Living & Arts

Trigger part VII: Hamlet in Bethlehem

In print | April 2, 2009

Disclaimer: This column is part seven of a 10 part series dealing with the author’s experiences with mental illness. As it contains explicit subject matter, sensitive readers may wish to avoid.

“I could spend my whole life prying loose the secrets of the insane. These people are honest to a fault, and their naiveté has no peer but my own.” – André Breton, The Surrealist Manifesto

“Fuck you, André Breton.” – F———r -——-

There was a song my father would sing for my sister and I when we were children, a novelty song from the 1960s. They’re coming to take me away, ha ha, he he, ho ho. To the funny farm where life is beautiful all the time. Oh I’ll be glad to see those nice young men in those clean white suits. They’re coming to take me away, ha ha. They’re coming to take me away. He gave a great performance, eyes bulging, his voice modulating and breaking, and my sister and I would crack up and beg him to sing it again. One day he refused, and when we asked him why, he said the song was disrespectful to the mentally ill.

I remember leaving the emergency room that day. I was being taken to McLean Hospital in Belmont. The hospital was twenty-five minutes from my home, but in compliance with insurance regulations I was strapped to a wheeled stretcher and driven over in an ambulance. I remember my father crouching there next to me as we drove, genially conversing with the two attendants and sporadically squeezing my hand. I attempted to contribute to the discussion, but I could not sit up or move, and try as I might I could not prevent myself from thinking: They’re coming to take me away, ha ha. They’re coming to take me away.

I arrived at McLean Hospital late that night and was taken to a diagnostic unit, where I was told I would stay for two days or so while I completed some tests. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of having my psychological breakdown on a federal holiday, and the McLean staff had been given a four-day weekend; it makes sense, I think, that those who attend to the insane and the suicidal receive the same professional benefits as custodians and garbage collectors. As it happened, I would spend almost a week there.

There were four wings on the diagnostic ward, with a large panopticon in the center. The windows had cordless blinds and were reinforced with iron grating. There were no corners, no closets, no places one could go if one desired privacy. I stayed in my room most of the time. I listened to my music player, although I had to go out to the panopticon to charge it, because they had confiscated my power cord so that I couldn’t hang myself. I read and drew. I had blood drawn at least once a day. I played a game, almost entirely out of spite, where I looked for ways to circumvent their precautions and kill myself: smother myself with a shower curtain, stab a plastic knife into my eye, shatter a lamp in the bathroom and slit my throat with the pieces. I took naps whenever possible, which was mercifully often because they kept me drugged to the gills. I was put on anti-psychotics for several days, and one morning I awoke to find my hands shaking uncontrollably.

Eventually I met with professional psychiatrists for an official diagnosis. I was told my condition was severe enough to warrant consideration for treatment at the McLean OCD Institute. However, my social worker expressed concern as to my willingness to cooperate, and observed that I had not attended any socialization groups since admission. I said that I was here to be diagnosed and that I had no interest in participating, but she glared at me, barely restraining her contempt, and then my neurosis around authority kicked in. I winced as if struck and profusely apologized. Later my parents told me that they understood my desire for isolation, but that it might improve my chances for actual treatment if I cooperated. So it was settled. I had to make friends.

I stayed for breakfast meeting the next morning. We sat around at small circular tables, and were told to state for the group our goals for the day. Gunter was first. Gunter was a bald, middle-aged German man, and when asked he stood up on the table and informed the rest of us with tremendous enthusiasm that he would today live up to his name, Gunter, Gunter, glorious name of God Gunter, and that he would be flying home tonight on the Frankenfurter. The rest of us stated our own goals, somewhat anticlimactically, and we settled back to breakfast. Someone turned on the television. The channel was set to VH1 and, I swear to God I wouldn’t make something like this up, they were playing the video for Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy.”

I laughed, and I laughed and laughed. No one else seemed to find it funny.

I began to get to know the other patients. There was an obese woman with a piled-up hairdo who wheedled me to set her up with my father. There was a small Russian woman who wandered the halls silently, always staring forward, like a ghost; a man who I think was her husband would visit and walk with her, holding her hand, neither of them speaking. There was a young poet with bandages down his arms. There was a bulky Middle Eastern guy in his twenties, so thoroughly medicated that he could only stomp around and drool. I remember once he emitted an approving growl and began to stumble towards a young female patient, hands reaching for her breasts. She squealed in horror and he was quickly restrained.

There was a plump Jewish woman in her early fifties. She skip-walked like a child, teetering on too-small high heels; she always wore a short purple dress, stretched tight over her swollen stomach, so she looked like an overripe plum. I encountered her once eating a box of Nilla Wafers in a chair by the panopticon. She asked me to take the box from her, and when I declined she snarled at me. “Take it.” I gingerly lifted the box from her hands, and she explained surreptitiously that she didn’t want the patients to take the cookies. I nodded and paused for a moment, and then handed the box back to her. Another time I encountered her in the same lounge, moaning and sighing, hands rubbing over her body and head tilted back in ecstasy. “Harold,” she groaned. That time I was careful not to attract attention.

I also met Lacey. Lacey was an elderly, compact woman with a strong Boston accent. Lacey spoke to God. She brought it up casually in conversation; “I went into the house,” she said, “because God told me to, and then the police came and took me to the hospital.” She would gather together other patients, the Russian woman and others, and they would sing dissonant hymns together and beg God to heal their afflictions often directly outside my room. Lacey took a liking to me, and told me that Jesus could save me from my illness. I politely declined. But it occurred to me, more than once, that my symptoms might represent some kind of demonic influence, that God was punishing me. The rational part of my mind tried to dismiss this. Yet I could not claim with absolute certainty that it was not true.

I was brought to the diagnostic unit largely as a formality, so that the hospital could confirm my disorder for its records, and I could later receive specialized treatment. The actual diagnosis might have been completed in less than a day. Yet there I was, in the immediate aftermath of a psychological breakdown, urged to engage in inane social performance with deeply troubled people. I was vulnerable, my perverse and religious obsessions were triggered continuously; and had I been determined to hurt myself, I am certain I could have done so without difficulty. I was kidnapped and blackmailed, and if I did not comply my best chance at sanity was forfeit. In a lifetime of dodgy psychological treatment, of countless moments of absurdity and incompetence, this was the weirdest and the most utterly senseless thing to happen to me. It was purgatory, an in-between place, a joke that seemed obvious and trite on every comprehensible level.

Apparently the alcoholics got their own diagnostic unit. Lucky bastards.

I did what was asked of me. I attended a gardening session, and talked to a young mother with postpartum depression; I went to fitness group and watched Lacey lob around a deflated basketball. I visited a seminar in the hospital’s outpatient program, a few hours after they changed my medication, and struggled to maintain consciousness. I met again with the treatment team and expressed utter contrition for my previous unenlightened attitude and the bulky woman decided I was redeemable. In any case, they let me go. The real work could begin.

Hamlet is a senior. You can reach him at hamlet.wrenncroft@gmail.com. The next installment of “Trigger” will be published next week.