I shuddered violently as another electric shock shot through my body, torturing me further. I screamed for them to stop but they told me that the devil must be expelled from my body. Another current surged through me.

"Please!" I gasped, pleading for mercy through my shaking lips. But no mercy would find me today.

Another shock, more pain. I tried begging, reasoning, persuasion, all to no avail; the electric hurricanes continued to storm through me, leaving only torturous pain in its path.

The pain was unlike anything I had ever felt before. It felt as though my veins were being split apart at the seams. The splitting, searing pain that rushed through me made my body convulse violently. In those moments of unbearable suffering, I asked over and over in my head to die. Living wasn't worth the pain that came with it. And my life wasn't exactly a life either.

When my hour of shock treatments was done, they returned me to my room...or cell would be the more appropriate word. I struggled to keep my feet rhythmically moving in front of one another, stumbling forwards blindly, so the guards half-carried me back. I tried to stop my eyes from fluttering closed and passing out. I needed to keep my grasp on reality. I couldn't allow them to win in their wicked battle.

Maybe it seems too hard to believe, but my parents are the ones who admitted me into this mental asylum. As firm believers of the Christian faith, a daughter who could see visions of the future seemed to be too much for them to handle and so they sent me here. They thought that the devil was corrupting my mind and soul with visions that would lead me away from my faithful upbringing. They also believed that, somehow, shock treatments were the only way to expel those demons from destroying my good Christian faith.

It took me seventeen years of built up courage to finally tell them and my sister Cynthia about my special gift. Yes, I see it as a gift. These visions would allow me to be one step ahead in my life. The question the teacher was about to ask, the errand my mother would request me to run, the secrets that my sister shared with me, were always revealed to me in the moment they made their decision. In my mind's eye, I would see it first. To me, it was fantastic and I appreciated this gift more than anything else in the world. It separated me from everyone else; it made me feel special in that I could help people in a way no one else could.

I could see when something bad was going to happen and used everything in my power to stop it from taking place. I convinced my parents not to go to the market, or my sister not to climb the cherry tree in our backyard, and I could help them avoid the dangerous or unpleasant looming outcome. I loved helping everybody with my visions, and I hoped that my parents would feel the same way about my abilities.

However, I regret ever telling them after their horrible reaction...

At first they thought I was pulling some sick joke. My parents stared at me in disbelief while my sister glared at me balefully.

"Prove it," Cynthia said in a cold, hard voice. "Predict something, anything, and prove it." My sister had never been so cruel to me before, speaking to me in such an unfriendly tone. She hated when I spoke to her about the new fantasy novel I was reading, or the mystical myth that my friends revealed to me about the 'haunted' house where the reclusive young doctor lived. She didn't believe in the supernatural and thought that those who revelled in it were ignorant and immature.

So, to prove my parents' and Cynthia's scepticism wrong I predicted to them several events that would occur in the next few days. As my visions slowly unfolded before them, exactly as I had predicted, my family became frightened. My sister, Cynthia, seemed to be shocked into silence as I foresaw the exact sequence and detail of events that occurred the following morning. My mother burst into tears and began mumbling prayers, between sobs, under her breath. But my father's reaction was the worst.

"Pack your bags. Now." He seemed to turn to ice and, scared of the consequences if I didn't, I ran to my room and packed a few clothes and my most precious belongings. He drove me to a 'hospital' where his friend worked and marched to the reception desk, without hesitation, to inform them of my 'peculiar condition'. As the guards knocked me to the ground and fastened a straightjacket to me, I caught a glance of my father walking out the door, without so much as a backward glance...

And here I find myself, three months later and slowly losing my mind every day. Some days I find myself in the asylum's garden (if you can call a barbed-wire-fenced courtyard a garden) with no recollection of how I got there or even waking up in the morning. The shock treatments were doing their job and it scared me more and more every day. How long would it take before I couldn't remember, recognize or acknowledge my surroundings or myself? I shuddered at the thought and slipped into a quiet nap to sleep off the pain of my daily treatment.