It was twenty-five years ago tonight that for the very first time I was sent to a psychiatric hospital.
The bipolar disorder had started during the preceding winter, but I didn't know that's what it was (it would be another four years before that diagnosis was handed to me). I had been manic most of the winter and then the depression - what I came to call " the dark fountain" - decided that it was time for it to show itself. The death of my grandmother toward the end of March intensified the blackness. All I came to think about was death and dying. Everywhere I looked I saw dead people waiting to happen. It was a dark fountain that was smothering me, driving me to the brink.
It got bad enough that one night some friends took me to the hospital in Burlington. The doctors there said that I was having intense depression. They were worried about my safety, afraid that I might do something to myself. And so it was that they signed orders to have me taken involuntarily to John Umstead, a mental hospital northeast of Raleigh. I got to call Dad before I was to leave the hospital, so my family knew where I was going to.
A cop came in a short while later. He took me out to his cruiser. We were five minutes down I-40 when his radio crackled to life and he was instructed to turn back around to the hospital and pick up another patient: another "compassionate", the situation was called. So we returned to the hospital. The officer opened the back door and told me to come out and he said he had to put handcuffs on me. I was horrified: I'd never been handcuffed before. I asked if I could just stay in the car and he said that was against the rules. So I had cold carbon steel slapped on my wrists for the first time in my life. We went back into the hospital though the emergency entrance. I did my best to hide the handcuffs from view, but nobody seemed to notice anyway.
A few minutes later the new patient, a young lady in her early twenties, was brought out. The cop put handcuffs on her too. And so he escorted us out and into the back seat of the car and we took off.
"Hi," the girl told me. "I'm Tracy. I'm crazy."
She began telling me about how her parents thought she was going to cut herself again. She told me about sticking pins and needles into her bare arm. I asked her why did she do that. "Oh, just to feel something," she told me. Tracy kept talking for the whole ride.
It took about an hour to get to John Umstead. We were taken inside. Tracy was met by two orderlies who took her down one way and I never saw her again. The officer took the cuffs off of me and I was taken down the other way.
I was brought to a room and told to take my clothes off. I did, behind a cloth screen so nobody had to look at me without attire. My shirt and jeans were taken away, my shoes too. They let me keep my underwear. I was given pajamas and "grippy" socks to put on.
A short while later a psychiatric nurse came into the room to give me a preliminary examination. She asked some questions. She also gave me a series of numbers and asked me to remember them. A little while later she asked me what the numbers were and I recited them back to her.
She asked me "Who is the President of the United States?"
Sometimes when things are dark, I fall back into using humor. That's what I tried to do this time, because this was about as bleak as things could get...
"Hillary Clinton," I replied.
The nurse gave me a harsh look and I could immediately tell that I had answered way wrong. I quickly told her that I was kidding. "I'm just really nervous right now," I added.
She made a note of what I had told her.
She finished the exam. By this point it was approximately 2 a.m. on Friday morning. I was brought to the ward. Taken to a room. There were two beds inside, but nobody else was in there. The assistant told me that if I needed anything that I could come to the nurses station down the hallway.
They had let me keep my book bag all this time. There had been nothing in it but my Bible. I sat up on the bed and crossed my legs, and took out my Bible and held it close to my chest. I started rocking back and forth, my Bible a talisman against the night. Whatever gets you through the darkness. I tried to pray, but the words would not come. All I could think about was that I was two hours away from home, in a part of the state where I knew nobody. I was in a mental hospital, the last place that I had ever expected to be. The depression was playing on the edges of my mind but I was too frightened and confused to really let that overwhelm me at the moment.
I looked out from my window. There was a darkened courtyard beyond the glass. I stood there, and suddenly thought that this was like that scene toward the beginning of The Godfather Part II, where the child Vito Corleone is locked up in the room at Ellis Island because he's too sick to proceed on to America. Looking out his window at the distant Statue of Liberty, young Vito starts to sing.
I was locked up too. Away from the world that I knew. But I couldn't sing.
"Especially," I reminded myself, "not in Italian."
1 comments:
I was in John Umstead for five days. It's been a full quarter century and I remember everything that happened during that time. The entire episode is the subject of one of the chapters in the book I've written.
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