Young Writers Society

So there I was, back on the ward again. It was impossibly unchanged, exactly as I remembered it. Same place, same routine. My electrical cords, shoelaces, tweezers, nail clippers, deodorant can, and phone are taken away from me. At least this time I'm expecting it. The process of my admission takes no longer than 3 minutes. This would ideally be a good time to get settled, but as usual I get caught up before I can go anywhere, and I am introduced to the cast.

This time the cast is different. It’s still the same show, just with different faces. First there is the token inmate, in from remand for a short term assessment. His name is Jason. He immediately assures me of his innocence, and gives me his diagnosis, 'explosive schizophrenic'. He is incredibly easy in manner and very welcoming, but his capacity for rage later became apparent. He longed for company, he said he was bored to tears on the ward and couldn't wait to go back to jail. "This place is horrible," he said "can't even have a cigarette”. “My brothers are in the lock up anyway, I’d rather be with them".

Jason introduces me to main cast; the drug-induced psychotic, the off-her-meds bipolar, the delusional engineer and the old lady with the voices. This is not how I see them, but it is how they are introduced. They are introduced as labels, because here, those labels become your identity. I want to know what they see when they look at me.

Later on I meet the Irish girl, Laura, who has a special nurse following her constantly. She comes up to me and proclaims “this is Russia, war-time Russia”. According to Jason, she has declared almost every part of the ward as international land. She stands staring at me, laughing to herself. She is wearing her pyjamas, no shoes, and a t-shirt wrapped around her head like a turban. As cruel as it sounds, Laura did become a great source of entertainment. She was fun and spontaneous, if a little bit violent and psychotic. She was with all of us in the main part of the ward, the low dependency unit. Around the corner is the high dependency unit. I like to call it Neverland. People never go there by choice, and if they return, they always return in a sleepy, drug induced daze. A couple of days later, an incident with Laura took her to the other side.

“Who are you talking to Laura?” The nurses is using her best calm voice, gently trying to pry the patient phone out of Laura’s hands.

“I don’t know,” says Laura, laughing gleefully, “I don’t know her name. What’s your name?” she asks, pulling the phone back.

“Are you calling the ambulance again Laura?” The calm voice is waning now.

This has become a common occurrence. Laura has called for an ambulance twice this week, and yesterday she tried to report the theft of her human rights to the police. As Laura's tone begins to turn hysterical, the ward duress signal starts to beep loudly. The duress signal is triggered by an emergency button that every nurse carries on their key chain. When this duress signal goes off, nurses and wards-men race through the hospital to assist, usually by restraining a patient, and forcefully sedating them. As the signal sounds, Laura seems to sense the trouble and she begins to yell.

“No, No! I have diplomatic immunity!” By this stage one of the nurses has the phone and is assuring the operator that she knows false calls are an offence, and explains that the caller is not legally responsible for her own actions. The offender is charging away.

“I JUST WANT A FUCKING CIGARETTE!” The nurses are following from a safe distance as Laura, still pyjama clad, stands defensively on an armchair, clutching a paper bag full of her belongings to her chest.

“Come on Laura, I think you need to take a break” says the nurse. She looks tired as all hell. Laura drops her paper bag and throws herself to the ground screaming, “I have diplomatic immunity! IMMUNITY!” The nurses are coming in closer and Laura begins to get more and more hysterical and it is obvious that she can’t be reasoned with. A nurse reaches out to touch her arm and she lashes out to hit them. Now it’s on. Violence against staff is the point of no return. The wards-men grab her by the arms and she struggles violently.

“Get real! Get away from me!” yells Laura, struggling hard.

“Come on Laura, don’t be silly, get up”

“No! Get away from me”

Once 5 nurses and 3 wards-men are on the scene, they finally manage to pull her up and she is marched, literally kicking and screaming around the corner to Neverland. Her screams echo through the corridors.

Once the screams fade to nothing, the ward goes on, unperturbed.

