»"Hospitalized" by MindSlave«
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 Have you ever wondered what it would feel like to be mentally ill like me? Imagine you grow up in a good family, have a fairly normal life, are a carefree and happy child with not a lot of worries in the world. You play sports, join the Cub Scouts and then go on to Boy Scouts, and make friends. As you get older, you realize you feel like you are somehow different, but this is normal. You fall in love, go to keg parties, roam the streets with your buddies, feel like a rebel when you see the dirty summer sunset, and go to local punk and metal concerts,. You are told by a male punk friend that you look and act just like "a classic greaser," and you are also told by a female hippie friend that you are more like a "flying elf," whatever that means. Even in high school and college you get decent grades and end up with a good education, largely through your own efforts because your professors think you are too weird so they take no interest in you, and also because they suspect you are getting your term papers off the Internet due to the fact that you write so well. You coast after college, enjoying hiking, reading, and writing pecefully by yourself. Your friends and family start to say you have been acting "strangely," but you feel fine. Then...so quickly, You hit twenty-four and within six months begin going into a downward spiral of depression and isolation, until finally your thoughts become massively distorted because the world has changed into a terrifying nightmare you can't understand, punctuated only by occasional, truly horrifying episodes of mental agony and physical pain to break the monotony. This goes on for a few days, during which time you do not sleep, and you do not much feel like you should. At one point you stay in a seedy motel for a few days and watch cartoons a lot to try to get back to childhood. When your money runs out, you return to live with your parents, but you begin to worry that you are being followed there and that the people following you may be doing so to find out who you asssociate with for future reference, and you suspect these people who know all about your life intend to kill a girl you were in love with but who rejected you in high school, and they plan to frame you for her murder.You end up defying a police officer (you are sure someone has talked to him about you beforehand) who has been called because you are behaving like you always did with your buddies, who thought you were cool and brilliant, only you are behaving that way in front of strangers and policemen this time, and a policeman detains you, frisks you, handcuffs you, and puts you in his police car to "get you some help." . He takes you to a buidling that looks familiar but honestly at this point you could be in Czechoslovakia or Tasmania for all you know. You go through a metal detector and are admitted for a "seventy-two hour hold",with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder In two and a half weeks there you will never hear the word "hospital", but that's basically what you figure out it is since they give you pills to take, though surprisingly these pills have no effect and you still are in constant mental anguish. Later you get into a little argument with a big old African-American orderly about the use of the phone, and suddenly the orderly orders you to stop touching the phone, which you have no intention of stopping doing since that phone is the only thing that connects you to your life before this nightmare. The orderly, deciding you are behaving threateningly, grabs your hands and holds them in his fists, so that you can't pull away, but you instinctively try to pull away. The orderly yells "Code Red!" to someone who has cone up behind you and suddenly you are tackled by three more orderlies and dragged into a little room no bigger than your parents' closet in their bedroom back home. An orderly stands at the door looking down at you sternly, until a black female nurse comes in, tells you to unbutton your pants and pull them down. She pulls out a huge syringe you hadn't seen before and sticks the needle into your buttcheeck, injecting some burning fluid into the muscle. Then she pulls out another syringe, and sticks that other needle into the same buttcheek as before. The nurse leaves the room and you are taken to a bedroom without a roommate in it and told "Get some sleep," which sounds like a good idea, and it is at that moment that you remember you haven't slept in a week. You lay down on the bed and instantly fall asleep. When you wake up, you don't know where you are again, but it is day and no one is in the room with you, just a window through which you can see some trees and grass You decide to break the window and escape. You pull a drawer out of the dresser between the two beds, and swing it at the window, expecting the glass to shatter and for you to be free. The opposite happens, the cheap fiberboard drawer shatters without making a dent on the window, so you try again by grabbing a long thick piece of wood from the drawer off the ground. and banging on the window with that a few times. By now there is another Code Red and you get dragged off to another room while they clean up the mess you made with the drawer. The medication makes you feel worse than you did before, only you are no trouble, because you are so doped up all you can do is shuffle out to the "day-room" to sit staring into space every day, and then back to your room at night, all under the watchful eye of muscular and (almost always) African-American male orderlies or "techs" as you learn to call them, For the first few days, they don't let you see visitors, so you start to suspect you may not be in your hometown anymore, and that your friends and family have no idea where you are, or have been told you are dead, which wouldn't be far from the truth. But finally your parents show up, though no friends visit you in the hospital because they don't know you are there since you can't remember their phone numbers, and because you know they would never