Contentt Warning: Psychiatrist Institutionalization
184 Liberty Street
Twice daily, we had mandatory feet-on-bed time. First after breakfast, then again in mid-afternoon. Every time we were herded to our rooms, I was reminded of my time working at a children’s summer camp. At Camp Kesem, staff and counselors endorsed the idea that rest time was for the health and wellness of the campers themselves, but it was an open secret that it was the one time of day the adults could breathe without needing to manage a mini-crisis – like preventing a group of middle-school boys from shotgunning expired Capri-Suns. At the Yale New Haven Psychiatric Hospital, I’m sure the nurses felt the same way, sneaking in some Facebook time as they sat watch outside our bedroom doors. The doors are never closed, not even to escape the glaring hospital lights that chased away sleep in the wee hours of the morning.
It is the two-year anniversary of my institutionalization, almost to the day, when I return to profile the psych hospital. Jagged Connecticut rain bombards New Haven. This area of town, home to Yale’s Medical School and the majority of the Hospital buildings, usually scurries with ant-like activity, but the crowd has lessened today in favor of staying warm and dry. Otherwise, it is an unremarkable weekday morning.
Unable to bring myself inside and lacking an acceptable excuse that would get me past the security desk, I find myself repeatedly circling the building. Despite living in New Haven since 2017, I would not have been able to find it without Google Maps. Making up a squashed polygon of a block, YNHPH is bordered by a major New Haven street, Congress, and two smaller roads, Washington and Cedar. But its address is on Liberty Street, a narrow roadway used more commonly for street parking than for through traffic.
I feel immensely disoriented. In my mental map of the city, I had situated YNHPH somewhere in East Rock, a neighborhood on the polar opposite side of campus. Even once I find the building, I am far from feeling any sense of the familiar. This is largely because I hadn’t ever spent much time outside the psych ward, but also because many factors had starkly hindered my absorption of long-term memories from this time.
The building appears like a preparatory Picasso sketch, with hodgepodge sections of architecture molded together. One section has the ominous black modernity of the Yale Student Health building– architecture known for its evil-lair vibes. Two sides are thick matte bricks. The few first-floor windows that break up the gridlike red walls reveal generic offices and a back room full of industrial kitchen equipment, rooms that fill out the building like muscle tissue wrapped around a skeleton of hallways that I – like marrow – had only ever known from the inside. The bricks are striped vertically by dripping rain spatter, blocked in segments by overhanging tree limbs. Feeling somehow both tucked away and looming over, the building blends into its urban surroundings rather seamlessly.
I can’t figure out how I entered the building back in 2019. A nondescript van had shuttled me from the emergency department of the main hospital, but between that vehicle and the locked swinging doors of the Young Adult ward lobby, there’s nothing. I remember leaving a week later through the main entrance, an all-glass cube on one corner of the building. Inside, a security guard sat within a smaller glass enclosure with a metallic circle speaker for communicating to the public. Accompanied on either side by my mom and my then girlfriend, I had smuggled my hospital gown out under my civilian clothes, for no other reason than to prove to my mischievous psych-ward roommate that I could.
The ward was split by age group between three of the four floors, with the ground floor dedicated to a threadbare cafeteria, a handful of mismatched classrooms, and a bunch of prohibited hallways unmapped by patient eyes. There was a rickety industrial elevator that we used sometimes, other times we were directed up the inside stairwell, a dulled stampede of socked feet. Our ward was shaped like a beaker, with a U-shaped loop of double bedrooms capped by a well-lit lobby filled with rows of chairs and a couple tables. The staff rotated out on shifts, but generally there were a handful of familiar – if often unfriendly – faces among the nurses. Patients departed in staggered waves, and entered along the same rhythm. Sometimes they came in escorted on foot, like I had, and sometimes they came in strapped to a stretcher.
With a few notable exceptions (like the Snake Guy who medically required 24/7 supervision and drew incredibly detailed pictures of his pet boas, he was going on his second or third month of residency in the ward), most of us would only stay around a week. Enough time for us to get comfortable, to determine preferences in an unfamiliar space, to make friends. The ward was unspokenly divided into the Sads (those of us a danger to ourselves) and the Crazies (those of us a danger to others). The Sads tended to clump together, and the Crazies were both avoiders and avoided.
But the real division was between the nurses and the patients. I grew up in hospitals, as both my parents worked in medical administration and my younger brother has chronic health problems. Thus, I have met healthcare workers on all parts of the spectrums of personality, kindness, and capability. But Mrs. Hannigan would have loved working at YNHPH. The staff were generous with their glares and anger and unyielding with everything else. They relished in doling out punishments, regardless of the inanity of the rule in question or the intentions of the perpetrator. Physical contact wasn’t allowed among patients, and it was frowned upon between patients and visiting family and friends. But that didn’t stop us from executing smash and grab hugs before our friends disappeared out the gray main doors with their parents or social worker, much to the shift lead’s loud chagrin. Eventually, whenever someone had to leave, they started enforcing additional feet-on-bed time. But as long as we followed the rules, they couldn’t care less about what we were doing. Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit during a Halloween weekend movie marathon? Sure. Eating only sugar cereal for every meal? Go right ahead, dude. Getting out of bed to look out the window fifteen minutes past your mandatory bedtime? Completely unacceptable.
I’m still salty about the window thing.
For me, for my former partner, for my family, time is split into two eras: pre and post psych ward. Recovery from mental health emergencies is like recovery from addiction in that you are perpetually in recovery, never recovered. But there are no sobriety chips to be collected. Just knuckle scars that have thickened into calluses that I count like rings on a tree stump. A reliable measure of time passed, but only visible after a significant cut.
From my spot on the sidewalk today, I can see a lump of a person looking down from the second floor windows - the Young Adult ward. Hoodie pulled up over their hair, hospital gown worn over their clothes like a cardigan, chin propped on folded arms, their gaze falls on the yard below and mine meets it there. A tightly-woven chain link fence separates me and the grassy space from each other, lined with thick fir trees except for a heavy bolted fence at the far corner. I’m sure current patients had kicked up quite a fuss when they were informed that they had to stay inside due to the rain, depriving them of one of their only available breaks from monotony and the inescapable feeling of being watched. On a nicer day, wards would be allowed out in shifts, starting with the kids, then us, then the adults, to play yard games or simply continue sitting or pacing in some fresh air. The yard is bisected by a volleyball net, though the basketball hoop on one edge of the concreted portion of the yard was much more popular among both patients and staff. A few autumn botanicals peek up on the manicured edges of the grass and in the mulch divots around the few scattered elm trees.
Just outside the sightline of the yard, even if pressed as far against the furthermost point of the fence as possible, a Blue State Coffee Shop bustles with medical school students. On the opposite side of the building, beyond the visibility of anyone inside, a lush park sprawls across the block, lined with delicate trees shedding their blazing leaves. A loose-leashed dog is elated to discover the grass sprays bursts of water with every jump. I didn’t know there was a park there before today.
The gate and wall carve away the ground, creating a little incline that directs the rain in sloping waves towards the sidewalk. Shivering as I watch the water puddle into the sodden leaves on the asphalt, my rainboots carving two identical arcs into the flow, I am struck by the realization that I can simply turn around and go home.
By Miki Cornwell