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

didn’t want to put myself in for that.
    I could have told them that I had slept with five people in the past day, heard the birds speaking Greek, sold my mother into white slavery and spent the money on dinner. Then they might have opted for Depakote, the big gun of mood stabilizers. But again, I wasn’t ripe for that. I’d been on Depakote before. I had gained way too much weight, for one, and didn’t trust what it would do to me. That wasn’t the way.
    But the things you say in psych wards can become a menu for drugs. You have to be careful. I wanted to keep drugs to a minimum, so I reported the virtual truth of my history. Depression, possibly bipolar. I was on 20 milligrams of Prozac, and hoping to get away with nothing more than a dose boost on that—the devil I knew—and maybe a sedative for the p.m.
    As it turned out, the medication question was going to have to wait for “upstairs,” the ward itself, spookily referred to, where a team of pros could look me over and make the chin-stroking, wisely nodding call.
    Down there in emergency that first night, I had managed to get some Klonopin by request, but I still hadn’t managed to fall asleep.
    Nil had migrated to the picnic table, and so was contributing to the noise. He was playing a highly unorthodox game of chess with one of the orderlies, who was complaining loudly and incessantly about Nil’s strategy, which apparently entailed moving more than one piece per turn. His amped-up brain was skipping ahead three moves and making them all at once.
    “You can’t do that,” the orderly kept saying, his voice rising in irritation.
    The bright lights were kept on all night, so it was like trying to sleep in an interrogation room. The staff, too, went on all night, gabbing and laughing as if there weren’t stranded sick people lying all around them trying to rest. We were invisible, discounted, like baggage or the dead, stowed and impervious. We could tell no stories, the assumption being, I expect, that we were all too drugged or nuts to notice or lodge a complaint.
    There were four rooms in there, actually, with beds even, two of which were empty. Who qualified for them or why I wasn’t sure. Perhaps the violent. After I’d been there for a few hours, I would have killed for a bed, or even just a closable door. I asked, at one point, if I could crawl away to one of the vacants for some privacy and quiet, but was told in typical bureaucratic futility-speak that it was impossible. I was, they said, not being formally admitted there, but only being held until a bed opened upstairs.
    Somewhere around 3:00 a.m., however, one of the loud gaggle on duty announced that he could use a nap, and crawled off into one of these rooms for a snooze, pulling the curtains and all. Three hours later, just in time for shift change, he emerged, sighing and stretching satisfiedly.
    I had managed to drop off somewhere around one o’clock, but had been woken at two for a chest x-ray.
    “Why do I need a chest x-ray?” I asked the man who wheeled me in a seat-belted, wooden-backed wheelchair through a maze of green hallways and mauve doors.
    “To check for TB,” he said.
    Oh, right. As you do.
    In the middle of the night?
    Passing back through the locked door that said Patient Elopement Risk and Triage in big white letters, I knew that I would not do well if I had to stay in the psych ER for another night. But I had no choice. It would all depend on when a bed became available on one of the main wards upstairs. This special, sequestered, locked ER was where they held you until then, where they processed your insurance or lack thereof, where they kenneled you, like it or not, because you were a risk either to yourself or others. It would take as long as it took.
    We were in the bowels of the hospital. There were no windows. No air but the recycled variety, wheezing through vents. No light but bright fluorescents, unforgiving and somehow worse than shadows. Had they not secured