Life in a mental hospital

Life in a mental hospital is bleak. The lack of privacy alone terrified me but the loss of freedom brought me to a deep down primeval panic from which I might never recover. I tried to make myself as small and unobstrustive as possible. I just whispered the words, "Compliant, compliant, compliant" over and over to myself like a Gregorian chant. I needed out and the only way to do that was to the best damn behaving mental patient they had ever seen.

I am having a panic attack while I write this post which is making me think I should stop. I am not going to, though. I deal by writing so writing I am.

I was in Unit G. It was a lock down facility in which there were two groups of people. There were the paranoid schizophrenics and then the people like me that got overwhelmed. It broke down pretty squarely to those that would end up in a mental institution for the rest of their lives and those would make it back out to the world.

There were three dayrooms-two of which had TV's and one with no TV. Each dayroom had a courtyard to the side but, needless to say, they were locked. It was torture to look at the courtyards and know I couldn't go out there. I enjoy being outside. We would often look outside and comment inanely on the weather. "Still raining?" "Yep, still raining." There, wasted three seconds of a day that lasted infinitely too long.

The schedule was brutal:
6 AM: Lights on, thirty minutes to get out of your room
6:30 AM: Dayrooms
7:00 AM: Breakfast
8:00 AM-10:00 AM: Sit and wait. This is the time people get medications, talk to the psychiatrist, talk to the social worker, talk to the nutritionist, talk to the other patients. Most of us tried to nap in the chairs or read. Difficult to do.
10:00 AM: Snack
11:00 AM: Lunch
12:15 PM: Assigned to group
12:30-3:00: Groups (you had three groups and they were fairly useless)
3:00: snack
5:00: Dinner
7:00:Snack
8:00-meds, rooms open back up
10:00-lights out

Basically, I was not allowed in my room for fourteen hours and I only had therapy for maybe three of those. It was exhausting. Then, I couldn't sleep because the techs would check on us constantly through the night. They would sit by the door and sigh. They would turn their magazine pages heavily and move the chair. I had to pretend to be asleep because they study everything at the mental hospital. Not sleeping counts against one.

I got in trouble the second night for talking too loudly. It was like fucking camp. She said we couldn't talk because it was lights out and then went outside and proceeded to talk so damn loud that I was ready to strangle her. Old me would have said something sarcastic and rude but new me decided it was a test and just thought of ways to kill her. Slowly.

The food absolutely sucked. It was the worst food I have ever seen in my life and I have seen some pretty disgusting food. It was from the prison system. We had to take the individual food out and then stack the trays. We might hit each other with them. The first day I came in and looked at breakfast and almost got physically sick. The egg looked like a sponge and tasted worse. The grits were like yellow. How do you mess up grits? Seriously. They gave us white milk and I hate milk. So I didn't eat after checking to make sure they didn't check our food intake. It is alot like the lunch room at school. We traded food and there was always one patient that would eat everything. He didn't care.

Snacks were just as dismal. Morning snack was a sad disappointment. Cornflakes and milk again. Lunch snack was vanilla pudding. Evening snack was the jackpot-pretzels and chocolate milk. I can drink chocolate milk. I would trade everything else but evening snack.

Everyone told me to try to get out before the weekend. The weekends are the worse because there is no group and no therapy. Just sitting in the dayrooms for fourteen hours. It sent shivers down my spine and made me shake to think I would be in there for more than three days. I wasn't sure I could survive it.

I was very fortunate. The psychiatrist and the social worker were worried about my safety and they decided I was coping well. They discharged me less than forty-eight hours. I still believe it was a miracle. My family was shocked. They were happy with reservations. Both my father and my boyfriend decided I had told the doctor what he wanted to hear and played the system. I did.

I can't say it was a helpful experience. It was eye-opening and crazy. I have great stories but, basically, the doctor medicated me. He talked to me for ten minutes-all while looking at his watch-decided I was bipolar and put me on massive amounts of lithium. I was medicated to docility. How can one think about suicide when one is zombified from the medication? The lithium caused my heart to race and my hands to shake and my mind to be unclear. Strangely, every single one of us-including the schizos-had bipolarness. It was the diagnosis du jour.

So, I never talked about my problems at the mental hospital. I never discussed coping mechanisms for when I was allowed out of there. I did receive medication and the helpful advice of "Don't think." Thanks, appreciate it.

I do know one thing, though, I am never going back to a lock-down facility. Never. Ever. Ever. I'm going to get better and pull my shit together so it is never an option. I have discovered they are not helpful. They are not comforting. They are to medicate you and throw you out into the world you couldn't handle in the first place.