Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin (12 page)

This is something that we in the free world, especially Americans, are not used to. It has never happened to most of us. On the contrary, we’re spoiled. We’re used to saying what we like, and suffering few or no consequences as a result. We’re used to knowing, as surely as we know our own names, that we have rights. And it’s not that patients in places like Meriwether don’t have rights. They do. It’s just that—and I can’t overemphasize this—it feels as if you don’t have rights when something as simple as coming and going, or smoking a cigarette, or seeing the people you love is taken out of your control because your mind, whether it actually is or not, is thought to be diseased.

Being put away does a number on you very quickly, and very thoroughly, no matter who you are in the outside world.

Finally, after watching other people leave, after losing a sense of time, and after losing more and more perspective on the system and my own position within it, my day did come. I was going to get out.

I had been through the treatment, such as it was. I had been given eight Lamictals and ten vitamins. I had swallowed one each day but not the other. I had had roughly ten to fifteen minutes of therapy a day, either with Dr. Balkan or with Sarah. I had sat in on the absurd fifteen-minute morning community meetings, where those who were awake or could speak intelligibly had said their piece, been heard, and usually been told that what they wanted either couldn’t be had or would be taken into “consideration.”

We all knew what that meant.

I had been aiming for the ten-day mark as a release date. So when Sarah or Dr. Balkan asked me how I was doing each day, I steered my answers progressively toward the lighter side of disaster, going from “I’m not as bad as I was,” to “Getting better, I think,” to the unequivocal, “I’m ready to go now, please.”

Dr. Balkan and I decided together about midweek that day 10, a Friday, would probably be the day. Of course I knew enough not to take this dangled freedom for granted until I was on the other side of the door, but I did allow myself just a whiff of elation.

I told Deborah as soon as I knew.

“It will be heartbreak for me when you leave,” she said, looking up into my face with eyes that bore no trace of their former mischief.

Sweet must have overheard this, though I don’t remember her being nearby at the time. But then, she had a way of floating in and out of rooms unnoticed. I walked by her in the hall later that day, and she showed me once and for all that it was a mistake to assume she wasn’t paying attention, just because she was talking to herself most of the time.

I heard the swish of her trench coat, and then, clear as a bell, she said:

“I’m going to miss you.”

The others reached out, too, as expected. Clean wanted to give me his number at a halfway house, and did. Mother T told me which shelter she was likely to be staying at when she got out. Even Kid gave me a number.

 

My last night, I lay in bed awake for hours filled with what was by then an irrepressible excitement. Like the Yenta, I thought with relish and in detail about the first things I was going to do when I got out.

I pictured and tasted each course, each bite of the meal I was going to have at my favorite restaurant. The juicy steak, medium rare, marbled with fat, oozing in my mouth, the buttery whipped potatoes, the firm julienned vegetables, the lemon custard, the red wine swirling in the bulbous glass.

I thought about the taste and smell of the fresh winter air, and the feel of it cooling my lungs and my lips and my ears. I thought about what it would be like to talk to people who didn’t have power over you or weren’t hearing voices. Normal society seemed desirable for once. The beautiful, beautiful mundane. What a thing.

As I lay there with my eyes open, and with my eyes newly opened, I listened to the nurses talking and laughing down the hall. I thought about how strange it was that so many of them considered themselves to be superior to the patients they oversaw, when the patients knew enough to leave as soon as they could, and even the worst among them were eventually discharged. But the staff was there all the time. By choice. Actual choice. Not, in my sense of the word, by voluntary commission, and then no choice at all. No. They had decided completely and repeatedly, of their own accord, to be in that place.

It’s bad enough to be committed to a mental hospital, and to spend your time unwillingly in the company of disturbed people. Even disturbed people know that. So why would anyone choose to work in such a place, choose to spend at least forty hours a week there, and never have enough sense to get out? If you ask me, that’s a far more deranged, senseless person than any so-called lunatic.

