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'Years locked in mental institution'
Vera Stein, a German woman, describes a harrowing ordeal of being falsely imprisoned in a mental institution, tied to beds and given injections. She emerged from hospital a physical wreck, and will never recover fully from the effects of the drugs she was forced to take.
But as the BBC's Ray Furlong reports in the latest in our Who Runs Your World? season on power and who wields it, her case is not an isolated one.
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Forty-seven-year-old Vera Stein clambers into her electric wheelchair and drives into her spartanly decorated lounge.
Her disability is just one of the effects of mental health drugs that were pumped into her against her will.
This year Vera won compensation from the European Court of Human Rights, after it ruled that she had been illegally detained for years in clinics, despite being mentally healthy.
They used physical force to inject me
Vera Stein
"I was nearly 19 years old, so I was an adult, when my father had me committed to a clinic in Bremen," she told me.
"I was put straight in a locked ward. The necessary court order was not obtained for this. I was given double measures of drugs to pacify me. They used physical force to inject me with 17 different types of drugs."
Under German law, to commit someone to a clinic they must either sign their consent, or a court order must be obtained. But in this case her father simply won the agreement of the health authorities to lock up his daughter.
In total, she spent nearly 20 years in institutions as a result of this. Worse still, her case is not unique.
"The mere possibility of withdrawing a person from legal life in co-operation with a psycho-medical system will always lead to abuse - and there we do have some problems," says psychiatrist Helmut Pollaehne.
He says the control mechanisms to prevent cases like Vera Stein's are not sufficient.
For example, he argues that so-called "visiting commissions" always announce their visits beforehand, weakening their control function - and warns that privatisation in the health sector makes it all the more important for the state to defend the rights of people who are in mental health institutions.
'Not rare'
"Within the German legal system, this is a rare case because the victims of psychiatric power are not very successful in taking their case to the court," Dr Pollaehne said.
"But in terms of being a victim - I mean being a victim of the abuse of psychiatry - it was not a rare case in the 1970s and it's not a rare case nowadays."
Ms Stein is now a crusader against the use of psychiatry to lock people up.
"The association of German judges has also complained that forced incarceration, forced treatments, and violations of personal freedoms take place in a legal grey zone," she says.
She adds that a recent study at Goettingen University showed the number of people held in psychiatric clinics against their will has trebled in the last decade.
Vera Stein, a German woman, describes a harrowing ordeal of being falsely imprisoned in a mental institution, tied to beds and given injections. She emerged from hospital a physical wreck, and will never recover fully from the effects of the drugs she was forced to take.
But as the BBC's Ray Furlong reports in the latest in our Who Runs Your World? season on power and who wields it, her case is not an isolated one.
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Forty-seven-year-old Vera Stein clambers into her electric wheelchair and drives into her spartanly decorated lounge.
Her disability is just one of the effects of mental health drugs that were pumped into her against her will.
This year Vera won compensation from the European Court of Human Rights, after it ruled that she had been illegally detained for years in clinics, despite being mentally healthy.
They used physical force to inject me
Vera Stein
"I was nearly 19 years old, so I was an adult, when my father had me committed to a clinic in Bremen," she told me.
"I was put straight in a locked ward. The necessary court order was not obtained for this. I was given double measures of drugs to pacify me. They used physical force to inject me with 17 different types of drugs."
Under German law, to commit someone to a clinic they must either sign their consent, or a court order must be obtained. But in this case her father simply won the agreement of the health authorities to lock up his daughter.
In total, she spent nearly 20 years in institutions as a result of this. Worse still, her case is not unique.
"The mere possibility of withdrawing a person from legal life in co-operation with a psycho-medical system will always lead to abuse - and there we do have some problems," says psychiatrist Helmut Pollaehne.
He says the control mechanisms to prevent cases like Vera Stein's are not sufficient.
For example, he argues that so-called "visiting commissions" always announce their visits beforehand, weakening their control function - and warns that privatisation in the health sector makes it all the more important for the state to defend the rights of people who are in mental health institutions.
'Not rare'
"Within the German legal system, this is a rare case because the victims of psychiatric power are not very successful in taking their case to the court," Dr Pollaehne said.
"But in terms of being a victim - I mean being a victim of the abuse of psychiatry - it was not a rare case in the 1970s and it's not a rare case nowadays."
Ms Stein is now a crusader against the use of psychiatry to lock people up.
"The association of German judges has also complained that forced incarceration, forced treatments, and violations of personal freedoms take place in a legal grey zone," she says.
She adds that a recent study at Goettingen University showed the number of people held in psychiatric clinics against their will has trebled in the last decade.
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