come in the first place because they would be afraid they might have to stay there too. You can barely put words together to speak and thus can't complain about the way you feel, and if you could complain it wouldn't matter because the medication they have injected into your buttcheeks is designed to stay in your muscles for months and slowly be released over time into your blood, causing side effects that are almost identical to Parkinson's Disease, and, though you are not told this until later, in a very few cases they are permanent. Though you own and have always read a large variety of books, your parents bring you old books you have already read, so you make your only two requests during your hospital stay:for some change for the coke machine and a new hardback copy of  A Farewell to ArmsIn two and a half weeks in the hospital, you have only been outside for cigarette breaks (you have never smoked but that's about to change) in a little square of grass with a tall brick wall around it and two hard metal picnic tables where you sit with your fellow inmates. After about two weeks, they tell you the day when you are going home. You watch the minutes and hours crawl by (the medication makes time seem to pass more slowly, like LSD can) and finally, finally, finally after two and a half weeks your father comes to pick you up and take you home. Suddenly...you are in a car, pulling out of a parking lot onto a busy road...you know this road, because you have driven on it since you got your license at sixteen. As you pull away from the buidling, you look back and realize you have driven past the place where you were held and forceably treated most of your life, and you never guessed that there were people locked up there who couldn't leave. And it turns out after a while and seeing two different psychiatrists and a therapist outside the hospital that you never had bipolar disorder, but that you had schizoaffective disorder, which can be described as acute schizophrenia linked to mood swings,. so all the thoughts and paranoia you had in the hospital could have been avoided if you had been given an oral antipsychotic and a tranquilizer upon admission rather than a just mood stabilizer. Every year, the psychiatric medications on the market get better and have fewer side effects, and your monthly appointments with your psychiatrist are pleasant conversations with a friend who can give you advice, or just chat with you. His main goal is to help you feel comfortable and able to do the things you want to do. Since your time in the hospital, there have been ups and downs regardless of what medication you were on, but the psychosis has returned only when you stopped taking your medicine. You know you'll have to take the medicine forever, and that you will never feel as good as you once did due to the onset of your illness, but this gives you courage because you know that the worst is also behind you. posted by MindSlave |
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| in-my-opinion.orgPoliticsPsychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry"Hospitalized" by MindSlave |
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 Cool, interesting. Did you keep diaries or record your memories somewhere? Or is this all pent up in your head? posted by sangu |
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sangu: Cool, interesting. Did you keep diaries or record your memories somewhere? Or is this all pent up in your head? No actually most of the time I was too out of it during that experience to write, though I think I wrote like a page once...LOL I think it was about turtles or something...but really I was unable to write during that time. I actually wrote all of that tonight from memory after I finished my posts on Kupov's "Forum Awards" thread. Thanks for the good review, I like it too. posted by MindSlave |
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 That's an amazing account of what you went through.. Is this institution still open? And is this how things normally proceed? 
I guess you can count yourself lucky, that you can continue with a normal life at least on pills. I sort of understand where that's coming from - my mom survives on pills too. Do you associate any of your early behaviour to manifestations of the diagnosed disorder? Or was it's real onset only in your twenties? posted by ryder |
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ryder: That's an amazing account of what you went through.. Is this institution still open? And is this how things normally proceed? Thanks ryder. Yes, that place is still going strong. It's funny, but I always assumed it was just a public hospital where they put me because I had no health insurance at the time, but a few months ago I asked my psychiatrist about it during my session with him, and he said that in fact, that place is technically not really a hospital at all. Apparently, it's more like a detention center! It's called PATH, which stands for "Primary Alternative to Hospitalization," meaning I guess that it's an "alternative" to putting a person in a real hospital. I've since gotten my health insurance reinstated, and I checked myself into another place, the main local hospital here, several times because I felt like I was headed for trouble. And, let me tell you, the difference between the real hospital and PATH is like night and day. At the hospital, the people are nice, the food is good, it's not overcrowded, there's plenty to do, and most importantly they don't overmedicate people to keep them under control. In fact, my current psychiatrist works at the hospital and so that's where I go for my appointments, only I go to a different floor than the part where people stay overnight, etc. ryder: Do you associate any of your early behaviour to manifestations of the diagnosed disorder? Or was it's real onset only in your twenties? Generally as I said I was a normal kid, but one thing that I remember about myself as a kid that would later become a real problem is that I would get stuck on one interest to the exclusion of everything else. For instance, reptiles. For a long time I was just obsessed with them, and really I lived and breathed roaming around the woods looking for reptiles or reading books about them. But the difference is that this obsessiveness didn't make me miserable or unhappy at all. It was just kind of an eccentricity that I now can understand is not exactly healthy. I had a touch of depression and what they call "hypomania" or hyperactivity in college, but really nothing bad until less than a year before I was arrested. As I said, it all happened very quickly. posted by MindSlave |
