[First the background. How I lost my mental health meds. I was 1,000 miles away when my wife calls and says that she is so sick that she is being hospitalized. (We are in the middle of an extended military move. I unwound my law practice to follow my Army wife) So I leap in the car and begin driving. It sounded serious, so I was very worried. After many hours of driving I stop to get a few hours of sleep at a Motel 6 and then go on my way. About two hours down the road, I realize I left my toiletry bag with all of my meds at the motel. I had not saved any of the documentation of my stay, so I had no address or phone number or anything. I turn around and drive approximately two hours and start checking every exit with a Motel 6, but I can’t find the one where I stayed. So I said to hell with it, I’ll deal with that later, and continued on. I spent about a week taking care of the wife, the apartment, and the dog, and didn’t really think about the meds. But during that time, the effects of the meds wore off, and I began plummeting into depression. And the problem with psyche meds is that when you go off of them you lose the judgment to get back on them. Now here’s the story of how that all played out a few weeks later. Forgive me if it is disjointed and random, but as I write this I am disjointed and random myself.]
Six Days in the Cuckoo’s Nest
This is what happens if you tell your wife you are feeling suicidal. Moments later the police arrive and take most of your possessions off of you. They then handcuff you and take you to the hospital.
The first twelve hours you sit in an observation room. It is brightly lit and unclean, and you are wearing nothing but your underwear, socks, and a flimsy hospital gown. There is a cot in the room and nothing else. There are cameras and a small window with a person looking in on you from time to time. I paced most of the twelve hours, going around and around like a confused, caged animal.
Once they are satisfied that you are not banging your head against the concrete walls trying to off yourself immediately, you are released into the psyche ward general population.
This psyche ward is a short-term program for people who had been on the outside and had somehow hit bottom. You stay there until a psychiatrist thinks you can be safely returned to the world. Many came in having been arrested for something. A few had attempted suicide. A few had admitted themselves. Many of them had been there before. My time was extended because of New Years, when the psychiatrist took off. I did not kiss my wife upon the new year or even notice it for that matter because I was locked up, drugged, and pacing the hallway when the clock struck zero.
Here are some of my thoughts about the psyche ward and some of the things that happened, and at the end my final conclusion, my New Year's resolution for real..
The first thing you should understand is that they keep everyone drugged. Aside from my regular meds and the shots and pills they gave me when they determined that I was anemic of all things, they had me on a heavy cocktail of valium, ativan, and something else I didn’t recognize.
I arrived at the psyche ward around midnight, in bad shape but sober, but they gave me so many drugs I needed assistance to walk around. They took my belt, lest I hang myself (or someone else I guess), so I had to hold my pants up. They also took my shoes because shoe laces are not allowed. I guess they thought I could strangle myself with my shoe laces. So they issued me some sky blue footie socks to be my shoes for the duration. So I’m walking in socks on a slick floor, holding my pants up, drugged to the hilt. On my first morning my handler took some tape and made two straps and wrapped them through my belt loops to hold my pants up. He did this expertly, obviously having faced this problem before. He then held me up and walked me to the group session and placed me in a chair where I sat undisturbed for two hours as people shared stories of life’s maladies. When it was my turn, I just said “I quit taking my meds and sunk into depression with ‘suicidal ideations’” (That’s what they call it.) Because of the shoe lace issue, the people in the sky blue footies envied the people who happened to have arrived in shoes without laces and got to keep their shoes. My wife went through all of my shoes, and the only ones without laces were flip flops. (Note to self: buy one pair of shoes with velcro fastening.) She could visit me one hour per day and bring me stuff, and she came every day for that one hour.
Every day after breakfast you would stop by the drug window, and the nurse would give you a small plastic cup filled with pills and a slightly larger plastic cup of water. For smokers, there was a nicotine patch. And some of us got a shot too. Then about midday, a nurse would find me and give me more pills and another shot. And these shots were this red fluid that looked like cherry syrup.
