Mental Health: Report from a treatment facility

Guest Post: "When I was Crazy."

A week ago Jane Collins wrote here that women collaborate and nurture while men compete and fight. Her post drew attention, in part because of the lovely photos of her, 

serene in her garden and another of her with her grandchildren. She looked like the picture of health. Mental health, too.

It has not always been serene for her. 

She maintains a blog of her own. It is more personal and less political than this one. There is an area of overlap: Mental health. In one of her posts she reported on her bi-polar condition and her time in a mental hospital. This is a portion of that post. It gives some insight into a private space, both the one inside her mind and the one inside a treatment facility. 

Collins used this image to illustrate her bi-polar thinking

Guest Post by Jane Collins

                                                    Going Crazy 

They asked my name at the hospital, but I was in a joking mood in my relief at being in a safe place, away from where I could freak my children out, so I told the intake worker I was Jesus Number Six Million and One.

 

He didn’t get it.

 

It was the Reagan Recession, and my husband couldn’t find any construction work. After the bank foreclosed on our farm, he and I and our three small children spent nine months living with my mother-in-law, a sweet woman, but very devout. She had to go across the street to her mother’s tiny house with one of our kids at night so everyone would have a place to sleep.

 

Poverty can make you crazy. I don’t even know how anybody stays sane in this society if they have no money. Everything becomes impossible.

 

I came to the hospital to get myself down off the cross.

 

In a psych ward, the people around you matter as much as the medical staff, maybe more. I was lucky. I was in a good ward. There were vegetables; there were regulars; another Jesus and a John the Baptist; and one terrified and confused adolescent boy who had probably tried to kill himself. Satan came to visit, briefly, late one night, but mercifully was quarantined by the authorities and left the next morning.

 

I had been salting my food heavily, even every bite of apple. My body must have known something. In the hospital, they put me on a different salt, lithium. It took a while to work but saved my life in this crisis. I was lucky, again, to avoid its long-term use, because it can be toxic.

 

It was hard to focus since things seemed to be flashing, glittering, radiating significance. The other patients anchored my attention, mysterious separate worlds that they were.

 

One day in art therapy, my friend Jimmy used markers to color in a picture of a tiger, orange and black, in a green jungle. It was stunningly beautiful. His psychosis made the picture vibrate with meaning.

 

Everyone recognized the picture’s power. Jimmy put it up on his door. Someone stole it. Jimmy seemed indifferent but I was furious. The next therapy session, I colored in the same picture, using Jimmy’s colors and style as far as I could remember them, making as close a copy as I could, though it did not have the magic of Jimmy’s original. I labeled it at the bottom: After Jimmy. I taped it to my door until the nurses took it down.

 

In a good ward, people try to help one another by telling the truth about what they observe. It’s hard to get that from a nurse or doctor. They’re cagey about sharing what they see. The patients in a psych ward have no energy for anything but the truth, so that’s what people speak, if they speak at all. Even the weirdest bullshit people say is a form of truth, if you listen carefully. No one is pretending. Everyone is wrestling with an angel, or demon, or however they perceive the struggle, but in crisis it is a desperate struggle, the battle for your life, for your own mind, for any kind of control over what you say and do, so the terrible truths can stop helplessly spilling out of your mouth, keeping you on one side of the flood and everybody else on the other side.

 

One time, a nurse got angry at one of us for swearing. Some of the nurses were self-righteous Christians, not really what you want when you’re soul-naked and crazy and babbling truth. She yelled at this guy for a few minutes while he sat there in silence, and then she stormed out. Somebody remarked, “They’re crazier than we are.”

 

The hardest part for me was not being able to see my kids for weeks. My seven-year-old carefully colored in a picture of a bee and a flower and mailed it to me. I looked at it a lot. That was me, a busy bee.

 

I needed to take Bobby’s advice and slow down. Mania can kill you with lack of sleep and pressured heart rate. The recovering vegetables needed to speed up. One day a silent woman grabbed me by the arm and insisted, with vehement gestures, that I walk the hall with her.

 

The hall was a checkerboard of black and white tiles. My new friend placed her feet carefully on the pattern. When I started to go faster, she’d put her hand on my arm to slow me back down. That woman did more to help me heal than anybody else. She was trying to get back up to her normal speed. I was trying to get back down. We balanced each other.

 

I drew a picture of her wearing a nice dress instead of a baggy gown, with her hair in a neat bun instead of wild. I was trying to help her off her own cross, whatever it was, but whether it helped or hurt I will never know.

