What It’s Really Like To Be Involuntarily Committed To A Psychiatric Hospital: An Ode To Crazy
I sit in the back seat of the Sheriff's extended cab police truck anxiously peering out the window. A surprisingly ominous and looming skyline is beginning to form in the distance. Early morning fog is patchy but add to the ambience of the nightmare-esque town taking shape. Surrounded by a chain link fence to rival any prison- it extends for miles and miles and is topped with barbed wire. The message is clear. There will be no escape. There is only one break in the fencing where we are greeted. Police officers are stiff but polite at the entrance to my escort. One of them gives me a funny look. He wonders what I am doing here. He doesn’t think I look crazy, but he shrugs away the thought and waves us through. After all, looks can be deceiving.
This place is genuinely creepy. Like, the stuff nightmares and horror movies are made of. It is not just one building or a few- Whitfield is a mostly defunct ghost town. It really is technically a town within a town. It has it’s own zipcode. Buildings and streets stretch on as far as the eye can see, most obviously abandoned and in various states of disrepair. I see a building labeled pharmacy. Another looks like a giant crematorium, puffing out black clouds of smoke that choke the sky. All of a similar style and made of mostly dark red brick. Most at least two stories tall. What the hell goes on here? I don’t like it.
I’m led with my suitcase into a building and through a metal detector. My mother has packed it with clothes she doesn’t realize I’m not allowed to wear. Shorts, flip-flops, sleeveless tees. She means well, it is June in Mississippi and it’s the hottest summer I can remember in a while. We are only allowed to wear clothing that covers our shoulders and ankles like God intended. This is the Bible Belt, after all. A corrections officer takes my suitcase one way. A lady dressed in scrubs leads me in another into a small room where it is just the two of us. She looks embarrassed. She asks me to lift my shirt and pull down my jeans with the underwear too. I ask her if she will consider buying me dinner and a drink first, but she doesn’t laugh. Perhaps she’s heard it. Perhaps it’s the awkwardness of the task. I do as asked then focus my eyes on the ceiling so I can go somewhere else in my mind. I guess I’m trying to preserve some semblance of the idea that I have dignity. She doesn’t really look though, and lets me redress quickly. She rushes out before I can even button my jeans and says to follow when I’m decent again. Next I’m driven several building over to one of the three out of the 15 or so on this block that are obviously still in use. The three functional buildings are spaced way apart. In between them sits sad, haunted looking units with boarded windows and some with caving roofs. I still don’t know what, or rather who, they used to house in all of them. I’m led inside through a thick reinforced metal door with a keypad operated lock mechanism. The message once again is clear. Don’t even think about it- you will leave when we say you can leave.
This building that I have the displeasure of calling home for the next 6 weeks is called the Women’s CDU- or Chemical Dependance Unit. Most, if not all, of the 42 women there at any given time have some type of mental illness on top of a substance abuse problem. But, then again, they do tend to go hand in hand. 40 of them have committed a crime and been court ordered to complete treatment in this facility. Sometimes instead of jail. Sometimes as well as a jail sentence. I am only one of two women here at this time who has been committed without having been accused nor convicted of anything at all. My family has put me here. The other woman committed herself. We obviously stand out. I’m instantly singled out for my attempts at self care. The other women don’t like that I straighten my hair every morning and put on makeup. Why do I bother, they wonder loudly. Who am I trying to impress. I tell them it just makes me feel better, more human. Most scoff.
We are separated equally among 4 therapists that work on the unit. Mine is an ex-crack head turned preacher’s wife. I know because she told us, often and loudly. In fact she was just a loud, attention seeking, and self absorbed woman by nature. She likes the women to compliment her. Her hair, outfit, shoes, the perfume she is wearing on any given day. She lives for it, and picks favorites based upon this. She calls me ‘Little Miss Pretty Hair’ instead of my name. Not complimentary, but mockingly. She tells us that she had a patient in her group therapy (where we were at that moment) a few years since past that was a Wiccan. She was horrified by the girl, and did not care to have anyone else like that in her groups in the future. She then took a survey of raised hands of everyone who was Christian. This was obviously the right answer. I raised my hand with everyone else, terrified if my non-religious nature was exposed this would mean I’d have to stay longer. She liked to threaten us with staying longer than our given time on the unit. Often reminding us it was her decision who graduates the program and who stays as long as she feels necessary. I’m terrified of this woman.