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Oh yeah and btw... I didn't put half of the bad stuff that happened in PATH into my post. For instance, when they put me in the little room (which is called a "QR" for "Quiet Room") after the first Code Red, someone had been in there before me and had apparently had food in there, because they had spit food all over the walls. So there was dried, caked food on the walls in there and no one ever bothered to clean it up. Also, there was another patient in PATH who used to call me "Jesus" constantly because of a joke one of the orderlies made about the Birkenstocks my parents had brought me to wear (you can't have shoelaces in PATH because you might hang yourself in there for obvious reasons), so every time this patient walked by me, he was like "Hey, Jesus," "How's it going Jesus?", etc., even to the point of saying it in front of my mother when she was visiting. The psychiatrists were jerks: apparently one of them told my parents in a meeting without me present that, "Sometimes these people kill their parents." Finally, though this is not everything that happened, for some reason the IV antipsychotic they gave me (Prolixin  ) causes a side effect called "hesitant urination," which is much worse than it sounds because the urinary sphincter seizes up and you can't urinate, so basically I was in constant abdominal pain from that, and they gave me medicine for it but it didn't help. I was in and out of the bathroom trying to urinate, but rarely could I do it, so my bladder got so full that I could see my abdomen sticking out from the urine in there! And to make matters worse, they gave me another big injection of the Prolixin the day I left PATH to keep me under control, so all those problems I mentioned followed me home. LOL, oh but I could go on and on...
posted by MindSlave |
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 MindSlave: Finally, though this is not everything that happened, for some reason the IV antipsychotic they gave me (Prolixin ) causes a side effect called "hesitant urination," That's so horrible... I know the feeling because I had a pretty uptight personality when I was younger, and some times when I knew I had to go, I couldn't, because I was so nervous for some odd reason... but I felt like I was about to wet myself any second and held it in even tighter when I wasn't around a toilet. The most horrible feeling ever. You've come a long way, MindSlave... I'm glad that you made the journey. posted by nocturnal_anonymous |
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So...how do you feel after all of this? What have you learned I guess..I'm curious. posted by sangu |
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nocturnal_anonymous: You've come a long way, MindSlave... I'm glad that you made the journey. Yeah thanks I feel pretty good these days. The really sad part about all that is, the journey itself could have been so much easier if the people at PATH had given me what they call a "therapeutic dose" of antipsychotic medicine in pills at the very beginning. I would have been fine and out of there in seventy-two hours with a referral to a psychiatrist and a prescription to fill at the pharmacy. But they just put me on a mood stabilizer, and after that orderly picked the fight with me, they actually went to court, before a judge!, to keep me in there as long as they wanted to under a condition known as "involuntary hold" which is reserved for people who are considered a danger to others! 
But now everything's cool, I was just writing this for the hell of it and to show that I have as much of a problem with psychiatric abuse as anyone, just not the practice of psychiatry itself. sangu: So...how do you feel after all of this? What have you learned I guess..I'm curious. Tonight I feel great. I watched The funny thing about that is, now that I have written so much, when I was a kid I thought being a writer was something I never wanted to do because those books they write are so long! But now I think it would be kind of fun. I still think I suck at writing fiction, though I'm still in my twenties and thus potentially have a lot of time to experiment. The good thing about the disaster at PATH was that I realized that life can't get any worse than that . As far as I'm concerned, I was imprisoned and chemically tortured for defying a police officer! I really think if they had started killing us in there like in a deathcamp I wouldn't have minded at that point because that would have meant they would be held liable. But the fact is, everything they did was legal! Another lesson I learned is: there is a whole hidden world where the law doesn't apply, going on right under our noses, all around us, and there are little wormholes into that world - like PATH - that bad people exploit to victimize others. But that hidden world is not the real world, it's artificial, and it's ruled by old ideas: Freudian theories of mental illness, for example, that claim that mental illness can be fixed or cured somehow. That's really why I attacked Francesca so much, because she claims not to be a Freudian, but her statements have Freud's mark on them, like her idea that psychosis is just an "emotional crisis" that people will get over without medication. If you take away anything from what you read of my stuff, remember: mentally ill people suffer way more than they let on, because they're embarassed about it. And another thing is: people who openly act strangely, like homeless people talking to themselves, are almost always harmless, because the really consistently dangerous mentally ill people are usually successful, slick, and superficially charming, until you look at the patterns of their behavior. They don't suffer at all, they cause suffering. Those are the ones to watch out for, not weird people. Weird people can be helped to try to feel better, while bad people can't be stopped from trying to hurt others; I can't put it any more clearly than that. posted by MindSlave |
