One man's personal journey into a mental health inferno
Anthony Brenton recounts his time in the Waterford Hospital
The jaws to the Waterford Hospital are not as imposing as the common perception.
The intake process is complicated and time-consuming, and so are the states of people coming in: the hysterical, the drugged-out, the fragile and afraid, people fighting against it and people begging for entry.
After this formality, however, you cannot shake the unsteady feeling of incarceration while following a nurse to your ward, through the jagged bones of a leviathan that has been picked clean by crabs. A fierce beast with its bowels of chains and bars, long constipated. Closed-down sections with outdated means of restraint and treatment, derelict quarters with echoes behind rusty steel.
It took two seconds and a dozen fluoride flashes for the room to light. I turned to the closing steel door, feeling as if it should have been inscribed with the words "Prison/Hell." It was not the greatest moment of my life. The door had a small abused window, yellowed and scratched. A strangely linear pattern of damage ran about the walls, nothing a small bucket of paint and a 'can-do' attitude wouldn't fix.
I was physically checked over immediately. Then later, my current psychiatric predicament was assessed by nurse and doctor alike.
The point of this brief institutionalization was to wean myself off a medication that my mind particularly disliked and fill it with another that it desperately needed.
By this cocktail approach I have spent much of the last 10 years in a fog of lassitude and confusion.
I have been on psychiatric medication steadily since I was a teenager, and the juggling is unending. Many thick books with thin paper sit dedicated to the practice of combining pills. A tranquilizer dance and a sensory blender that warps thought worse than street drugs.
I have eaten thousands of pills, submitted to numerous injections and electro-convulsive jolts in an attempt to smooth out the storm of anxiety, paranoia, delusion, depression, bipolar and schizoaffective disorders.
Other terms have been thrown around. But a person can list only so many maladies that have a true effect on their day-to-day survival. A deluge of side effects accompany these diagnoses and their respective tablets, creating a mindset that resembles illicit drug psychosis, and exhibits a pattern of disorders that were not initially present.
By this cocktail approach, I have spent much of the last 10 years in a fog of lassitude and confusion. An aggressive tiredness, stumbling and falling asleep no matter the clock. Other times so panicked and nervous I feared I had been poisoned by LSD. Hallucinatory and tactile-sensitive, haloed like an old painting of a saint, trembling like an innocent at the gallows.
Coming upon or off this stew of pharmaceuticals has similar — and just as intense — psychological and physically damaging effects. This time, simultaneously I began detoxification, with all its intricate dancing and foulness, and riding the rush of chemical pilgrimage that fresh drugs washes upon the body and mind.
Reality on the line
It turned out, though, that this was a love story.
It had to be: spic-and-span cleaners, competent nurses, angular paint jobs, cable television, snacks, meals, meds, soap, toothpaste, fresh towels, doctor supervision, functional windows … though, despite their best efforts, and clear signage, the washrooms were smoked out and splattered with nicotine overdose spitting.
Reality was actually on the line. The day-to-day perceptual intake scrambled by psychotropic pharmaceuticals from one cartoon to another … in walks a nurse with a small plastic cup, rattling pills.
After settling, my wife brought in a constant flow of books and a steady flood of candy that knotted my belly. The hospital food was fine but got old fast. There were strange, underlying similarities between vastly different entrees. There was, however, plenty of clean water.
Like most institutionalization, time moves very slowly behind locked doors. In a mad tedium, days are broken up by meals and snacks, games of bingo, reading, and working on cursive. Television lags worse than counting toes. In a stupor, one almost feels the need to carve the walls notch by notch to count out lonely years, though a mere three weeks creeps by.
Exiting as unnerving as entering
Across the street in the park: pigeons, seagulls, ducks, geese and swans scattered at the feet of elderly ladies skirting the water, mincing bread. But in here every breath was a vehicle for screaming. Bronchi clapped like torn paper. A voice distorted with force. Threatening staff and patients. Codes were called for extra security. She had the same view as I did.
In Inferno, the first part of Dante Alighieri's 14th-century epic poem Divine Comedy, a man holds his own severed head by the hair like a lantern uttering, "Woe is me." In this drowsy inferno each of us thought our madness unique, each with our own head in our hands. An unbalanced parasitic belief. And then, for a moment, it was silent again. Light footfalls, distant traffic, a smoker's cough, a writhing bible.
In the end, according to bloodwork, my medication levels were at an acceptable plateau.
Through slick talk I was able to reason a discharge from the locked unit. My doctor agreed with me that acute care was no longer necessary. The balance had been achieved. After some paperwork and the gathering of my meagre possessions a key was produced and the bolt was rendered useless.
Exiting the hospital was just as unnerving as entering it.
The routine of weeks was severed and replaced by a natural randomness: The man at the wheel of a passing bus was not under supervision to ensure his stability. The lady at the counter had a laugh that seemed unchecked. A vast expanse of possibility ballooned.
And as parking lot rocks stuck into the soles of my shoes, clicking like pendulums, the halls melted away and my file was shelved.
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