Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin Read Free

polemic, or an investigative report, though it is, at times argumentative, conjectural, and raw. It draws no hard-and-fast conclusions. It asks. It surmises. It prods. It also wanders, meanders, spirals, and circles back. But in the end, it does no more and no less than take you with me. And that, after all, is really what you’re here for, isn’t it? To come along for the ride.
    That much I know I can promise you. A bumpy, loopy, sideways, up-and-down ride.
    A journalist I once knew had a saying about our profession: The most you can hope to do is inform and entertain.
    As an invitation to these pages, that sounds about right.

BEDLAM
    Meriwether

Pseudonyms. It began with pseudonyms. Hastily scrawled on the dog-eared pages of a paperback book. Words circled, underlined, then crossed out by the exuberant young man who sat next to me that first long night in the ward.
    His given name was Kristos, or so he said, but his pseudonym was Nil. Nil, as in nothing, nullity, none. It signified the end point of his quest, the resignation of his ego, and, as he said, “A far, far better name for a Buddhist, wouldn’t you agree?”
    We could not hit on a name for me. Or he could not sit still long enough to do so, and I didn’t feel quite comfortable with the exercise. I was undercover, after all, but using my own name.
    I still have the sheet of paper. “Possible pseudonyms,” it says, written large and slantingly in Nil’s hand, leaning sideways across the orderly printed text beneath. I am looking at it now, and in the light of day, or perhaps, healthful dissociation, the two p ’s seem too large, the sibilant s ’s too small, yet so inspirationally precise, and, of course, so blatantly—well—insane.
    Written so imposingly, as they are, in that distinctive fecal brown Crayola marker—the only pen psych patients at Meriwether hospital are allowed—these are unforgettable words to me, words as indicative, damning, and, admittedly, histrionic as “Abandon all hope.” They are the words above the doorway, the words of my descent and of Nil’s. They say everything and mean nothing.
    You could make a diagnosis on that basis alone, I suppose, if you were so inclined. As an artifact, Exhibit A, this page would not work much in Nil’s favor in court, or in a doctor’s hands. Nor does it pasted in my notebook.
    It is the thing I turn to when I want to go back to my first night in Meriwether. Immediately back, as if transported to the all-night fluorescent lights of the hospital ward shining down on the off-white page, Nil scribbling and cocking his head interestedly at his own wild script, all the while explaining dharma, string theory, and the four noble truths.
    Nil couldn’t sleep and neither could I. He, because he was manic. I, because I was terrified, though trying hard not to show it. And because I was bedding down for the night in a foldout chair. All the gurneys in the hallway were taken, and the hallways were all that we had: U-shaped and lined with gurneys, with small alcoves on each end. One side for the women, one side for the men, the nurse’s station in the middle, and alcoves at either end. The alcoves were filled with the chair beds, and each had a small picnic table with a TV mounted above it.
    My chair was commodious as chairs go, like the contraptions you see in business class on a plane. It probably wouldn’t have precluded sleep had it not been for the loud talk and laughter going on just feet away at the picnic table, which the night staff had colonized. They were flipping through tabloid newspapers, trading jokes and insults.
    Their noise resounded in my head, the noise of a public place.
    And that is very much how a big-city public hospital feels. Like an ugly big-city public place, a bus station, say, or a restroom in a vagabond park where everything is a bilious green or degraded shade of gray and nothing quite works the way it’s supposed to, or is ever really clean, except in the strictly