For the most of my stay I am forced to stay inside the building at all times because I don’t have proper shoes. I called my mother the first night they allowed me phone privileges, two weeks into my stay. I was mad at being in this hell hole. This place wasn’t going to help me or anyone else. This place is going to traumatize me and damage me further. She hangs up on me and refuses to send my sneakers so I can leave the building. I have to write an apologetic letter detailing my many crimes against humanity, real and imagined, and grovel in order to finally get shoes to walk outside for the first time in a month. When they arrived, I cried. I finally get to go outside during one of the two times a week we are allowed to stand beside the building in the sun. There is nothing to do there, but it’s outside. I am lost in thought when I see a woman that must have escaped from one of the psych buildings half jogging down the block. Her hair is wild and her eyes are frantic, but she doesn’t appear to be trying to escape. It seems as if she is looking for something. Something on the ground? My interest piqued, I watch silently as she scans the ground in wide sections. Finally, she spots what she has been searching for with a strange jerk and runs to the treasure. Lifting her shirt slightly, she produces an object from the waste band of her jogging pants. She holds it low and attempts to shield the object as she peers behind her, the direction she appeared from. When she is satisfied no one is following her, she crouches and reaches out towards a large rain puddle that has collected in a giant pothole that has formed in the asphalt of the street. The object is a plastic bottle with the top cut off, forming a cup. She fills it with the brown puddle water and throws it back down her throat like a shot of whiskey. Again, and again, and again. She stops long enough only to steal glances behind her to make sure her captors have not located her yet. Before I can process what I’m seeing, one of the MHT’s with our group finally hones in on the spectacle. Oh shit, she lets slip. She radios some faceless person on the other side of her walkie talkie. The water drinker escaped building 62 again. She shoos me back into the building along with the rest of my unit, and watches alone until someone comes to get the lady. It’s just another day at Whitfield.
One day another patient on the unit that I’m reasonably friendly with comes to me in a rush. In the hushed tones of a conspirator whisper, she lays out a plan of action that she wants help with. I’m dubious, but curious. What could this be about? I’m so starved for amusement I entertain her and hear her out. She says when she leaves the unit, her court order is to go back to her local county jail to finish serving her sentence. I am unsure of her crime. She says she knows exactly where they keep the paperwork she was brought in with detailing her return to jail after graduation from this program. She saw them put it in the nurses station, in a filing cabinet. She theorizes that if she can bypass the MHT’s (Mental Health Technicians) and nurses watchful gazes long enough to sneak in the nurses station and snatch that file, destroy and dispose of it- well, they’ll let her walk right out on her own after graduation. She can run off into the sunset. But she needs help. Someone must distract the nurse on duty long enough for her to steal the file, then again to return the file. She has enlisted another woman already to help. Will I distract the MHT in the tv room, so that she doesn’t wander out and see the heist going down? I nod and say I will try. I have no intention of trying. I will not risk staying here a minute longer. I usually would have just been honest about that fact, but I’ve learned that the kind of women who are court ordered to this place are quick to anger. Most of them are not rational and prone to fits of childishness. It’s the drugs. They have a way of mentally stunting a person. If they start as a teenager their emotional maturity tends to stay around that same level forever. I don’t want to risk setting her off, so I walk into the tv room as asked. But instead of engaging the MHT on duty, I simply sit in a chair with a group of women and begin to watch tv. I later find out she actually did manage to get her file undetected. She destroyed the paperwork by flushing it down the toilet. Upon the attempted return of the file, she was caught. The other girl she enlisted, her closest friend here, set her up to fail for fun. They sent the criminal mastermind directly back to jail. The sabotaging friend laughed for days.
When I’d first arrived, I was given an extensive questionnaire that supposedly aided in diagnosis and treatment. I was prescribed exactly one vitamin daily, one blood pressure pill, daily group therapy with a thought nazi, daily confidence classes (of which I never actually had even one, due to the teacher’s maternity leave) and an anger management class that for no given reason never met once either. My therapist singled me out and told everyone I’d only relapse and return, that she didn’t believe in me or my ability to change. She said I was one of the bad ones. But she didn’t make me stay longer. As it turned out, she did not actually have that authority after all. I spent 6 weeks surrounded by criminal, often violent mentally ill women coming down off years of drugs. I became withdrawn and depressed. I had my phone privileges taken away for giving another woman one of my potato chips. I went in a fairly happy, well adjusted young adult with a recreational drug habit bordering on addiction and left a shell-shocked, antisocial, mentally tormented woman that was broken by how easy to throw away she was. So when I found out that they’d finally closed down that unit for good- I couldn’t help but smile. Although, I do wonder… What ever became of the water drinker?
