How I Became, and Unbecame, a Psych Patient

 

Early on, I was about 13, hormones kicking in, when family issue upon family issue invaded without knocking, slinking around the corners, under the rug, behind furniture in the secrecy of things we all know about, but we don’t talk about. I was on the edge of entering adulthood, desperately needing guidance that was lacking, so I set out to fill my own aching void. It was the 1970’s, with the popularity of Sybil, the drama of a young woman with multiple personalities embraced into integrating by such a caring psychiatrist, and Lisa and David, disturbed young people so attentively observed in some ward, and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, a tempting tale of a woman grasped from the bizarre world of schizophrenia. 

These portrayals resonated with me as so much better than my life as a quiet good girl, ignored in the shadows. I desired that attention I’d never get, not in the midst of generational and current family trauma, and I was compelled to read and watch these stories over and over, until I obsessed. Ideas formed of how I could have that level of concern, and this is where I began to style myself into a psych patient.

Unbelievable, isn’t it, that I would want to be in psych treatment because it offered what my parents were never able to give me? But it’s true.

So, one day I took what wasn’t even an overdose, and I called a suicide line, and I ended up on a psych unit for two months. It was 1980, and my dad had recently died, sister had been forced to give up her teenage pregnancy baby, a custody battle was raging to have my stepsister live with us, and I was supposed to be happily pursuing where I’d go to college. But inside, my mind was a pinball machine, and the chrome balls were fear and anxiety bouncing off bumpers and setting off bells that were so noisy, I had to keep them quiet. Tucking away my shame over not understanding how to grow up was paramount.

That first psych hospitalization gave me what I needed. Maybe it was more the style or approach back then, but the nurses talked and got involved, reassuring, in an almost nurturing way. I’d found what had only been my perfect place within the dream scenarios consuming me over the past four years, and if continuing to fabricate parts of my behavior so I’d be seen as fit to stay, that was fine, and that felt good, and that worked great for me, for that time.

I assumed an identity, habits, really an addiction, without the ability to consider how it would play out.

Even when I’d pull away, work at jobs, go to college, eventually earn a degree, travel, form some friendships, I’d carry along the fantasies of being a psych patient again. If this doesn’t pan out, when this doesn’t pan out, I’ll fall back into psych treatment, was my reasoning, my failsafe, because for me it was all desperate clinging to ideals of societal functioning without truly incorporating them into goals and a future I desired for myself. That part of me seemed to be disabled, that part that yearns for independence, accomplishment, and a kind of community with others that connects with the larger world.

And I’d inevitably dip back into the dim, colorless hospital corridors, the endless office visits and pharmacy refills and lists of what I should do when feeling certain ways, which I did with a sense of duty, but not to recover or heal for myself. I just wanted my current therapist or psychiatrist or group facilitator or social worker to…appreciate me…to love me. That’s not the place to go looking for those things. It was a quest that was destined to fail, but I couldn’t stop in my pursuit.

During my teens, twenties, thirties, while I was anorexic and cute and could bounce back from the abuse I inflicted on myself or threw myself into, parts of the psych treatment scenario I imagined did happen. Then, with so many detention holds, with the quality of the hospital I might end up on this time becoming a crapshoot, with conservatorship thrust on me, the glitter rolled off.

Skip my life video up to my fifties and I’m still in psychiatric treatment. I’ve avoided dealing with my true problems, and my true problems have, in turn, been avoided by mental health systems that would prefer the time saved in talking to just getting on with the drugging. I’m on seven meds, weight shot up into the stratosphere, back and knees too achy for the exercising I used to do a lot, and I can’t get out to walk anyway with sun sensitivity, with the constant drowsiness and hum of voices collected over the years chattering in my head about if you’d done this back then, like we said, before it got so late, you might have been someone. I’m convinced there is no way out. I’m stuck and mired in this whatever I am now. My continued destiny is temporary warehousing in psych hospitals, where nurses are now shielded behind glass in stations and only come out to dispense drugs that drain my spirit further while I rot and decay and slowly die.

Then this glitch happened, when an inpatient psychiatrist stopped quetiapine for a few days, and the outpatient psychiatrist, apparently confused, followed that with discontinuing five meds, and I got so sick. I was rolling in sweat, losing my insides, LSD dreams, floors swaying under me, walls closing in, blackness into bright light, lifetime flashing through swells of creative tsunamis, paranoia to peace and back and around again, sick.

After discharge from ICU, I expected that my entire treatment regimen would be examined, evaluated, and reconstructed and that I’d be handled with concern and respect back at the mental health center. But liability issues mean that human rights department representatives are looking to aid their employees, in this case the psychiatrist, in how to best explain what happened so that they are extricated from culpability and more of the responsibility falls on the patient. I was quickly disillusioned. The last few times I visited the center, a pall of grey seemed to have fallen over it, and the workers there now had beady or sharklike eyes, darting looks at me as they closed doors for conversations I wasn’t allowed to hear. My world shattered, and my longtime fantasy, the one I started with about finding that ideal attention, care, and love, yes, it shattered too, thankfully.

Suddenly I was with myself.

This is a gift, but not one that had me dancing and skipping and frolicking through fields of daisies. I’d put off, put away, and put down my own capabilities for so long, and now here I was.

And here I am.

My aim is to strip away all previous notions about myself and drop the regrets while I dig around in this raw sort of pile of myself, pulling out the old issues and letting them see the light of day, letting them whip around whatever emotions they’ve so tightly bundled, being fine with that and holding my own respect for myself. When I was so much younger, my trepidation overruled the idea that life is full of uncertainty on a constant basis, which is why people find company and pleasant activities to have some breaks and to reinforce the ultimate quality of it all. Attempts to escape handling that reality only ended up in a big, huge delay. And I’m done delaying.