Behind Three Doors (part 2)

(continued from part 1)

Seven Days

With the winter Olympics on the small overhead TV every night, my first stay on the psych ward was imbued with an eerie sense of monumental circumstance. The Olympics, this universal worldwide event that interrupts all normal broadcasting and takes over everything, was happening at the same time as this catastrophic storm in my head. My normal broadcasting was interrupted too. I was in this strange place with strange people and at night they checked on me with a flashlight every fifteen minutes. I found out later that's suicide watch. That's what they mean by "suicide watch," a term whose literal meaning has skated right past me all these years. I get it now.

The nurses push around dollies with computers on them, these rolling workstations they use to find you and dole out meds, which they do by scanning the bar code on my bracelet first and then scanning each pill. They had me on Risperidol at first, an anti-psychotic. I must have looked aghast when they said that, because they called it "just a baby dose." As if to say, "Oh, you're psychotic, but only a little bit, we think." They were more used to people with ongoing mental health issues. They didn't seem to know what to do with my bewilderment. I didn't drink, I didn't take any drugs, I hadn't had any previous problems with depression or anxiety, and now they're giving me this anti-psychotic? 

The people in charge of the psych ward work out of the cluttered nurses' station in the middle of the floor, but these people aren't all nurses. There are also the Mental Health Workers, who wear scrubs but don't dole out meds but they are in charge of everything else, such as bed checks and group sessions. Nurses and Mental Health Workers have different jobs, and I would spend the first few days utterly confused about who to ask for what information, and I was bewildered at how I'd arrived in this strange place, and I was paranoid so I thought that they were all deliberately trying to confuse me. When my dinner tray contained food that I couldn't eat because of my diabetes I thought they were testing me to see if I would eat it anyway. I was suspicious and distrustful and confused.

The nurses' station was located in the middle of a common area they called a "milieu." At the end of that hall, another common room. Compared to the milieu, that end-of-the-hall common room was too bright and too echoey. There was a small TV in each common area, encased in Plexiglas and you had to ask at the nurses' station for the remote.

Patient rooms flanked the milieu area closest to the nurse's station. Adjacent to the nurses' station, a set of double doors led down a long hallway, where there were more rooms. While it wasn't explicit, the implication was that those rooms were occupied by the more violent people. Some had a Mental Health Worker seated in the doorway, reading or doing a crossword puzzle. No phones were allowed. Whenever the occupant wanted to leave his or her room, the Mental Health Worker went with, everywhere. I was told those workers were on "one on one" duty because it was possible that their lone ward would freak out.

Though there were enough chairs for all of the people, the chairs were never where they needed to be. If a meal was being served in the milieu with everyone seated in front of a gray tray, chairs needed to be brought all the whole long way down the hall from the common room. Then if  there was a group session being held in the far common room, chairs needed to be brought all the whole long way down the hall from the milieu. The chairs were heavy wooden things, blocky and worn. They looked as though they'd been hewn by mountain men. These chairs, too heavy to carry, everyone just pushed them, the stronger people pushing two or more like a little chair train. Back and forth all day. Each chair makes a scraping sound the whole way. I still hear it in my head.

There is no other group dynamic quite like a psych ward. There you are, with your own set of events that got you there, that you can't even begin to explain, and there are twenty-something other people that you have no idea how to interact with; I found it helped just to keep an open mind whenever someone spoke to me. I tried not to "guess" what anyone's problem was, especially since at that time I didn't even know yet what mine was, or how long I would be broken. Or when, or if, I would ever be fixed.

It's been eight months. ∎

Thank you for your positive feedback. I'll write more about 
how the days go in future entries. Tags are "Anxiety" and "Depression." - md

December 20, 2018:
Update: It's been four years. I wish I could say I'm...how I was before. I'm not. My brain is a sieve, and all my heroes are dead. I've written an update about "The Frail Male." Trigger warning...it is not for the faint of heart. 

Related: The Frail Male At Work (And Everywhere Else)