Documenting my journey through the mental health system

The most bizarre feeling – I’ll never get over it – of watching a suicidal patient. That is my role tonight, on my last night before a couple days off.

Every time I peek in on him, I’m taken back immediately to the mental hospital, forced to wear an anti-suicide turtle suit, and an aide looking in at me every five minutes. Our eyes would meet, he would mark that I was awake, and he did this every five minutes throughout the night as I tossed and turned in that awful turtle suit.

Now I have to do it to someone else. It’s so awkward.

I felt awkward every time in the mental hospital too, as the patient. Every time our eyes met, a quiet and bitter acknowledgement that you’re under scrutiny. The silence between us just loudly stating “you’re a prisoner here.”

I’m not supposed to think of it like that. Rylee the therapist would remind me that it’s not so black and white. But I still have a lot of bitterness and distrust toward the entire medical system. When you’ve worked in it long enough, you see all its skeletons and all its terrible flaws and all of its dirty underbelly. We pay so much and see such poor outcomes. Finding an inpatient psych bed nowadays compared to half a century ago? Good luck. And people are just getting older and sicker and fatter and crazier every day.

And now he’s on a DCR hold for doing exactly as I would have done – trying to leave. He’s also injured with frostbite and came from homelessness. Yeah, I’d be suicidal too.

He’ll get locked up, probably in the same mental hospital, if not the one within the hospital itself. I’ve been locked up in both. I’m still pretty raw from it. I still feel whispers of that paranoia and fear. Dr Black and Rylee would say to think of it in terms of DBT – dialectical behavior therapy – that two things can be true at once. In this case I think they mean there are people who care in the medical and mental health systems, while also being very flawed systems. As I type that I feel myself scoffing and rolling my eyes, but I suppose it must be partly true because I am here. I chose this.

It will take me years to consider allowing myself to trust again. It’s okay for others, and I try to convince paranoid patients of our good intentions, but it’s not okay for me. That is the twisted logic I impose on myself.