Why I’m still awake

D. Goldrose
Aug 8, 2017 · 2 min read

This time three years ago I was in a psychiatric ward. I wasn’t sectioned but had been told that if I tried to discharge myself, I would be put under section — i.e. bound by the law to remain. We slept in dormitories. The curtains separating the four beds were always closed but would be twitched back every ten minutes by a member of staff checking on you. This happened at night, too, when they would shine a torch in your face to see if you were still breathing. I woke up when this happened and would become irate. Particularly because not sleeping was what had landed me in the hospital in the first place. Becoming irate, on more than one occasion, led to me being forcibly injected. As Joanna Moncrieff, psychiatrist and advocate for reduced usage of antipsychotics, has argued, it is often more scary having one’s mind invaded against one’s will than being physically restrained. Modern day psychiatric wards might look calmer to the outsider, but the terrors of the asylum, these days, rage within. At the expense of the patients.

I spent six weeks in the hospital, and the following spring was back again, this time sectioned, for a ten-week stint. That winter I went to a different hospital, then another, transferred, then another. That lasted months. Now I have a therapist, and a psychiatrist, and I see them regularly. I am lucky. Objectively so. And subjectively. And every way it is possible to be lucky.

I am awake, I think, because I am exerting my free will — my free will to sit in bed in the quiet, with the lamp on, using my time, because tomorrow is a real day, where I have to do real things; it is not a day where I will exist for no reason, outside of time, apart from my people, witnessing pain, and the daytime is not preceded by a nighttime where the light must be off and the minutes punctuated with torch beams. Ironically, once I got an eye-mask sometime in mid-August 2014 I slept better than ever and was consequently wide awake in the hospital and perceptive and observant all the day long, in a way that I won’t be tomorrow, as I move about London in a happy haze. A haze in which I will think, as I sway on the tube and lean against the bar — I chose this. And am glad of it.