You accommodate, you learn what to avoid, whom to placate. And the pull to be solid with the oppressed, the moral imperative toward solidarity, meets the pull toward making yourself agreeable with the guards. Yesterday I discovered that there is a little kitchen available to the patients who wash dishes. The staff kitchen really, but if you are good and smile a great deal and are very pleasant, there is real coffee there. This must be the coffee they gave me the first nightāwhen was it? How long?āyou must know; you must always know the date. You must count the days and keep a record in your night table. If you no longer know how long you have been held, how long you have been imprisoned, how will you ever get out or help yourself? What will you say when you are asked? Suppose that help came and you were unable to tell them when you were taken, the day of your arrestāit would dissolve all this horror into nothing. Forget itāmake up to this bully of a nurse and admire the coffee, the glass jar of instant coffee. Would she make me some? Would she really? Or could I make it myself? Oh, Iād love to. āYou can come here again if you are good.ā āBut sure I am always goodā: the brogue to amuse them. āAh, but ya take walks now, donāt ya, Katherine?ā āNothing but a wee small walk it was,ā this with the grin of an eight-year-old. āAnd a great mistake it was, too,ā I add, perfectly serious, swallowing my own meaning while they take theirs.
If I keep this up, do I get a phone call? No, that is doctor's orders, they say. And they seem to be leveling with me. It is the doctor who has decided I will speak to no one, write to no one. Then how can I make anything happenājust wait for Dāarcy? They will go on frustrating her at every turn. The system is huge, a nationwide bureaucracy. And maybe she is unable to interest anyone else. Then, too, she is busy with the women at Armagh, and she lives way out in the bog without a car and has damn little money. Maybe she has come to the end of her road, too. So the only thing I can do here is try to talk to one of the doctors. But they are never here. If one draws your blood he does not speak. If you meet one in the hall, he isnāt yours or he cannot talk to you now; you are to see the nurse, who tells you to see the doctor. You are to remain on your course of medicine and try to guess how long or how much Thorazine and Prolixin and even relatively harmless and familiar old lithium. Lithium is called Pryabil hereāI invariably think of a little bird having its beak jammed open. Many of the drugs here have different names, so it takes a long while to figure out which is which. And Prolixin is still a mystery to me. How does it produce the sores on Margaret's back? Why on earth prescribe something with these physical side effects? Or such psychic trauma, nightmares like mine?
There is shock always in the background. Enid has it. Delores has had it since she was eighteen; she is thirty-five now. The last time she was out she found a young man to marry. Then he jilted her, and they put her on shock again. Perhaps permanently or perhaps she will get out after a year or two, fall away and be captured again, and back to the empty look and the tremor, the blank fright of her presence in the dayroom. A beaten creature, a lifelong patient without a shred of selfconfidence left. They have consumed her human substance utterly. It is painful to look at her, acutely embarrassing. To see the fear in her eyes makes one ashamed, near tears, as before some terrible malformation. You count your blessings: They donāt give you shock. You have even discovered coffee. You are learning to make yourself agreeable when you forswear your vow never to speak to the staff, only the patients. The mechanics of a concentration camp and the little payoffs. Cushy it is, soft. Got your smokes and the telly, a bit to read in the papers. If you are feeling responsible you can think of someone else to address with your little toilet paper missives.
āMindy was always a well-behaved child, but lately she's stopped performing,ā my mother says. She addresses this remark to a small group of psychiatrists. As my mother pronounces this last wordāperformingāI stiffen in my chair. Does she think Iām some sort of puppet or doll? Clown would be more like it, dressed as I am in yellow hospital pajamas a couple of sizes too large.
It is December 6, 1967, three months before my sixteenth birthdayāthe date of my admission to the New York State Psychiatric Institute. This is a teaching hospital, better than most state institutions. I will be part of a community of others like me: troubled kids from middle-class backgrounds, unable to cope well enough to continue to live with their families.
It's been a downward spiral from compliant child to angry adolescent: early drug use, truancy, the tip of a lit cigarette held for a moment against my skin. Unanswerable questions clog my mind, keeping me awake at night, silencing me to near muteness. The hospital has agreed to accept me on one condition: that my mother brings me to family court and presses charges against me, placing me on court remand, making me a ward of the stateāso my mother, in a moment of weakness, will not have the power to sign me out. There I will remain until they decide to discharge me, or until I turn eighteen, whichever comes first.
āShe could be here as little as six months,ā one of the psychiatrists reassures my mother.
My heart pounds defiantly, each beat the slamming of a closing door. I had seen the impending date of my admission as a sort of token of a battle won; a badge of victory in my rebellion against my mother, a final act of defiance. It never occurs to me that I will have to live, as usual, through each day.
