Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin (20 page)

Again I had my own bathroom, though there was no shower this time. Still, it was cleaner than clean. The communal shower was down the hall between the octagons, a tiled room with a locking door. Half the room was a changing space, with a chair to put your clean clothes on and hooks for your dirty ones, and the other half was a large open shower with powerful water pressure and a wonderously efficient drain.

My room was painted blue, each wall a different shade, sky to cerulean, and the walls were at odd angles, so that the bare-bulb night-light that was set in a glassed-in niche near the floor threw a strange light. Weak, diffuse, yet penetrating.

This private little room that money could buy—that money, or actually insurance, had bought—very quickly became a refuge and retreat for me, and I came to think of it as the best that any hospital could give you when your mind was what ailed you. I had control of my light. The night-light as well. And so on rainy days, which turned out to be most of them, I usually had the night-light on in the afternoon, like a beacon in the gloom. And the room, like the prow of a ship, seemed to seep through fog, like fog, to Patagonia or somewhere else mysterious, far away and lonely.

I sat in there often with the night-light, and I did it because I could, the benefit of privacy and cleanliness and a little trust. I could do it because the bathroom did not stink, and because I was not afraid to do yoga on the linoleum floor next to my bed. In fact, I liked it, the alone time, the V-shape of the room, tapering toward the entrance, holding me, helping me find the deep mystery of the world in a secret place.

At those times I was not afraid or depleted. I was full. I was sitting inside my brain, up behind my eyeballs, buzzing, washing the day’s thoughts off my shoulders in waves.

The light came in from the dayroom, filtered to a calming glow by the frosted glass in the top of the wooden double doors. (The glass was shatterproof, with embedded chicken wire.) I was allowed to keep these doors closed, another luxury denied me at Meriwether. This made time alone in the room even more recuperative and cherished.

On the outside of the door the nurses had stuck a small white tag with my name on it, handwritten, not typed. We learned each other’s names quickly that way, as did the nurses, and we were granted a small piece of property as our own. And so I could say to myself:
This is my room. My space. Tomorrow or next week it may be someone else’s, but for now it is mine and I am safe in it. I am respected in it.

It’s hard to overestimate how much this meant, how much healing it actually allowed, and could potentially allow anyone in similar straits.

The room or partial room you occupy, if it is clean and quiet, and you are left to yourself when you want to be, if you can shut the door and turn off the light, or turn it on if that is your preference, if you can exist in this place in a suspended state, separate from the stressors of your life, alone, but knowing that just outside the door there are people who will talk to you, or play cards with you, or help you if you are shaking—if all of this is true, then that room becomes a type of sanctuary. In it you can get a version of what people get on religious or spiritual retreats, what fleeing emigrants of catastrophe and danger desperately seek. Asylum.

That is how things began to change for me a little. That is how I managed to get some actual benefit out of being in St. Luke’s, even though I was supposedly only there as a journalist, getting the feel of a small, rural private hospital. I did, at times, achieve a state of vacancy that I could not have achieved at home, both in my person and in the space around me. Expectation fell away with the scenery. The familiar and often burdensome trappings of my apartment, my life, and my personality were at least intermittently replaced by a friendly, clean medicinal emptiness. Not the painful emptiness of exile or imprisonment or the shut-in’s disheveled bed, but the paradoxically full emptiness of relinquished expectation.

I knew that I could hibernate in my room. But I also knew that I could walk out into the dayroom, and walk down the hall to the addicts’ side (as I often did, despite the rules, because I found my fellow depressives’ company too depressing), and chat, or watch TV with someone like Fenske, who didn’t want anything from me. I had the option, and it was this luxury of choice between the easy fellowship of cheap distraction and the reprieve of a good, long, soulful gaze at the ceiling that began to give me some partial shelter from my despair.

Sister Pete appeared on the ward each night after dinner, wearing her generous brown habit and beige sneakers. Around her neck there hung a four-inch crucifix that glowed in the dark. When she talked to you, her soft brown eyes were always widened in surprise, her hand always moving to adjust the headband of her wimple, which jumped and slid as her scalp crinkled in response to whatever you were saying.

Though she was in her sixties, everything was news to Sister Pete, and a cause for wonder. She called me Norah Baby and sought me out wherever I was hiding, though I didn’t hide from her explicitly. She was too good to pass up.

She was addicted to the Eucharist and went to mass three times a day to partake. In her theology, you were what you ate. Literally. The more of Christ’s body you consumed, the more like his body your body would become, until, she said, you were thirty-three (and presumably bearded and olive skinned) forever.

It was notable how small a deviation this really was from received Catholic doctrine. The transubstantiation was orthodox. So was the cannibalism. It was only with the look-alike age regression that Sister Pete ran off the rails.

She grew up on a farm in a town about ninety miles from St. Luke’s, and spent her childhood sitting in a tree house dreaming of God and the contemplative life. She entered a local convent at eighteen, and lived there for forty years, at which point she came to St. Luke’s, took up residence in an efficiency apartment on the grounds, and became spiritual adviser to the patients. It was a job she loved and took very seriously, and by all accounts performed very well.

She was a kind of savant in this regard, giving mad solace to the mad, living every moment in the moment, happy and at peace, even if she was permanently out to lunch, or probably because of it.

This use of Sister Pete was the single greatest act of kindness and therapeutic intelligence that I saw among the institutionalized mentally ill. It had made Pete whole and beloved, given her a sense of usefulness, the guiding purpose that is the cornerstone of any person’s emotional well-being.

