“How did it all start?”
The crisis counsellor then asked questions about my breed of anxiety and depression, specific questions that I only broadly remember today. Stuff about childhood, medications, how my mental illness started. This last one, I would almost find humorous, if it wasn’t so tragic.
Whenever I’m asked about “how it all started,” I think of cliché Hollywood counsellor scenes where the patient says something like, “12 years old, October 2, 1997.” I have never been able to take this question seriously, because it just seems so silly. Mental illness often happens randomly. It could be triggers, it could be trauma, it could be just spontaneous. And, at least for me, I sure as hell didn’t keep track of timelines. It all got smudged together into mental goop.
So, when answering the question, I remember just making up something about yadda yadda hypochondria yadda yadda existential dread yadda yadda loss of mother yadda yadda family history of depression yadda yadda getting worse over years, yadda yadda ignoring my mental hygiene yadda yadda. I knew deep down that my explanation was absolute bullshit.
The entire time, the counsellor was scribbling. I specifically remember two things: the incessant scribbling and the occasional quizzical, concerned or shocked facial expression. In the moment, I remember feeling like I’d be used in some kind of case study down the road, even though, in hindsight, I realize these professionals take notes simply as a way of trying to understand you and your specific issues.
There’s this morbid joke that has circulated around my network of mental health contacts, where there’s a picture of someone walking on a tightrope, with the caption ‘Me trying to be honest about my mental illness, but not honest enough to be involuntarily committed.’ That’s sort of the balancing act that I (and probably many others) have had to practice.
Sitting in that chair in the Emergency Department was no different. Sure, I felt like I was on the verge of death, but flat-out admitting it would lead to involuntary admission. Then came more images of pills, pills, pills, lobotomies, Hollywood clichés—which were probably based on the real-life historical treatment of mental illness. Let’s face it, there have been some fairly messed up ways of treating mental illness. Even today, stigmatizing mentalities and questionable treatment methods still exist.
When all the questions were finished, Susan/Beverley wished me all the best, and I was moved to one of those rapid assessment areas. I sat there for about four hours, talking to doctors and nurses and being sent back to the waiting area.
The nurses probably gave me about 3 milligrams of Ativan (a fast-acting anti-anxiety drug in the benzodiazepine class) in that timespan—which, if you’re not aware, is a HUGE dose. It didn’t help ease my mind, but it made me sleepy. At such a high dose, it better have made me feel at least a little tired!
Would you like to be admitted?
When I was finally seen by a psychiatrist, he asked me what I would like to do. At first, I thought he was kidding, because he could clearly see a dude who was shaking from fear and rocking back and forth from nervousness. How was I supposed to make an informed choice about the future of my treatment? But then he offered a follow-up question: “Would you like to be admitted?” Admitted, I pondered.
[su_pullquote align=”right”]All of those Hollywood portrayals of mental hospitals came back: orderlies, straitjackets, pill cocktails. I wondered how long I’d be admitted—a day? A week? A month? A year?[/su_pullquote]
Then all of those Hollywood portrayals of mental hospitals came back: orderlies, straitjackets, pill cocktails. I wondered how long I’d be admitted—a day? A week? A month? A year?
A bigger question I asked myself was, “If I am voluntarily committed, would I be allowed to leave whenever I wanted to, or would I be stuck there until professionals believed I was adequately treated?”
I had work, friends and a life—and although I had spent months neglecting all three of those things, the prospect of being committed paradoxically scared me, because I was afraid of losing contact with those aspects of my life.
Undecided at that point, I called my wife, and we had a fairly long conversation. Eventually, we both came to the conclusion that it would be in my best interests to stay. Otherwise, we determined, they’d send me home and it would be back to step one all over again.
Home scared me. It was a place of restlessness, not comfort or security. For more than two months, I had dreaded home. I had dreaded bedtime. I had laid in bed suffering continuous panic attacks: skipped heartbeats, sweat pouring down my face, crying into my pillow.
Being sent home would have been one of the biggest mistakes of my life. That night, I lay in a messy room filled with medical apparatuses, on a hot, sticky rubber mattress. The psychiatrist gave me another 2 milligrams of Ativan, and I slept, uninterrupted, for about three hours.
At last, I thought to myself, as an ear-piercing Code Blue alarm quaked through the entire hospital. Code Blue—cardiopulmonary arrest—someone was on the verge of dying. Their entire existence could have been wiped out, instantly. Gone in a second, with doctors and nurses feverishly trying to resuscitate them.
But in that moment, on that sticky hospital bed, I didn’t have the ability to feel sorrow. These were the first three hours of sleep I’d had in five days. I was ecstatic. Completely and irrationally happy. When the breakfast cart came with soggy toast and gelatinous, lukewarm oatmeal, I slurped it all down like it was my last meal. Gone was my ability to feel anything outside the realm of my own perspective. My mind was like a tape that kept skipping and going back a few seconds, just to skip and replay the same three-second sound bite.
Still, each sound annoyed me. I wanted to be healed, but I also told myself that healing seemed improbable—no, impossible. The suffering of others became background noise, as my mind was fully enclosed by a then-infinitesimally small window of perception that was still hanging between life and death.
Psychiatric ward
At around 9 a.m., a nurse entered my room. Knock-knock, and the door creaked open. I was butt-naked, changing into a new hospital gown, but I guess medical professionals have seen everything. I let out a small chuckle when the nurse left the room, at the idea that there are only two types of people who have ever seen me so intimately—one, obviously, my wife, and two—medical professionals.
The nurse, whose physical description has been transformed into a stock photo of an average man by my mind, informed me that I was going to the psychiatric ward of the hospital—about a kilometre away from the main building.
Like clockwork, two nurses arrived at around 10 a.m.. They walked me to an ambulance, but it wasn’t like a regular ambulance. It had simple seats, with “HOSPITAL SHUTTLE” emblazoned in capital letters on the side.
The short trip, along with my registration in the psychiatric ward and introduction to my psychiatrist, was a blur. The next thing I remember occurred two days later.
[su_quote cite=”Albert Einstein”]Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That’s relativity.[/su_quote]
It was evening and I had just finished eating dinner. At that point, I had made a few friends in the ward, but I still sat in my room most of the time, relatively sleeplessly, wondering if I’d ever heal.
Time was trickling by. My wife’s visits seemed to end instantaneously, yet when I didn’t have visitors, I found myself staring longingly out towards the lake, remembering a life before mental illness threw my mind into a tailspin. Or, maybe this image of a life before was simply an illusion—nostalgia breeding at a rapid rate. Time trickled when I was alone, yet being alone felt oddly comforting and safe.
After dinner, my nurse recommended I get up and do something. It will help you feel better. Psh. ‘Easy for you to say,’ I thought. Regardless, I figured I had nothing to lose. That night, I stayed up laughing with my buddies, playing cards, building puzzles and talking about world events.
It was the first time I had truly laughed in more than three months. We all told stories to each other. Some of it was typical stuff, like why we were in the hospital. What shocked me most was not why we were all there—why fate had brought us all together—but that we all had personalities and a love of life hidden somewhere beneath our illnesses.
For some of us, it took more effort to extract that essence, but I remember going to bed that night thinking that in those moments of community, I felt truly alive for the first time in months.
Over the course of the next week and a half, I spent a dizzying amount of time adjusting to new medication—and I mean dizzying. One of the withdrawal effects of Zoloft is dizziness and what I call head ‘jolts,’which feel like someone has just shocked you with a cattle prong. Most of my days were spent doing intensive group and individual therapy, and trying to keep my mind occupied long enough for me to forget that I was in a hospital.
