I can't believe this is real. I can't believe this is happening to me.
He won't give me my medication and let me go home. Instead he starts talking about up heaving my entire life by phoning my ex and claiming I'm a danger to the baby! This isn't my regular psychiatrist. He isn't someone familiar with my case; just my psychiatrist’s backup for the week. And, all because I needed help and shared the scary feelings when he asked me about my symptoms.
So now I'm really freaking out, and I mean really. I'm having a full-blown meltdown right here in front of this stranger, and there's nothing I can do to fix things, to stop it. There's nothing I can do to turn down the lights that are getting brighter and brighter in my eyes or the mounting terror pounding in my heart, smashing me with wave upon wave afresh. There's nothing I can do to put geometry back to rights with nature and architecture, to bend the distorted angles of these suddenly Escher-esque surroundings back to familiar right angles and normal joints of wall and ceiling. There's nothing I can do to slow or stop the lengthening tunnel emerging suddenly outward from me, taking me ever deeper from the room around me. And try as I might, there's nothing I can do -- no amount of tearful pleading -- that will make this suddenly all-powerful stranger yield and simply let me have my medication so I can go home.
Before I know it, he is urging me instead to go into the hospital.
"I can't do that," I try to tell him. "I'm unemployed and I can't afford to pay."
He says they have ways of waiving payment, of getting Medicaid to cover it, etcetera. With all bases covered, he has me trapped there like a caged animal. I feel rooted to the spot. I cannot leave without my medication, which I need for relief, and he is determined to put me in the hospital. Had I been in my right mind I would have just walked out then and there, but had I been in my right mind I would not have been there in the first place. I am not in my right mind.
Before I even know what's happening, this stranger is on the telephone to the hospital across the street, asking about payment waivers, inquiring if there are available beds up on psych, asking if he can come through the back door to the E.R. and skip the waiting room, telling them he has a patient he wants to bring over.
A patient. That would be me.
He hangs up the phone, stands, and puts on his white coat full of typical doctor stuff. A stethoscope dangles from the lower pocket; routine examining tools peek from the breast pocket. "Shall we go to the hospital now?" he invites, an unsmiling non-prince-charming coaxing his reluctant "date" to some twisted, horrific distortion of the royal ball.
"Advertising, are we?" I indicate the coat, which he assures me does not have "psych" written on it anywhere and is indistinguishable from any other white doctor's coat.
"We don't wear white coats for psych," he adds, which I later am not surprised to find out is a lie. All the psychiatrists wear them, as well as the med students and others on the treatment team at the facility.
I don't know whether to believe him or not, but it does not matter. From this point on, nothing I say or do will matter. I am now a prisoner of the mental health establishment, charged with the grievous offenses of telling the truth about my symptoms, losing my grip on reality in front of a professional, and guilty of being severely bipolar in the first degree. The defendant's plea: Insanity. The sentence: Hospitalization on a locked psychiatric ward, 8th Floor North at Griegor University Hospital. The term: unknown and indefinite.
(* - names and places in this series are changed to preserve anonymity.)