I imagined how Mother T would have flourished in this kind of role. I thought of all the people I saw at Meriwether, and I wondered how their lives and conditions might have changed for the better if someone had made even the smallest provision for them, had given them a blithe sinecure to occupy their time, to make them feel useful. What might have been accomplished?

What might happen if we as a culture took even the most minor responsibility for the lost among us, rather than consigning them, and quite possibly ourselves, to the ravages of the system? The indifferent system.

Have we abandoned each other to “the professionals,” pushed ever on by our definitive work ethic to perform or sink, to behave as though we do not live in bodies, do not have emotional lives, have no ties to community? If we are healthy, we get the benefits of family and a place in the social order, a place that reinforces our mental health, makes possible our continued ability to hold that place in the social order.

We are pack animals sustained by companionship, bonds, and our position in the web of human contact. But if we fall, if we fail, if we succumb to the breakneck pace and onerous demands of our lives—too much work, too much family, too many responsibilities and natural, normal fears—then we are cast out, shut away, ripped from the sustaining web, and expected, alone and abandoned, to recover.

What about a community that makes a place and takes personal responsibility for the impaired, accepts them as part of the larger civic body and takes the burden on itself, spreads it among the healthy to lighten the load? What about a community that says, “We will care for our own”? Instead there is the alienated demi-apocalyptic world that detaches signified from signifier, piece from whole, and sends the wounded off to languish in the psychic poorhouse.

It is the difference between public and private solutions, the cold grasp of the institution, and the warm fold of a refuge where people have names and not wristbands.

This reminded me of Meriwether again, and Mother T.

I remembered Mother T trying to say the word “psychosis.” She never stumbled over other English words, but this one she did. Psychosis. She said it like she was trying to get her mouth around it, like it was too big a bite taken from a burger. She’d learned it from her doctors. Her diagnosis. Psychosis.

That’s how Sister Pete said the word “kerygma,” uncertainly, but with gusto nonetheless.

“What is that again, Sister? Kerygma?” I inquired.

“Yes, kerygma.”

She was telling a joke about Jesus.

“Is that what you get when charisma meets enigma? Jesus as charismatic enigma?”

I liked my own bad joke. She did, too. She laughed.

“No no. Kerygma.”

I asked her to write it down. The whole joke with the word in context. She produced a piece of scrap paper from a memo book she was carrying. The memo book was full of scraps, none of which was much bigger than a gum wrapper. Some were blank. Some had old jokes or reminders written on them.

She told the joke as she wrote.

“Jesus asks the modern-day apostle: ‘Who do you say that I am?’

“Answer: ‘You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground of our existential being, the kerygma, in which we find the ultimate meaning of our interpersonal relationships, the pristine quintessence of Him whose very essence is to be, the primordial sacrament exerting a transcendental holding on our becoming.’ ”

She paused here before the punch line, her wimple rising.

“And Jesus said: ‘Huh?’ ”

Her eyes went especially wide when she said the “Huh?” and then she grinned and started in on a long lilting laugh.

“That’s good, Sister,” I beamed, charmed as always by the pure joy Pete took in the smallest things. And I began to wonder whether true goodness wasn’t, in this fucked-up creation, a form of retardation. Not an avoidance of vice but an ignorance of it, a lack of acquaintance with it that cannot be willed after the fall, no matter how strong the intention.

The temptations the rest of us are forever trying to elude are things that would never occur to Pete, wholly oblivious, in her tree house still, listening to the birds and blissed out on God. This led me to thinking something I had thought before, that perhaps mental illness is a form of brain damage or brain trauma. Maybe the upside of that is that it functioned, as it appeared to in Sister Pete’s case, like a protective coma that kept the thinker from thinking too much.

And so in this vein, like a jackass, I said sophomorically:

“Sister. Don’t you ever feel the burden of existence?”

She cocked her head to one side, brought up short from her laugh in true puzzlement.

“The burden of existence?” she asked.

Touché, Sister. Touché.

Now that I was upstairs, the program began in earnest. First thing each morning, as soon as I emerged from my room, perhaps of my own accord, perhaps coaxed by the gentle sarcasm of Nurse Maggie, who chirped, “Good morning, Sunshine,” or Nurse Candy, who wheeled in a blood pressure monitor and said, “May I?”

However it happened, first thing, when I sat myself down in a chair in the octagon or the kitchen, someone, a nurse or a psych tech, handed me my self-inventory form.

This form was used as the basis for the first group meeting of the day, which began at 10 a.m. and was variously called process group or goals group or social work group. In this group, all the patients on the unit met with a nurse or a social worker or a psych tech to take stock of our progress or lack thereof.

 

And so on down the line. My energy level is . . . my ability to concentrate is. . . . Have you had suicidal thoughts today? (If yes, please tell staff immediately.) What are your goals for today? Did you meet yesterday’s goals?

Goals and groups were the backbone of the day, both a way for staff to keep meticulous records about each patient and an opportunity for the patients to vocalize their feelings as well as make requests and complaints. Keeping us occupied and checking in was useful, even if sometimes it was a great heaving bore for anyone functioning above a murmur. Naturally, a lot of it was going through the motions, the staff asking the same questions over and over again—How are you feeling today? What’s your goal for the day?—and the patients, depending on their moods, usually giving answers that were either long-winded and peevish or prudent and angled to expedite their release. Still, it was better than being babysat by TV, and it did force each of us to mark the days in some meaningful way, however small.

After Meriwether’s malign neglect, I respected the attempt at care, even if I made fun of it sometimes. When they asked me, for example, if there was anything I needed or would like, I wrote, “A heart, a brain, courage.” Or on the sleep question, after the last option, “Required medication,” I penciled in my own worst case, “Required bludgeoning.”