“We’re making scones with jam and cream at 10:15, if you’re interested” says the day program manager, grinning like it’s the best damn day of her whole life. I am in the twilight zone.

Things on the ward go from zero to 100 in seconds, most often without any warning. Just this morning Laura was singing Broadway classics, sitting in the alcove where the bin should have been. She was happy, happy in a psych ward kind of way, not a real world kind of way. She tried to wrap her bed sheet around her and wear it as a toga whilst refusing to remain seated at breakfast because 'it was traditional to dance while eating in official Irish territory'. And now, no more than ten minutes later, she doesn’t exist. That’s how it is here, on the ward we are all like children. People disappear around that corner and we forget. Often we don’t get to see them come back.

With frequent yelling and acts of violence, the main rooms of the ward are mostly unbearable. Thankfully, I can hide in my room/holding cell. It's quiet, and sun pools on my bed so I can lie in the warmth. The room is decorated in fake wood, a fake wood chest of drawers attached to the ground, a fake wood bed attached to the ground, a fake wood desk attached to the ground. There is a tall window that faces directly in to the rooms in the next corridor, with a small courtyard in between. It is minimal, but the blankness is peaceful. Hiding in my room is noted down as ‘isolating’ and ‘anti-social behaviour’. Everything here is noted down. Whether or not you eat your meals, when you sleep, how long you sleep for, if you are writing, or talking, or reading. All of it is written down for revision by our psychiatrists. Today, I have been reminded twice that refusing to speak to other people won't get me out of here any quicker, but my mind is so loud, everything is so dark, and I don’t want to be seen. I can withdraw in to a safer space in my room, an empty space I can fill without having to exist. Away from the garish colours and noise of the ward I can float in an ‘in-between’ state, where the world doesn’t exist outside of my room, and I don’t exist inside it. The tiny courtyard outside my window will one day be beautiful, but now it is stunted. It feels dry, unfinished, although I hope that I never see it fully grown. The thought of looking out this window in ten years makes me want to stop breathing.

Soon, my peaceful dissociation is short lived. I have visitors. I receive visitors fairly often, more often than I would like, but after seeing patients who never get visitors, who have no one, no family, no friends, I have learnt to be grateful. When my visitors arrive, I regal them with play-by-play accfounts of the events on the ward. From some tiny store of energy I pull out a normal, energetic person and she makes light of every truly mad thing I've seen, because to her, their pain was source for entertainment. I hate her.

I knows that my experience is a unique one, and that the stories of the ward satisfy a kind of morbid curiosity for the people on the outside. This other person, the normal person, cares about nothing and no one. She is mean, and tough, and she functions as a big barrier between me and the terribly sad things I see on the ward. No one wants to hear about the horror, or the dullness, or the despondency. They want to hear you say something that proves that the person they know still exists. They want you to be at your best. I know it salves their worries, and I do my best to give them some relief. The guilt of what I have done overwhelms me, and I am exhausted.

My visitors do eventually leave, just like I wanted them to, but when they go I feel a deep sense of abandonment and desperation. I am all alone, staring at my courtyard, and I'm going to be here forever. It is bleak, so terribly bleak, and I am pulled back to that awful feeling of hopelessness. I am just a sinking, toxic, mess. The futility of my life stares me in the face. I do nothing, and I will always do nothing. Life is a never ending blank space. A terrifying blank space. It's like being stuck in a bad dream and knowing that you have nothing to wake up to. Death still scares me. I think it will always scare me. When I decided to die, my fear of death couldn't overwhelm my fear of the horrible way I was living, and I could see no future, none at all. That experience has changed me, for good. I'm not the same person I was 8 months ago when this all began. I never thought that things would get worse, I didn't think it was possible. But it was. I would do anything to get that girl back, the girl who at least had the energy to do something. But she really is gone, and I will never be there again. My desperate hopelessness is paralysing. I feel like my bones have turned to concrete, and every move is exhausting. So what do you do when you can do nothing to shift the misery? When everything feels harder than you could have imagined? I’ll tell you what you do, you take some Valium, and you have a nap.