The Institute is built into the side of a cliff along Riverside Drive. The main entrance is on the tenth floor; to arrive on the fifth floor ward, you must descend. We live underground, nestled into rock; on one side locked windows overlook the Hudson, on the other, a wall of stone. Up to thirty men and thirty women live on one floor divided into two mirror-image halves. On each side long hallways connect two dorms, five private rooms, a bathroom, a shower room, a utility room, a locker room, a quiet room, a nurse's station. In the center is a sitting area, kitchen and dining room, elevator and locked staircase, and two living rooms which house TVs, a ping pong table, and heavy, padded chairs and couches. Beds line the dorms in neat rows, beside each one a dresser with only a few personal possessions allowed on top: books, toiletries. Here and there stuffed animals nestle atop hospital bedspreads.
I live here for twenty-seven months. It will be months before I am allowed to make a phone call, wear my own clothes, or have visitors other than my family.
We wake and are escorted to the bathroom. I avoid looking at my reflection in the long metal mirror above the row of sinks. Depending on your status, you may or may not close the stall door when using the toilet. If you are on observation an aide or nurse holds the door open. Showers by permission only, accompanied by staff, especially if shaving.
We line up for breakfast, do the patient shuffle. It is a hard time, between sleep and meds, a kind of limbo within limbo. Those of us on observation wear pajamas. Others wear street clothesāclothing privileges, they call itābut I havenāt earned them yet. I try to make myself look attractive in my baggy pj's. āFea!ā the Spanish-speaking maintenance crew say to me as I pass. They must hate us for being privileged and spoiled, for being fed without laboring, for having and abusing everything they work for. Every day they clean up our mess, buffing away the spills and scuffs, bringing the linoleum to a dull sheen.
After breakfast we line up for meds outside the nurse's station. With its large windows, it is a glassy eye always watching. Inside, nurses wearing white uniforms look up at us as they write in our charts. The head nurse emerges pushing a metal cart on which jiggle bottles of pills. She hands us our morning doseātiny white pills, round red ones, blue ovalsāthat rattle in little paper cups as we toss them into our mouths, washing them down with water poured carefully from a metal pitcher. Our mouths are checked for pill retention, our names checked off the list. Patients who resist or have trouble swallowing get liquid meds, clear or gem-colored cocktails that burn as they go down. If you refuse, you get an injection.
Medication is the rule, the burning absolution. Sometimes people demand more medication between times, begging for it tearfully. I resist, hiding the pills in my cheek, under my tongue. I find it odd that, objecting to my personal drug use, they are so dedicated to pumping me full of their drugs. Let them have a taste of their own medicine, I pray, wishing the doctors a forced experience of the flatness, distortion, and lack of luster. The nurse shines a flashlight in my mouth, probes with a wooden stick. My body turns leaden, my mind hums numbly. Objects sprout halos. I am on Thorazine, the standard-issue drug for psychosis.
Before I was admitted to P.I., the psychiatrist Iād been seeing had told me I was āphobic.ā That made sense; I was afraid of crowds, heights, loud noises, people. Here, I am suddenly catapulted into a new category, officially diagnosed as Schizophrenic. Somewhere I know that I am notāthat I am just an angry kid, rebellious and selfdestructive; but having an active imagination and little else to do, I comply. Iāve read I Never Promised You a Rose Garden; Iāve seen David and Lisa. The dramatic syntax of madness appeals to my creative side. This is the language of my new realmāI might as well add my own symptoms to the collective pot, earn the right to be called crazy, have something new to report in therapy sessions. You want crazy; Iāll give you crazy, I vow.
After breakfast and meds there is a brief period of bustling energy as the ward divides into those going to activities and those who will stick around. The mood shifts from the cacophonic tuning-up of an orchestra to the quiet concentration of a poker game as those left behind settle into chairs in the common area. Soon you can hear the humming of the electric clock, the tap tap of cigarettes on ashtrays, the rustling of pages.
I look around at my new community. Aside from those wearing pajamas, they could be a random group of commuters awaiting their train ā¦ except for the motionless man staring, mouth open, dribbling a little. And maybe the twitchy woman, wrinkling and releasing her face every few seconds. Some of the patients I already know. Liz, in her twenties, pulls her bathrobe tight around her ample form and settles into a chair to read. Nancy, a talented painter, is equally talented at defying gravity. Following a leap from a bridge, they found her floating downstream. Next time, she jumped from a neighborhood roof. Pink scar tissue dots her back where she was stitched up, put back together.
We sit and wait. The hands of the clock sweep the seconds slowly. The silence buzzes, the air is heavy; medication makes it heavier. We wait, we pace, we jiggle our legs. We wait for meals, for meds, for appointments with doctors and social workers; to be escorted to the bathroom, to school, to OT and PT; for lunch, after which we go back to the dorm for a nap. We wait for sleep. Mostly we wait to get out of here. Some wait to exit more completely. Like the man who every few minutes slides from his chair to the floor, thinking he is committing suicide. He brightens briefly after shock therapy, until the next depression nails him.
Soon it will be lunchtime. In the half hour before the bell is rung, we glance at clocks and watches restlessly. Then the bell! We shuffle forward, line up, try to fathom the day's fare posted on the chalkboard. High in carbs, low in fiber, this food nourishes neither body nor spirit. I grow fat and constipated on macaroni and cheese, powdered mashed potatoes, canned vegetables, spaghetti and meatballs, cake and pudding. But when that Pavlovian...
