For many women, road to prison is paved with trauma [View all]

In her dorm at Eddie Warrior Correctional Center in Taft, Nikki Frazier would experience anxiety attacks that would waken her in the middle of the night. For about an hour she would sit on her bed, shaking, sweaty and nauseous.

“It would feel like I was having a heart attack,” Frazier said. “It was just a big ball of weight in my chest, and it was so bad.”

Frazier could point to one source of her anxiety: In 2005, she got into a dispute with her then-husband, and he kicked her repeatedly in the face with steel-toed boots, for which he was later convicted.

Six years later, a doctor cited the beating in diagnosing Frazier with post-traumatic stress disorder, severe anxiety and depression.

http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/crimewatch/oklahoma-watch-for-many-women-road-to-prison-is-paved/article_27d284d6-4107-5aa6-852c-77d3e96c6f16.html


This story is part of an Oklahoma Watch project titled, “Troubled State: A Series on Mental Health.”

Oklahoma Watch is nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that produces in-depth and investigative content on a range of public-policy issues facing the state. For more Oklahoma Watch content, go to www.oklahomawatch.org.