Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin Read Online Free PDF

university library than just lying around in the asshole of Meriwether Hospital.
    What poor tasteful soul had taken refuge in that artifact, I thought? Or had come in clutching it to his breast years ago? And had he left it behind purposely, a grim reminder of a time he was determined to forget? Or had it fallen from his grasp inadvertently while he gave himself up to a gurney and turned his face to the wall?
    I took that page with me up to the ward, taking my own brand of refuge in it, as had Nil. I took it, and my notebook, and Nil’s Crayola, which he had kindly given to me for keeps.
     
    I went into a consult room and met my treatment team first thing.
    The word “team” sounds good here—thorough—but wasn’t really. They were more of the “How many mental health professionals does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” variety. Their effect was not increased by their number.
    There was the unit chief, who made brief appearances twice during my stay (at the first interview and the last). There was Sarah, a medical student; Kim, a chirpy social worker, whom I never met again after the first interview; and Dr. Balkan, the staff psychiatrist, who would be attending to me most directly.
    We gathered at a long conference table in what I remember as a poorly lit room, but this may just be my memory shading the scene to fit how I felt. I felt exposed yet shadowed, intruded on but not seen. There was too much attention and not enough.
    This gloominess was, I think, the effect of the way these people did their jobs, like civil servants, dryly, colorlessly, in unison. They had procedures and they followed them. They asked me more of the usual questions about my history, my family, and what had brought me there. They wrote it all down on their notepads, and then they looked at me to see what they could see.
    I don’t know what they saw. A classic depressive? A charlatan? I worried that they might see through me. But a night in emergency had lowered me to the right level, or thereabouts. So what were they really going to see? Fear? Desperation? Distrust? Those were real enough.
    I know that I did not see them any more clearly than I thought they were seeing me. I was jaundiced as hell. I went in there predisposed not to like them.
    My first time in the bin in 2004 had soured me pretty soundly on ward shrinks. I’d been at the mercy of a prick on a power trip, the kind of buttoned-up banty rooster who gets off on control and then, when you resist him, tells you that you’ve got issues with control. It had taken me two days of forced calm and tactical parlay to convince him to let me out of that place, when all I wanted to do was leap across the table and bash his bald pate in. Again, who wouldn’t look crazy doing that? And yet, who wouldn’t want to do it when squaring off against a pug jailer with an advanced degree.
    Aside from Baldy, I’d met my fair share of shrinks over the course of the previous fifteen years. One of the last ones in the string had been the genius who’d convinced me to go into the bin that first time, even though it was the worst possible advice she could have given me. She’d also been the one, back in my twenties when I’d first consulted her, to prescribe way too many medications way too soon, without telling me about their side effects or the dependency and withdrawal they could induce.
    Coming into Meriwether, I had, let’s say, a sore spot for doctors.
    That’s undoubtedly why, among the team, I liked Sarah, the medical student, best. She wasn’t a doctor yet, and so she still had sense enough to doubt herself. She hadn’t yet cultivated the persona that she would get with her degree, the nonstick coating that so many psychiatrists spray on an inch thick somewhere between memorizing the material at school and coming into contact with actual human beings. All too often, by the time you found yourself sitting across from them in the hospital giving them your sorry spiel, it was like