Model claims she was wrongly committed to NYC psych ward after going to hospital to ask for anti-anxiety meds

 Monday, May 16, 2022 – A model has revealed her experience when she visited a hospital for anti-anxiety medicine following an assault.

According to a new lawsuit by New York City model, Abeba Davis, 39, she was visiting her social worker at Queens County Hospital Center in Jamaica on Jan. 8, 2021, to pick up anti-anxiety prescription about a week after her alleged assault.

But when her social worker stepped away for a moment, Davis said she was rushed to the facility’s psych ward, told to take off her clothes and was given pills — all while she was insisting that she was sane.

“I’m begging. ‘Please, I’m not crazy.’ And they’re like, ‘Yeah, yeah,’ because the next person next to me is also saying they’re not crazy,” Davis said, crying during an interview with the Daily News.

“No one hears me, I was just like nothing to them. I was just a naked Black girl sitting in the corner begging to get out saying, ‘I’m not crazy. I’m not crazy.’”

Davis says she was assaulted about a week before the incident and filed charges with the New York Police Department. Her alleged attacker pleaded guilty to a non-criminal violation in November, according to the Queens District Attorney’s Office.

Davis had been assigned the social worker, who asked her to come to the hospital before receiving a prescription, according to the lawsuit filed in Queens Supreme Court.

Medical records show that Davis was at the hospital to “restart medicine.”

“She didn’t say anything about me getting a psychiatric evaluation,” Davis said of her social worker.

The model was waiting in the emergency room when her social worker stepped away for a minute, promising to be right back, Davis said. A nurse then approached, took her into a room and began asking questions, Davis said. Then another nurse took her to a different wing of the hospital where a cop guarded a metal door.

Inside that room, the lawsuit alleges, a woman undressed Davis as the model asked what was happening, she said.

Davis said the hospital workers told her she had to be processed into the psych ward. They took her phone, jewelry and clothes, leaving her half-naked with a sheet to cover her upper body, Davis recalled.

Then she was tossed into a holding room “surrounded by mental patients,” Davis said.

She alleges that a screaming, naked man roamed the room while another woman stared at her threateningly, according to the suit. A third woman was suffering from COVID-19, Davis said, but wasn’t wearing a mask.

A frightened Davis was told to take two pills and calm down by one of the workers, who said she would be kept indefinitely in the facility if she did not relax, she said.

 Davis says she doesn’t know what type of pills she took.

After hours of waiting, Davis finally saw her social worker behind a plexiglass window.

“Please, please, get me out of here,” she begged her social worker, who told her to sit tight.

It took few more hours passed before Davis was finally released.

“(The social worker) even said they messed up by taking me in like that and she was sorry this happened to me,” Davis recalled.

She believes she was held in the psych ward for about 10 hours.

“Patient has no mood or psychotic symptoms, denies suicidal/homicidal ideations,” a doctor wrote following Davis’ visit.

“Patient has fair insight and judgment.” The doctor noted he spoke with Davis’ sister, who said Davis is “psychiatrically stable.”

The experience was so traumatic that Davis left the city and moved to Miami, she told The NY daily News.

“It’s that worst nightmare where you know the more you try to get the attention of the orderlies to tell them you’re not crazy, the more that you are playing into the narrative for an orderly that you should be there,” said William Igbokwe, Davis’s attorney.