 

Where we hung out in the common room, the television was a real presence. Some of us heard the voice of God in it more than once. This was a truth-telling God with a loving sense of humor. It was a welcome voice.

 

Once one of us threw a tantrum, not at any of the patients or staff but perhaps at the world in general. Just after nurses led him away, the television said, “His anger is part of his charm.” The timing was perfect. Everybody laughed.

 

Nobody talked trivia. Nobody was interested in politics or sports or celebrity gossip.

 

Sitting with our backs against the hallway wall one night, I coaxed Jimmy into showing me where he had slashed his wrists. I compared my wrist to his. Inside the dark chocolate skin, his flesh was the same color as mine. We both stared at our wrists next to each other. It was comforting somehow.

 

A frightened teenager came in late one night. I was up. I was always up. He lingered in his doorway, looking around. He was glad to talk with somebody besides his father or his nurse. I told him he was lucky, he landed in a good ward. Some silent ones, some nice people, nobody especially scary. After that, he called me “Mrs. Cool.”

 

When someone called a patient, a phone in the hallway would ring. Nurses ignored it. Sometimes one of us would pick up and find the person the caller wanted. I got in the habit of answering it in a singsong lilt like a company switchboard operator: “Hell-o, Crazy People…”

 

One of the most embarrassing moments to remember, and there are many, is that I sang. Some people liked it; they listened in the hallway when I sang in my room, looking out the window into the park. But once I wanted to cheer this sad guy up, and I sang to him from the hallway, “The Longest Time” – a Billy Joel song. I meant it as an expression of cosmic all-embracing love, but people teased him about it, and his family heard he had a girlfriend. Actually from the way his sons talked to him about it, maybe that was a good thing. They seemed glad to have something to joke with him about.

 

The nurses found me amusing, until late one night I got frustrated with the nurse on duty, who was doing paperwork and refused to talk to me. I banged my wrist against the edge of her window. I wasn’t suicidal; I was just being a drama queen. Oh boy, did that get her attention. In a moment, two large male orderlies materialized on either side of me. They hustled me into my room and strapped me in my bed with leather restraints on my ankles and wrists. Then a nurse injected me with Thorazine, an anti-psychotic. She said it would knock me out for hours. I woke up 20 minutes later.

 

I found that I could wriggle around enough to sit up, leaning back on my arms. When a nurse came by, she reassured herself that I was done acting up, and removed the restraints. I asked her to show me the padded cell, as I thought that would be the next step if I misbehaved again. She laughed. There was no such thing. I was already in the locked ward. The restraints, and the Thorazine, were the worst consequences they had.

 

It was spring. I missed the farm. Early one morning, my mind stopped buzzing long enough that I could hear a blackbird sing in the park. That song rang as pure and clear as anything I had ever heard, all by itself in the silence.

 

I was beginning to come back down from the thrilling, dangerous ride I’d been on. I tried to stick to my principles. Be kind. Recycle. I collected the little things hospitals waste by the ton: medicine cups, the plastic tableware they give you when they can’t trust you with real knives and forks, paper products. I heard nurses tell each other to see me if they needed supplies, I had stacks.

 

Once I was sleeping again, the doctors decided I was ready for a day pass. My husband took me to a huge drugstore that would have overwhelmed me with sensation just weeks before. I bought a few things I needed while he waited outside. The moment I entered the store, one of my favorite songs started to play on the sound system: “Strange Days,” by John Lennon. The last notes of the song played just as I left. I felt like the universe was encouraging me.

 

The kids were waiting at my mother-in-law’s. Seeing them, holding them, was heaven.

 

When the hospital released me, finally, we moved north to the state where my parents lived, and where there were construction jobs. My mother found a wonderful old psychiatrist who saw me a few times, and then took me off lithium. He didn’t think I would get that crazy again, and I haven’t. I’m usually pretty happy with myself and my world.

 

Still, I’m as crazy as the next person. I get depressed, I get anxious, I have insomnia, I get angry about nothing, I over-react. The pandemic almost pushed me over the edge, but I turned to the things that always help me: friends, music, meditation, walks by the riverside, my husband, my kids.

 

All I want people to know is that sometimes life gets better. We are not things that get broken and can’t be fixed. We’re alive, and we can heal.

Collins with her grandchildren, lighting a menorah on the second day of Hanukkah.