Believe it or not, but I just spent all of last week in the loony bin… here’s how it happened:

[continued from part I]

Yes I was admitted to hospital over a week ago. First to the local emergency department. And then later transferred 1.5 hours away to the nearest mental health unit (aka “psychiatric ward” aka “lunatic asylum”). This is how my journey began.

I decided to opt for the back seat because I didn’t want to talk to anyone. The nurse sat beside me with the driver in front. I was very quiet, looking out the window at the world go by. At about the half way mark, I started to get nervous, because they were mentioning this thing called a “psych ward” with increasing frequency. Previously they had really only told me that I was being transferred to another larger hospital.

The nerves morphed into nausea. I told them I felt sick. I asked for more air. They gave me a vomit bag. The driver pulled over and not long afterwards, I vomited. Ugh. It must have been the blood test on the empty stomach that did it (and sitting in the back seat). They offered for me to move to the front seat. Pretty soon, I started to feel much better and started talking to the driver. We both agreed: this world is in trouble. And if you’ve been reading this blog, you know why. The nurse asked me: “Is all this why you’re depressed?”. “Partially”, I replied. “Partially.”

I was fine for the rest of the trip, but I was disoriented. We arrived at this weird-looking building with tall, thin vertical windows with corrugated iron cladding. I’d never been here before. I remember being escorted through several locked security doors. The sun was high up in the sky and I couldn’t tell which way was North.

We ended up in a little interrogation room and they told me to take a seat. There was a single chair with armrests in the center of the room. I sat, wondering whether or not to get myself comfortable by using the backrest. It was all a bit odd. They kept asking me if I knew why I was here. I knew. Truthfully? I don’t even remember what else they asked me. Probably my name and date of birth.

Oh I remember! There was a multiple choice questionnaire, that’s right. A K10 anxiety and depression checklist, not the usual Depression and Anxiety Stress Scale (DASS) scoring template I was already familiar with.

“About how often do you feel depressed?”, the nurse asked with a cheery voice. “All of the time”, I responded bleakly. She filled in the little circle at the far right end of the same row. “About how often did you feel that everything was an effort?”, the nurse asked. “All of the time”, by now almost monotone. She filled in another little circle at the far right end. The month prior, my depression scores were listed as ‘severe’. They literally could not get any worse.

I remember being told to remove all of my belongings except the clothes I was wearing (for some reason I got to keep my wallet although they did ask for that too). Without my phone and car keys weighing down both pockets I felt almost naked. I was searched with a metal detector.

Then I was escorted through another set of double doors commonly seen throughout hospitals. I’m pretty sure they had a metal grid inside the window portion, for added security. My purple Crumpler^® messenger bag sat on the floor on the other side of that doorway. I think here is when the shock really started to set in because –unlike at an airport security checkpoint– I was not immediately reunited with my possessions.

Once inside, they sat me down at a round table which was bolted to the floor with sturdy metal L-shaped brackets. I was presented with a piece of paper to sign. I began to read through the document, which was printed on a single sheet of A4-sized paper. It was the terms and conditions regarding my voluntary admission.

I think it all seemed pretty routine for the nurse. As for me, I was still in a state of complete shock. I hesitated for a moment. There were about eight people in the room. Lord knows what was wrong with them. Another patient wandered over in my direction, and, keeping his distance, said to me in rather a loud voice something along the lines of: “Can I give you some advice? don’t stay here if you don’t have to be here, everyone wants to get out of here if you can leave just go get out of here don’t sign anything!”, like it was one drawn out sentence with no pauses in between. Hmmm. Not a good sign.

I glanced around this room and outside towards the 20-foot security walls and the abundance of dull grey cement and concrete (yes I know the difference between the two by the way). It all all looked very sterile. Even the raggedy-looking tomato plant appeared to be depressed. To me, it all looked (and felt) like a virtual prison. That’s probably because that’s exactly what it was!

I also noticed that there was a complete lack of art on the walls –and taking this complete stranger’s sage advice– decided not to sign. It all seemed like a very depressing environment to be in and I just didn’t want to be there. “Fuck ’em!”, I thought. “I’m not staying here a moment longer than I have to”, I resigned. Besides, I held this belief: “Shit, this is really going to interfere with my work” somewhere in the back of my mind.

“I can’t sign that.”, I said. Out loud. “I won’t sign.”, I said again, emphatically. Now I don’t know if everyone realises this, but there’s a whole world of difference between the two words “can’t” and “won’t” (for some people at least). And I thought that saying both of them strongly enough, sequentially, that they would somehow synergistically add up and give me a tiny bit more clout than either word used alone would. Nope.

“I don’t need to be here”, I thought, looking around the room one last time, utterly convinced of my decision-making abilities. “What happens if I don’t sign?”, I then asked (inquisitively and a admittedly a little belatedly). “If you don’t sign we can keep you for up to two hours until you see a doctor who can release you”, I was promptly told. “Well two hours is better than two weeks”, I muttered to myself, and stubbornly refused to cooperate with them any further.

I don’t exactly remember what happened next –whether I was standing or sitting or where– but it wasn’t long before I was ushered by one of the nurses into another small private room. A large man with a somewhat porky face and dark complexion walked in. I started answering a whole bunch of his questions. And then I realised I didn’t even know who the fuck I was talking to. I couldn’t even remember his name. “Are you a psychiatrist?” I asked, once again belatedly. “Yes I’m a type of psychiatrist” he said with a charming English accent. And I was like “okay… fine… good… I’ll be able to prove to this bloke of my sanity… finally I get to talk to someone intelligent!”.

