me with crossed arms and glared at me like he hated me. Finnin arranged to have me injected with sedatives and detained me in Albany Med's astonishingly filthy psych ER. :: Being forced to wear a backless hospital gown… in a privacy-free environment where virtually all of the other staff and patients were men felt like a dehumanizing form of sexual violence. Being chemically restrained was like being raped. Having blood drawn involuntarily when I was sedated made me feel like a lab rat. There was a man bound in mechanical restraints in the hallway, howling for help. It was horrifying. I was taunted by an ER nurse who repeatedly told me about how she had collected collateral information from my abusive female parent. I told two different ER staff members that I felt like I was in the Holocaust. At no point did a mental health worker materialize. I repeatedly asked, "When am I going to see a social worker? When am I going to see a doctor?" There were approximately 10 people detained in the psych section of Albany Med's ER, but there were no mental health professionals. The entire place was run by residents and security guards. As though the ER wasn’t sufficiently loud and overwhelming, the nurses used someone’s tinny cell phone speakers to play Amy Winehouse—including her song “Rehab” (“they tried to make me go to rehab/ I said, ‘No, no, no’”) for the people detained on an involuntary hold. A security guard kept trying to guess where he knew me from, and I’m 99% sure he had been a janitor at one of my previous jobs who had been fired for showing up to work drunk at 10am and trying to start a fight with his boss. :: At hour 28, I finally saw a psychiatric resident. I was so frightened I was physically shaking and struggling with word retrieval. I am very lucky that I was discharged; the shortage of inpatient psychiatric beds saved my life. :: What I know today is that what happened to me didn't feel like health care because it was never intended to be care-- emergency medicine is a very literal extension of policing, and psychiatry is an extension of the carceral state.