I spent my first hour in an inpatient psychiatric unit sobbing inconsolably at an empty table in the unit dining area. A middle-aged psychiatric veteran approached me and put a sage hand on my quivering shoulder. “This is merely an occurrence,” she told me. “It doesn’t have to mean anything.” And just how wrong the sweet woman was. It meant something when the necklace I wore every day was stored in a cellophane bag labeled with my name and birthday lest I attempt to choke myself with it. It meant something when the window in my assigned bedroom was frosted over to keep eyes in and eyes out. It even meant something when I ate jello, the quintessential knifeless dessert, for lunch at least four times during my stay.
I have always been enamored by the work of Sylvia Plath and her various portraits of her mental illness--how exciting and exotic it seemed to aestheticize the mysterious goings on in a mental asylum; how alluring it must be to be a shattered woman. I have always found a certain beauty surrounding such characterizations, as if an emotionally unstable woman had her own unique brand of sex appeal. But running a finger through knotted hair in front of a hazy mirror after nearly two days without showering, I was struck with the reality that perhaps I was not that woman. Perhaps I was too sick to be aestheticized. My suicidality was not a witty Plath quip, but a raw, violent, and terrifying urge to shake my soul from the very body that anchored it. There was not an elegance to self-harm like I expected, but a crazed psychological necessity. In short, I was too crude to be broken like Sylvia. Scarred, stripped, and humiliated, I was an unwieldy and utterly uninteresting protagonist in a novel that I was too depressed to even begin to visualize, let alone write.
There was also a clinical nature to my environment that was a far cry from the New England clapboard clinic I had always envisioned. A special key was needed to get in and out of the facility, as well as to open the closet where they stored my hairbrush (as even that was too dangerous for me to use alone). My vital signs were taken religiously each morning, and my three meals a day were the primary temporal markers that ensured me that the day was actually passing. Visiting hour was always six to seven, and of course, absolutely no use of electronics. I sported a paper bracelet patterned with barcodes which were scanned every time I was given my medication or requested an Atterax. I felt very much a specimen, lonely and vulnerable, in this cold sterility.
This, perhaps, drove me even crazier than when I arrived; I would spend afternoons shaking with akathisia in my bed. I felt impulsive; I wanted to break out of my skin. Even my calls home on the public landlines were of no avail to my gripping claustrophobia. I remember so vividly the absolute horror in the face of a young man in a blue hospital gown being dragged away as he was force-fed seroquel to calm his nerves. “I don’t feel safe! I want to get out!” I remember him saying as he was pulled from the unit common room. We all silently stared, hearts thumping with his in empathy, knowing that any one of us could be in the same position.
This empathy was often widely shared amongst the patients, though to a limited extent. It was very clear that each of us had a piece of ourselves missing, a piece which kept us from being fully engaged with one another. For some, it was the desire to distance oneself from the unit
community in order to solidify the boundary between asylum and outside. For others, it was illness that held them back, which allowed them to observe their environment but not engage in it. For me, I was in utter denial that I was even there, sleeping constantly in hopes that I would awake in my own bed at home. Perhaps if I hid in my room, colored my own pictures, read my own books, and did my own puzzles, the people around me might dissipate, removing the reminder that I had gone crazy and was locked in a place especially for crazy people. This never happened, of course, but luckily so: bearing shockingly vivid witness to tears and terror stirred me with the knowledge that they, too, were just as vulnerable as I.
And then there was the Patio. As the unit’s best attempt at fabricating freedom, the Patio was constructed of a four-foot cement wall upon which there was a seven-foot chain link fence encased in plexiglass to keep us delinquents from escaping. There was little-to-no wild life, save a belligerent swarm of mosquitos, but at least the sweet sunlight upon our faces reminded us of the eventual freedom the outside world promised. It is shocking just how beautiful a ray of sunlight can be when only allotted a half-hour of it a day.
After a week of this hell, I was promptly and unceremoniously discharged back into everyday life. Perhaps I regained my freedom, but there are still bits of my time in the psychiatric unit that remain with me. The humiliation of being stripped and examined. The stark loneliness in my room with the frosted window. The compulsion but inability to scream in terror, despair, and frustration. All of these haunted me then and haunt me now, often when I am alone and ruminating. Suddenly, my mind brings me back to a reminiscent corporeality--padding around in socks through the hushed day room where a plexiglass-entombed television blared hypnotically against the lingering scent of antiseptic.
But, in the end, what did it all mean? I don’t--and ever will--have the filtered, sarcastic elegance of Sylvia Plath, but here I am, unequivocally my own brand of mental patient. Raw, terrified, a sallow face framed in matted hair. Perhaps this is the very essence of what makes me alive; there comes a time when novels fail, and all that is left is you and your own being. I was not brave enough to be a protagonist, not multidimensional enough to be an antagonist, even in my own story. All are terms and devices which bring us from the very essence of what it means to live. Perhaps the meaning of my time there was the truest, most primitive version of myself: hurting and insane, but undeniably real.