Of course I know now that this is too harsh a judgment, coming, as it did, out of extreme resentment and trapped exhaustion. I feel certain, even in my still jaundiced mind, that some public hospital somewhere employs one person, hell, maybe a few, who actually give a shit, and try to do some good.

The point is, fair or not, informed or not, this is how I felt at the time. Meriwether skewed—maybe even took away—my judgment on these matters for a while. I cannot deny that, nor should I. That is what institutions do.

I slept restlessly for a few hours, and then in the morning I woke again to the sound of Mrs. Weston clacking into the room. This, too, vaguely amused me for the first time, because I could just about relish how good it was going to feel to write about her.

 

The docs signed my discharge papers at 9:25 a.m., but I didn’t make it out of the hospital until 3:15 p.m.

Those were the worst six hours of my stay.

I sat all day in anticipation, watching the hours drag by, tasting my freedom, but anxiety-ridden at the prospect of it being somehow revoked, or worse, eroded by my paperwork’s slow, careless passage through the clogged procedural channels of the hospital bureaucracy.

Time had come to mean everything. A visitor who arrived ten minutes late, for example, could never know how painful those ten minutes were to someone watching every tick of the clock, living for a friendly face.

Discharge was that much worse, because you sat there, after having been boxed in for too long at the mercy of a flyby doctor’s will, finally knowing that you were technically free at last, but having to wait nonetheless for the heel-dragging staff to make it happen.

The staff’s blatant indifference was offensive enough in the daily rounds, but it made you boil when one more day of your life was coming rapidly to a close and your release papers were languishing on the table while the nurses studiedly procrastinated.

After making numerous inquiries at the nurse’s station, I learned that we were waiting on the pharmacy, which had yet to fill my prescription.

“Can’t you just write me one that I can fill outside?” I asked Dr. Balkan.

This was not hospital policy, she said. And so I waited for several more hours.

At three o’clock, desperate, I cornered the unit chief on her hurried way through the ward and managed the miracle of bent rules. She wrote me a scrip, and I got the nod to go.

Finally, having spent the day convulsed by turns with rage and despair, I stepped over the wide white line in front of the nurse’s station, the one that patients were forbidden to cross, and stood by the locked double doors of Ward 20 for the last time.

As I waited for the nurse, with his jangle of keys, to unlock the door, I looked back at Deborah and Clean and Mother T, who had gathered to wave me off. I knew what they were feeling. I’d felt the same mixture of pleasure and envy when I’d seen Casey and the Yenta discharged during my stay. You couldn’t help but share in the free person’s joy and be happy for them, but watching them leave, you also couldn’t help but feel that much worse about your inability to follow.

 

I left Meriwether hospital with my few belongings in a paper garbage bag that I got from one of the janitors. It was the same kind of bag that I’d been filling with desiccated orange peels and secreted candy wrappers for ten days. They had lost my backpack somewhere between triage and the ward, and I wasn’t going to spend one extra minute in that place trying to find it.

It had only been ten days, and I was supposedly just a journalist at work, but I was a wreck, a pathetic, quaking, permission-seeking, cowering nonperson in petrified thrall to the keepers of mental hygiene.

As I made my long, slow way out of Ward 20, as I heard the locked double doors click behind me, with me at last on the right side of them, the outside, as I rode all the way down in the elevator and scurried all the way down the labyrinthine halls of the main floor, even as I stood in line waiting to sign for my valuables, I really thought that some disembodied arm was going to reach out and grab me by the shoulder and say:

“Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

And when I finally walked into the same vaulted lobby that I had come through ten days before, pushed my way through those so much more symbolic revolving doors back out onto the street, and took my first lungful of liberated air, all I could say—and I said it out loud, yes, talking to myself—was “Thank God. Thank God. Let it be true. Let it be true.”

