"Don't say a word to these people! They'll get you - they'll tie you up! They're nothing but a bunch of whores!"
I was trying to warn the others at the Crisis Triage Center, those still unrestrained, those still sitting on ratty couches in tiny waiting rooms. As for me, I was in four-point restraints, shackled at the wrists and ankles with leather belts. This was the result of an argument I had (and lost) about whether I should go to the hospital.
I had been forcibly injected with Inapsine, and it was starting to relieve some of the agitation. I stopped yelling. The Inapsine was also beginning to clear my thinking just enough to make things extremely uncomfortable. Now the restraints were becoming noticeable. I felt sick, tired, and scared.
There was a little office right behind me, and I could hear the nurses joking and laughing. I thought they were laughing at me. But my immediate concern was my wrist restraints. They were on so tight they were chafing. "Help!" I begged, "Would someone please loosen up my restraints? I promise I'll stay put! Please help me?" No one came. The merriment continued, not five feet away. They were still laughing at me - and talking about me, too. They could read my mind. It was terrifying.
Yet there comes a point, writes Kate Millett in The Loony Bin Trip, when "[a hospital experience] is actually so boring that even the terror wears thin." I had reached that point by the time transport finally arrived to take me to Oregon Health Sciences University (OHSU). I had been lying there for hours. Finally, off came the wrist restraints. They noticed the welts, mumbled words of regret.
I arrived at OHSU with the clothes on my back and a large wad of money - money I had intended to use to buy a gun. I was searched for weapons and contraband, then ushered into the unit - a solid wall of noise. I could barely hear the heavy metal door clanking shut behind me. Everyone, it seemed, was yelling, laughing, crying, slamming doors. The interior décor was based on metal covered in chipped paint, and every sound echoed through the long hall.
A nurse showed me to my room, a seclusion room with nothing but a mattress on the floor. I changed into the hospital gown and robe she brought me, and lay on the bed. All the fight had gone out of me. I had no intention of getting up again - ever.
After a long time, a doctor and a group of medical students came in to do an interview. I was deeply into depression by this time, and it was monumentally difficult to participate. When they asked me a question, I had to think a long time to answer. When they left, I was relieved.
I spent several days in seclusion. Three times a day, they brought me food. It was horrible and lukewarm, served on a Styrofoam tray with plastic utensils. It's hard to cut your meat with a plastic knife; it's a good thing I didn't feel like eating.
The nurses scolded me for not taking care of myself. They wanted me to shower, brush my teeth, comb my hair. All that was beyond me. All I wanted to do was lie curled up in the sweat-soaked sheets. The doctors came in each day. "Depressed," they agreed.
Then something changed. I started to feel better. VERY much better. I was excited about my progress.
But not the doctor. "You're getting manic," he pronounced, and prescribed Thorazine and Valium. I couldn't believe I was manic. I felt fine, and I thought they must be performing drug experiments on me. My only problems were that people were reading my mind again and laughing at what they heard me think. I was frustrated and angry. I confronted the nurses on this and they pleaded innocence. This didn't satisfy me. It didn't convince me I was sick, either. I thought that, realistically, this peculiar phenomenon was taking place, and it didn't have anything to do with mental illness, or mania in particular.
(It was only much later, with the help of a very smart psychiatrist, that I admitted I might, after all, have been manic during this hospitalization. It turns out that one of the characteristic symptoms of mania is a lack of insight into one's own condition.)
The court investigator came to see if he would release my hold, or send me to commitment court. I thought I'd have no problem, since, after all, I wasn't sick! But he thought I was manic, too. Too much laughter, too much chatter and activity. He offered me a 14-day diversion from commitment.
