Real LIFE IN THE PSYCH WARD

That November morning, I barely slept. I faced the insurmountable task of meeting a deadline while incredibly depressed and suicidal. In the fall of 2018, I was a Ph.D. student in a humanities program in the Midwest, and I had been grappling with this depression for months. If I missed this deadline, I thought, it would be just another shameful mistake in a year full of mishaps and professional blunders. The idea of one more embarrassment, one more mistake that would cast doubt on my ability to be professional, was too much. I just might kill myself.

Before that morning, there were small fantasies, daydreams, imaginings of doing something “on accident” that would cause my death. My bipolar brain was operating like a highway, with each lane moving at varying stopping and starting speeds, complete with gridlock, accidents, pileups, speeding, road rage, and falling asleep at the wheel. My brain was busy and very exhausted, and this feeling was starting to seep into my body. I felt physical fatigue.

This looming deadline for revising my qualifying exams was another impending disaster; a tsunami of dread big enough to wash away the California shoreline I lived near.

I just need a moment to collect myself, I thought. I Googled, “How do you know you need to go to the hospital if you are suicidal? What happens?” Spoiler alert: If you Google this, you should probably go to the hospital. I went to my then-boyfriend and asked him to take me. I let my family and a few close friends know, and I vaguely emailed my university advisers that I would not be meeting the deadline due to ongoing health issues. The thought of being honest with anyone who oversaw my work in academic circles was unbearable. I couldn’t add more to the list of things I felt already pegged me as a problem student. 

As my boyfriend drove me to the nearest hospital, I was filled with immense shame. I had failed at living up to the narrative I’d constructed about myself as an ideal Bipolar II patient who always adhered to their meds, went to therapy, and did the work. While I was terrified about my decision to go to the hospital, I found a kernel of calm in my emotional storm that told me this was the best decision I could make. 

Being admitted to the hospital was, fortunately for me, a relatively straightforward (if strange) process. I approached the front desk and told the receptionists that I wanted to die and kill myself in a tone that could easily have been used to ask where the nearest restroom was located. I had to go through a string of nurses, a doctor, and several psychiatrists before I was finally admitted to the unit. I was given some medication for my pain and anxiety, and this showed me how badly I had been doing. I went from crying and hysterical to relaxed and laughing within a few minutes of taking it.

The unit’s aesthetic was vague, like a dentist’s office: waiting-room chic. It was a co-ed space, two to a room; the mattresses reminded me of gymnastic mats. There was a communal dining area that only had decaf coffee, a patio area where we had three “outside time” breaks a day, and a room with a piano and huge TV. There was a small library chock full of The Big Book (Alcoholics Anonymous), Danielle Steel, random potboiler crime thrillers, more AA literature in at least five languages other than English, and a set of Judy Blume books.

I didn’t know how long I’d be on the unit, and I didn’t necessarily want to engage with those around me. So, I decided to reread all the Judy Blume.

But while I read those books, I realized I was using learning and education yet again as a defense mechanism. This hit me further as I began to engage more with my fellow patients and the various social workers and occupational therapists who structured our daily activities.

In our “processing” groups and workshops people would become vulnerable. You might share a moment with someone during group time, and this would expand your social circle later, during the copious hours of downtime between activities and meals. I became friendly with patients who had diagnoses of anxiety and schizophrenia as well as those who were just grief-stricken and overcome by the difficulties of their lives. Our lucidity ranged from hyper-vigilance to deep psychosis. But here, we all were on the same boat; the degrees between well and unwell were shown to be subjective, if not nonexistent. 

We patients would talk about life in snatches of conversation between gratitude exercises (a practice I once scoffed at and now embrace), time management workshops, and lessons on how to identify our support structures. I met artists, dental assistants, x-ray technicians. I met people who were unhoused, in recovery, recently relapsed. People who were on parole, in long-term relationships, pregnant. People as old as 83 and as young as 18. The hospital wasn’t a utopia; it was real life amid our distorted relationships with reality. It felt more real than the world of academia I had been occupying, which stressed deference to and the specialness of those anointed to pursue “the life of the higher mind.”

Without a phone or any academic work to steep myself in, it was the first time that my one duty was to learn about me and the boundaries I needed to develop to be better to myself and the other people in my life. It was a week chock full of stories and life-altering experiences, and by the end of my time there, it started to feel almost like the summer camp I had never attended. The day before I was given the go-ahead to leave by my psychiatrist, he broached the topic of leaving with me. I felt unsure.

I was later talking with Sam, a young woman who had been on the ward for six or seven months. She was the one who had added the Judy Blume books to the library. Sam did not like a lot of people; she had been on the ward for a long time and was there partly due to a court order. But she got along with me and liked that I enjoyed her books. I talked to her about how unsure I felt about leaving the ward just as I was feeling better. She softly interjected, “If I could go home, if someone gave me the choice, I’d love to go home.” That decided it, then. Sam helped me make the choice to go home and face the challenges at hand with a new perspective. I was nervous, but I could do it. 

A few months after I left the unit, I returned to the Midwest to fulfill teaching duties and to complete my exams. I had hoped my return would be a triumphant comeback story. It was anything but. Two big pillars in my life crumbled within weeks of each other. First, my relationship ended during a phone call. And as I was trying to make sense of the sudden dissolution of my relationship, my shaky connection to academia finally gave way.

But my seven days on the unit effectively altered my relationship with myself and with the rest of the world. I was able to identify who could support me, and my friends and family pulled through for me in a way I couldn’t have imagined. In the past, a situation like this would have caused a full-blown depressive episode like the one that put me in the hospital. But this time, it didn’t. My work on the unit taught me about the wells of tenacity and resolve within me. The people I got to know had pulled me out of the individual I was during my depressive episodes. The impact of that transformational experience got me through the crises I faced when I returned home.

My mental health recovery was not the neat, fabulous success story I hoped it would be. But oddly, I feel grateful that things didn’t work out. Because of this, I know there is little that will deter me from being myself, from being honest about the realities of living with a mental illness, or from seeing flawed institutions for what they are – and knowing that I can survive all of it. The thing I initially felt the most shame over, being hospitalized, has been transformed into the greatest example of my resilience as a queer person who lives with multiple disabilities. While I have compassion for the person I was before that experience, I feel much better as the person I am becoming.