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

antimicrobial sense, as when you scorch cement and porcelain with bleach.
    The noise wasn’t the only barrier to sleep. It was freezing in there, too, and all we had to cover us were sheets and paper-thin sky blue pajamas. Hospital issue, all of it, including the Acti-Tred socks with stickum on the soles. I was wearing two pairs of those, and I had layered on a few extra johnnies for warmth.
    Seven hours before, all of my possessions had been taken at the door, put in a gray metal locker, and tagged. I had been sitting in my chair ever since, pretending that I was on a flight to Australia instead of locked by my own doing in the holding pen of emergency psych.
    I had been working my way up to this for weeks. I hadn’t wanted to go. Who wants to go to a psych ward, much less one of the grungiest, scariest ones you can think of?
    Dumb-ass journalists doing experiments, that’s who.
    Despite having been to the bin before, I hadn’t been at all sure how to commit myself to Meriwether. That first time around, at the end of Self-Made Man, I had arranged it through my doctor, and I had only agreed to go because she knew the place—had trained there, actually—and because, according to U.S. News and World Report, it had been rated one of the best facilities in the country. I had been given the admitting nurse’s number, had called, and had been told where and when to present myself for treatment. And, of course, I had needed/wanted their treatment. This, on the other hand, was self-inflicted and clinically unnecessary.
    It was altogether different. I knew no one. I had no connection with the place, and, understandably, I was intimidated by its size and what I expected would be its desperate, unclean, cavernous recesses where the unwanted were lost and forgotten. Though I had put myself there purposely, and purposefully, the urge to flee set in immediately, nonetheless. I didn’t want to get lost there, or even unduly detained for however long it might take, once I’d gotten my story, to convince the doctors that I didn’t really need to be there.
    That was the trick. Convince them that I did need to be there. Stay for at least ten days. Then convince them that I didn’t need to be there anymore. And do all of that without seeming crazier than anyone.
    I had a history of depression with occasional mild hypomanic episodes, or so the diagnosis of my former private psychiatrist had indicated, but when I checked myself into Meriwether I was feeling good. Quite good, especially when you consider how scary it is to throw yourself anonymously into what you can’t help thinking of—per the liberties of one too many Hollywood movies—as the darkest heart of darkness in the concrete jungle.
    I was not actually depressed, but I had to pretend that I was. A strange exercise for anyone, but especially for a depressive who has spent the bulk of her adult life trying to escape bleak moods, not court them. I wondered: Could I talk myself into a trough, when I had never been able to talk myself out of one? Would faking the mood bring it on for real? Was my “disorder” that suggestible? And, more to the point, were the doctors?
    Certainly, I knew what to say, and how slowly and disconsolately to say it. Whether I was really well or ill, no one but I could really know. How would the docs tell the difference? As in all psych wards, when you check yourself in with only a backpack to your name, saying you are suicidally depressed, they take you at your word. There is nothing else to go on. Diagnoses are made on hearsay. What you say is what you are, even if you are not a reliable narrator. There is no test, nothing independently verifiable. Just the swordplay of soft interrogation.
    I might have told them I was hearing voices, but then they might have given me Seroquel—which is what Nil was taking—or Haldol, or Thorazine, or some other heavyweight antipsychotic that makes you drool and twitch and doze off at the dinner table. But I