After her exhausting efforts to educate the public, the now seriously ill protagonist Renate alias Antje Wienberg, née Dreist, from The Voices of those Remaining, received a letter dated September 16, 2019 from the Sexual Abuse Fund office of the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth, in which she was informed that she was a victim of familial sexual abuse according to the requirements of the Supplementary Assistance System and can therefore receive benefits from the fund. Despite the opinions of the psychiatrist Dr. Rainer Gold, who was exposed as a drug tester, his practicing assistant doctors, the notorious psychiatrist couple Krause as well as the employees of the social psychiatric service and those responsible for the victims in Neubrandenburg and the surrounding area, Antje Dreist learned for the first time in decades that her accounts of her sexual abuse were believed. In this context, the victims of the report “The Hell of Ueckermünde” and the voices of those left behind hope for public support to shed light on the human rights violations perpetrated against them and the crimes committed behind closed doors.
We will never give up.
Christian Discher, PhD
22 years after her first admission to a psychiatric hospital, Antje Dreist, who was born in 1967, published her memoir Fatum. In the form of poems written mainly in rhyming couplets and fragmentary episodes from her life, Dreist describes her path as determined by others. Dreist reveals a care system permeated by power, which pursues its own interests, uses people as “objects of administration” and denies them their own autonomy if they resist. In 1991, her experience of abuse and her fear of external control were diagnosed for the first time as the result of a paranoid-hallucinatory psychosis. With this diagnosis, she no longer had a voice to those responsible in Neubrandenburg and the surrounding area. What Antje Dreist uncovers is shocking and proof that there is a need for reliable supervisory bodies to uncover the abuse of power in the psychiatric system.