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MindSlave: Another lesson I learned is: there is a whole hidden world where the law doesn't apply, going on right under our noses, all around us, and there are little wormholes into that world - like PATH - that bad people exploit to victimize others. Aha! Knew it was hidden in there somewhere. MindSlave: because the really consistently dangerous mentally ill people are usually successful, slick, and superficially charming, until you look at the patterns of their behavior. Interesting. And once again, my all-time favorite saying, cool. posted by sangu |
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I know everybody's sick of this topic, but I have one more thing to say about this... I really think they should let the mentally ill serve in the armed forces! After being in PATH, I really don't fear very much, especially as relates to physical danger. Once you've been brutalized like that, psychologically and physically, nothing really scares you, and you are absolutely ruthless when opposed! LOL, they should turn me loose on the terrorists. In a matter of months, I would have the severed heads of every single member of al Qaeda mounted on stakes on the White House lawn with the word "infidel" scrawled on their foreheads in permanent marker and their mouths stuffed with raw porkchops! BOO-RAH! SEMPER FI! [CLICK HERE TO VIEW THIS PICTURE] posted by MindSlave |
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 MindSlave: I know everybody's sick of this topic No one could be sick of hearing something that they don't have a clue about. This might sound unintentionally patronising or superficial or something, but it is interesting. I've never been in such a situation - it's obviously new information to me, from someone else who's been through it. MindSlave: I really think they should let the mentally ill serve in the armed forces! There I disagree with you though. It's not everyone who comes out of such an experience for the better. As she said on the other thread IMO → Is every mental illness caused by infections? Francesca Allan: You've got plenty of soul, Holy. Otherwise, you wouldn't have survived all you've been through. You've got soul to burn. Not everybody's so lucky. posted by ryder |
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You're not offtopic, this is my thread, and knn's not logged on, so he can kiss my offtopic ass! ryder: It's not everyone who comes out of such an experience for the better. Who said anything about coming out of the experience "better?" The objective of the US military is to create honorable killers to be sent to confront the enemy for the purposes of winning the peace! What better place to find such people than a fake mental hospital like PATH, which is really a lot like a boot camp where soldiers are trained? [CLICK HERE TO VIEW THIS PICTURE] posted by MindSlave |
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MindSlave: The objective of the US military is to create honorable killers to be sent to conront the enemy for the purposes of winning the peace! What better place to find such people than a fake mental hospital like PATH, which is really a lot like a boot camp where soldiers are trained? I'd think that people who managed to 'come out' of these places would more likely be affected adversely by negative and strenuous experiences like fighting in a war (sure, now you'll tell me it's positive and energising ). Or, they'd not be interested in killing "for" a country that endorsed the setting up of places like these. Or, they'd not be interested in killing people they didn't know (as opposed to targets they themselves chose for their own reasons). Or, they'd be conscientious objectors 
The event that they were interested in and capable of participating, I'd think was a minority occurence, and not something they'd bend the rules for. And, er, I don't think they'd be very keen on doing it Vlad-the-Impaler style, even if they liked H. P. Lovecraft.. MindSlave: the severed heads of every single member of al Qaeda mounted on stakes on the White House lawn with the word "infidel" scrawled on their foreheads in permanent marker and their mouths stuffed with raw porkchops posted by ryder |
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ryder: I'd think that people who managed to 'come out' of these places would more likely be affected adversely by negative and strenuous experiences like fighting in a war (sure, now you'll tell me it's positive and energising ).No, war is never positive, though adrenaline can do wonders for energy levels. Still, the negative business of war can have positive consequences, like, well modern Europe and much of modern Southeast Asia! ryder: Or, they'd not be interested in killing "for" a country that endorsed the setting up of places like these. Soldiers don't fight for their country, they fight for each other. In wartime, the home country is seen as the ultimate refuge and authority, but no soldier ever killed in a war because they loved their country. Rather, soldiers kill because the enemy wants to kill their brothers-in-arms, and thus the enemy must be killed in turn for the self-defense of the military unit. ryder: Or, they'd not be interested in killing people they didn't know (as opposed to targets they themselves chose for their own reasons). They know that their enemies want to kill them and their fellow soldiers, so they fight in self-defense. ryder: Or, they'd be conscientious objectors Another word for coward.
posted by MindSlave |
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The time now is 12 October 2008, 11:46 php B.B. |