The meals on the psyche ward are awful. They are items that are meant to be at least warm, but they are never above room temperature (which varies from day to day—one day the heat went out, so everyone sat in our circle group wrapped in blankets). Doctors plan each patient’s plate based on his or her dietary needs (as determined by the daily drawing of blood and the vitals taken every five hours) So each person’s tray is unique with their name on it. Once the trays are matched to the people, every one sits down and the food trading auction begins. “I’ll trade my fruit cup for a piece of bread.” “Anybody want this milk?” “Anyone not want their meat? That kind of thing goes on until everyone ends up eating pretty much what they want from what is available. Because each person is provided one tiny paper container of salt, no one is willing to give that up. Faced with a bowl of grits, some eggs, and some potatoes, you have to make the decision which item will get the salt, and which ones you can stomach plain. Of course it’s all cold. And what’s funny is that everyone is so drugged up, no one is really hungry. But everyone attends meals if for no other reason than the meals mark time. And they eat the food because it’s something to do.
Despite all of the strange things you see, the essence of the psyche ward is absolute boredom. And boredom is one thing that can destroy the mind. Even the drugs they keep you on don’t cure the boredom.
When I first arrived, there was a single torn-up paperback. It was a biography of Sally Hemmings, the slave who was Thomas Jefferson’s real mate. It’s not a book I would normally pick out but I was elated to find a book after about 30 hours of near sensory deprivation. I sat there from midnight until about 4 am reading it by myself in a chair (I barely slept the whole time I was there because it was loud and uncomfortable.) One of the handlers saw me reading it and brought in a stack of slightly outdated Newsweek magazines. I thought that was nice.
On the psyche ward, there is no ego. How can there be? Thus, people from all stations of life are rendered equal. The lack of ego allows for absolute open communication with strangers, which oddly reminded me of what it’s like on the drug ecstasy. Further, on the psyche ward, everyone is at their absolute worst. So there is no judgment. And at the first meeting of the day, everyone has to give their name and tell what their malady is and what caused them to be there. So we all knew each others’ problems, so no matter what happened, no one was phased. For example, the wild schizophrenic guy, who only talked about food, began walking out of a crowded room, and his pajama pants fell to his feet. But then he just stepped out of them and kept going. The people in the room looked at each other to make sure they had all seen the same thing, but no one even cracked a smile or even gasped.
In the psyche ward, trading e-mail addresses or phone numbers is strictly verboten. And you are so heavily monitored it would be impossible to sneak it. I had a long conversation with a historian of the Middle East about how the Iraq war has upset the balance of power in the region. (she was also well-versed in Southern speech patterns). I also had a long conversation about steak with a guy with thirty years experience as head chef in downtown hotels. I wouldn’t mind keeping in touch with these folks, but I’ll never talk to them again.
Being in the psyche ward you see people who have a much wider range of acceptable activities and aversions, and just seeing this widens your own range. Thus, to an extent, being on a psyche ward makes you “crazier.”
In the psyche ward, you get 90 minutes of art/music therapy every day. About 15 of us sit around a table stocked with various colored paper, crayons, markers, colored pencils, etc. We are given a certain task. Then soothing music is played as we all color and draw away for about 45 minutes. (It felt like prison kindergarten.) I was skeptical at first, but it was really the most pleasant part of the day in the psyche ward. Mostly because the music was good. They even played some Michael Hedges. As to the drawing, you had to put some effort into it because in the second 45 minutes you show your work to the group and explain how it meets the task. Some of the shit people drew actually made me almost laugh. (The only time I cracked a smile in the psyche ward). At the same time, some of the stuff people drew was fascinating, especially the schizophrenics. Thus, I am no longer skeptical about art/music therapy.
Surprisingly, the living quarters in the psyche ward are co-ed. There’s a hall with rooms for two and showers. They didn’t put men and women in the same room, but we were all on one hall. Thus, there was occasional inter-gender accidental visible nudity. But it mattered not one whit because as I said, there is no ego in the psyche ward, and everyone is too drugged to care. The men were kind of on one end of the hall, and when I stalked the hallways at night there was snoring coming out of every room. Luckily though, my roomie was a near catatonic depressive who made no noise. So I could get some sleep. Oddly, he didn’t sleep in his bed. He slept on the floor between his bed and the wall. I asked him why, and he said it was because it was closer to the ground. So when the checkers came by counting heads every 15 minutes at night, I would remind them that although he was not in his bed, he was indeed in the room.
Although we were not segregated by gender, we were segregated. There were two “sides” to the ward, one for cooperative patients and one for non-cooperative patients. The two sides were separated by locked double doors, but occasionally a non-cooperative would escape to our side requiring multiple staff members to remove them. Each time this happened, we were all called together to be reassured that we were safe. But most of us were glad it happened because it was something to watch at least.