Please keep in mind that I just wanted to leave this place and go straight back home to pat my dog. Because it’s the little things like that that make me feel ‘happy’. Access to all of those little creature comforts we tend to take for granted. Plus my freedom. And I thought that if they made me stay –if they forced me to– there was a fairly strong chance I’d either throw a temper tantrum, try to escape or worse yet kill myself. There was just no way this was going to work for me. Because I was already at rock bottom. “I can’t stay here two weeks.”, I said, while shaking my head resoundingly as I often do for added effect.

Once again, I was asked whether I knew why I was here. Maybe the real problem was that I was too honest? Yesterday, I had visited my local community health centre. To try and get some more help. Because I felt that the monthly visits to my psychologist were not enough. They were helping –sure– but only very slowly (cognitive behavioral therapy or CBT as it is known is inherently a slow process). So I had told the occupational therapist my latest thoughts. I had told her everything. That’s why I was here in the first place… of course I knew why I was here.

He told me that they were worried about me and spun the old “duty of care” argument. Uh oh… I could see where this was going…

Because although I didn’t wanted to kill myself right there and then in that exact moment, I had dwelled on it for some time. I hadn’t completely ruled out the possibility of doing something like that in the future. If my situation were to get worse for example, as a kind of an escape route from my relentless suffering. Like if my mum or my sister died, or some other fairly drastic and unexpected life event. For example if my dog was ever taken away from me — simply being with her was one of life’s few remaining pleasures.

Quite frankly, yes, I was almost over it. I almost could not take any more. Almost. I had had around forty hours of cognitive behaviorial therapy in the last three years alone. My change of career was about ten times harder than I ever imagined. I didn’t feel very successful. I had no motivation left. My sleeping patterns were a complete mess. I felt hopeless. Useless. I had basically had enough of it. It might be the least desirable option, but it’s still an option. My secret option. And I had briefly checked out on that option too.

So I don’t even remember if he asked me this next question before or after the previous paragraphs, but he said it in a strange, roundabout way. Instead of asking whether I had ever had (or currently had) suicidal thoughts or asking me directly whether I wanted to kill myself, he posed the question in the conditional, subjunctive form, like this:

“If I were to ask you whether you wanted to kill yourself, what would you then say to me?”.

Now that’s a strange way of asking somebody something, isn’t it? Is this some kind of pyschiatrists’ trick? Since I’m a rather fond of learning languages, I’ve since learned that this is called “the subjunctive mood”. Right. Looking back on it now, yes, it’s rather clever now that I think about it. All of a sudden this became a hypothetical scenario. Yes hypothetically I might want to kill myself in the future if the situation got worse. And then there was an awkwardly long pause on my behalf. Too long. Like nearly this long:

He had caught me off guard. Dammit! Yes I felt about as guilty as Jan Ullrich when asked about doping. But I didn’t smile or laugh because it wasn’t funny. Nothing was. “It’s too soon”, I remember thinking. “I’m not that suicidal. Not right now. Not yet. I’m not ready to do it yet. I’m only partially suicidal.”

Lots of things were going through my mind, but I still hadn’t answered yet! I’m not one to tell lies. Should I answer “maybe”? “Not right now”? “Sometimes”? None of these are good answers. I realise now that when you’re in this kind of predicament, anything other than a straight up ‘no’ is not the right answer. In the end I decided upon saying “how can I answer that question?”. I couldn’t think of what else to say. But the alternative was to sit there and say nothing for even longer. My lame response was a partial admission of my suicidal tendencies.

It was around this point in the conversation that he said “we can keep you here as an involuntary patient” and “I don’t take this decision lightly” (or whatever way he said it). I was astonished. “You want to put a suicidally depressed patient into a more depressing environment?!”, I remarked.

I felt like a tiny insect who had flown unwittingly into the outer perimeter of a very large spiderweb. The web had been spun well before I had entered the room that day. And the juicy big orb spider was coming to get me. It was a trap and suddenly I was stuck!  Fuck!

You see, up until then, I had assumed that if I voluntarily walked into one of these centres, that I could voluntarily walk straight out again. Wrong!

I honestly wish I had a fucking tape recorder with me, but I didn’t have one so apologies if this next section isn’t verbatim and/or with the correct sequence of events. He looked me right in the eye (or I looked him right in the eye if you prefer) and he said: “The state wants to keep you alive” (or the equivalent, the only words I really remember were ‘state’, ‘you’ and ‘alive’). Or maybe he said “The state has a duty to keep you alive”, or something else very much like that — sorry, I just I don’t bloody remember.

“The risk to you is less in here than out there” the man said. To which I promptly replied: “but you haven’t seen my home environment, so how can you make that judgement? YOU don’t know!“. Then he repeated himself and I repeated myself. A few times actually. I was getting anxious. And then I said “well we’re just going ’round in circles”. The nurse nodded in agreement. The meeting was basically over at that point. There was to be no further discussion or compromise.

I had been classified as either a “mentally ill patient” or a “mentally disordered patient” (I’m still not sure which one). Basically, I was sick. How had I let things get this far? I don’t know. Depression is the disease of the 21st century; it wears an invisibility cloak and it can creep up behind you while you least expect it. Somewhere along the line, I had been gradually losing hope about my future.

By now it was dawning on me that there was not going to be an exit from here any time soon. Whether I signed that silly admission form or not, they were not going to release me back into the big bad world for a while. That was it. I was to be admitted as an involuntary patient at a psychiatric hospital ward.

[continued to part III]

 

They’ll be callin’ in the morning
They’ll be hanging on the phone
They’ll be waitin’ for an answer
But you know nobody’s home
And when the bells stop ringing
It was nobody’s fault but your own

Axl Rose, Coma GNR.