And then I ran. I ran for blocks, clasping my crumpled paper bag to my chest, still thinking I might be chased and dragged back screaming in futile protest for the brief taste of gorgeous, real life that I had been given.

But—and I said, “Thank God” again out loud—no one came for me. As I slowed to a walk, it felt glorious to be out of breath, to have a wallet, and shoelaces, and a meandering gait, and my own sweet, whimsical will again.

INTERIM

As expected, I learned a lot about madness at Meriwether. By madness I mean, of course, madness as we currently recognize and label it, or, more specifically, as I was able to observe it in Ward 20 at Meriwether Hospital. I can make no meaningful generalizations about madness per se. I don’t think any of us really can. Even if madness as some definable entity can really be said to exist, which I don’t think it can as yet, nonetheless, mad individuals are as singular as other individuals, even if they tend to have certain propensities in common (delusions, paranoia, despondency, mania, and so on).

Yet generalizations are unavoidable, and we all make them, usually in less than charitable ways. Like most people, I harbored strong prejudices, especially about psychotic people. But living in close quarters with Deborah, Sweet, Clean, Mother T, and the rest of them disabused me of many of those prejudices, even as it reinforced and engendered others.

For example, it may surprise you to know that I never felt unsafe in the ward.

Portrayals of “psycho killers” and stalkers in movies have conditioned most of us to believe that psychotic people are always violent, menacing, and dangerous. When a mentally ill person makes the news, it’s usually because he has brained a pedestrian with a cement block or pushed someone in front of a subway train. Sick-flicks and tabloid cover stories have given us our picture of psychosis and made it a staple of our worst fears and nightmares.

Sometimes psychotic people will play into this warped preconception, simply as a means of ridiculing our ignorance or deflecting the sting of our gawking eyes. Deborah did this when she cruised me so blatantly that first time in the hallway. And I allowed myself to be frightened by it. Looking back on it now, my reaction was as absurd as flinching when a clown says, “Boo.”

Otherwise my fears in Meriwether did not stem from my fellow patients, but rather from the hulking, glowering institution itself, and the power it had over me.

The psychotic people I knew and lived with were more confused and disoriented than anything else. This may have been due in large part to the effects of the medication, but whatever the case, even at their most paranoid and fluent, they were more scared than scary. When they were exercised, it was more out of annoyance that nobody seemed to be listening to them or taking their wishes into account. I never worried about being in rooms alone with them. I never lost sleep thinking they were going to creep into my room and get me, and this wasn’t, I can assure you, because I thought the nurses would get there in time.

They were as human as everyone else, of course. As selfish and petty and generous and witty, and most often, just as run of the mill. They were just as much a reflection of their class and culture as the average person on the street. They liked MacDonald’s, iPods, M&M’s, and TV. They were fat and fond of the same poisons that we all buy on every corner or in bulk at Costco. They didn’t like being told what was good for them, and they didn’t like being told what to do. But when they fell, they wanted to be picked up. They wanted to be saved and provided for, but made the minimum effort on their own behalf. I’d say that made them pretty normal.

None of this is to say that I came away from Meriwether with a sense that the psychotic people I knew were, in every way, just like everybody else. They were psychotic. There’s no getting away from it. And I had to adjust my approach to them accordingly. When I spoke to them, I wasn’t speaking to someone who processed information in socially common or easily navigable ways. It was different, and often it was harder, more off-putting, and even unpleasant.

Still, something very strange happened in my mind as a result of these everyday interactions on the ward. This partial normalizing of crazy people in the bin had the opposite effect, too. It made normal people in the outside world seem crazier.

Instead of going back into the public sphere and luxuriating in all the confidence and like-mindedness that I could have and find in normal people, I actually approached strangers with a new reserve. I realized how stunningly naïve I had been to assume that most people I met were sane. Most of us do this. We presume people are sane until they prove otherwise. But, after Meriwether, it suddenly seemed a lot wiser to approach strangers as if they were nuts until they proved otherwise.