One lady on the other side would shake these locked double doors to create a drumming effect and sing this weird but pleasant tune over and over. I would listen to her, and she would go on and on until staff needed to go through the doors and shooed her away.
In the psyche ward, there is a rule that a patient can not touch another patient at all. But on day two, in the TV room, a woman freaked out and went after another patient. I tried to stop her, and she grabbed my arm and wouldn’t let go. Someone even said she did that and wouldn’t let go. Staff arrived, loosed her grip on me, and took her away. The staff then came back to debrief me, make sure I wasn’t hurt, and make sure I felt safe. I said, “I’m alright.” I was so drugged up, I didn’t give one shit.
The TV room. You would think that having a TV room would ameliorate the boredom in the psyche ward. And it did to an extent, but it had nothing to do with the TV, even though it was always on. The room was just a convenient place for people to gather and talk.
The TV didn’t help for a couple of reasons. First, you are too drugged up to understand what was going on on most shows. Second, it rarely stayed on a single station more than fifteen minutes. This was due to the fact that no one agreed on what to watch, there was a constant stream of people coming in and out, and drugged psyche patients have no compunction about picking up the remote and changing the channel everyone is watching. In the extreme, there was one guy who thought that channel surfing meant continuously cycling through the channels without ever stopping on one. And this guy seemed to have the remote a lot. One time a woman said “Pick a fucking channel!” I thought the fact that the guy was just cycling through as if it were normal was just as interesting as watching 15 minutes of some random show, but I thought the comment was appropriate. Indeed, the only time the TV was on one channel more than fifteen minutes was when none of the drugged mental patients could find the remote. It was always between the cushions on one of the sofas.
In the psyche ward, people with little education have a very sophisticated knowledge of the chemistry of their meds. I heard a man who could barely form sentences speaking in terms of chemistry way beyond my understanding.
It may have been coincidence, but the people who were there for having attempted suicide seemed the happiest.
You can have a fascinating discussion with a schizophrenic, but eventually you realize it’s the only conversation you can have with him.
If I wanted to shave, I had to find a handler to come watch me. That didn’t really make sense to me. If I wanted to remove the blade and slit my wrists, I could do that in my room. But while using it to shave, it would be pretty hard to seriously injure yourself.
While shaving was optional, daily showers were mandatory and ice cold. Again presumeably to prevent a hanging, there was not the traditional shower head. Instead, the cold water shot directly out of one of the upper corners of the room.
One difference between prison and the psyche ward. In prison, it’s difficult to get medical attention. One the psyche ward, you are bombarded with medical attention. At all times, there were phlebotomists and nurses roaming about with these rolling devices taking blood and blood pressure. If you happen to be sitting in a chair staring at the wall and one of them came by, they would ask you your name, look at a list, and then usually either draw blood or take your vital signs. My arms are bruised from all of the shots and blood removal.
One woman barely spoke English. She was there because she was pulled over by a cop while driving a friend’s car, and there was no proof of insurance in the car. The cop was going to arrest her, and she didn’t understand why. She panicked and freaked out crying and wailing, and said she wanted to kill herself. She really had no intention to kill herself and has no mental illness. But there she was with us crazy people. Her main concern was to get back to her grandchildren. She had probably never taken any sort of drug like valium or atavan, but now she has.
In the psyche ward system, I was twelve, double one, double nine, six-o. I memorized it in honor of Alex in “A Clockwork Orange.” I kept my wrist band that had my number and my sky blue footies as souvenirs.
Toward the end of my time there, they lowered my drug level, and I mostly returned to normal. And some of the group discussions were at least somewhat interesting once I regained the faculty to see the absurdity of it all.
But here’s the important part.
Although it was mostly a miserable and surreal experience, it saved my life. First it put me back on my psyche meds. More seriously though, through all of the blood analysis, the doctor determined that I had reversible damage to my liver, but that if I didn’t quit drinking, it would soon become non-reversible, and I would die young. He explained it well. He said I was OK if I quit now, but I was right there on the edge.
That’s the kind of news that clarifies things, so after thirty years of enjoying the benefits of ETOH, I will now be sober Joe. No more Natty Lites for this boy. I always knew the day would come, and now it has. Just further evidence that I am entering a new chapter in my life. So I’m very glad my wife had me arrested. How many people can say that?
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