Mr. Bad Weekend

Or, That One Time I Was Involuntarily Committed to the Psych Ward During a Breakup

By Alan Hanson
Illustrations by Alexander Glandien

This is a story about my depression, and my eventual “visit” to the psych ward. It is mine alone. I speak for no other persons with mental illness or any others who’ve had to experience the semi-polite incarceration of the psychologically injured. Respectful omissions and name-changes have been made.

During the close of August, I finally let my disease take its most violent stranglehold: I decided to kill myself.

I’d just spent a summer instigating, enduring, and thusly regretting the hardest breakup I’ve ever experienced, while simultaneously hitting the peak of my depression. This — the breakup — also spurred a rapid and stressful move, as we were sharing a happy home in Harlem when I yanked the rug from beneath us. What happened? Well, I had reached a point in which I felt I was doing more damage than good. It was nothing she was doing. It was the forest of personal gremlins becoming restless in my gut. A lesson I didn’t have the energy to teach to the prying EMT in the ambulance, asking, “Did you do it ’cause a girl? Ya lose your job or somethin’?”