Documenting my journey through the mental health system

I feel like a fool sometimes. Taking on grad school, taking on this other job, moving back into my house. Everything compounds. Everything is a lot. And I have so many intrusive thoughts and feelings.

This job. I don’t really need it, but I want it. A sick part of me insists on the exposure to all the triggers of past traumas. This hospital, Sacred Heart, where so much went down. Before I could ever imagine getting a job here, I was a patient here. I was brought in from a neighboring mental hospital that said I needed a higher level of care. The night before I had tried to hang myself in the shower and trashed the doctor’s office. In the psych ER was a long line of cells, psych holding cells, since placement after detainment can take awhile. Tiny rooms with a bed and nothing else. I was forced into one and forced into restraints. I just remember the feeling… trapped, terrified, hearing voices, suicidal. I fought like hell but security staff strapped me in. A nurse came back after a few minutes and they held my shoulder down and injected me with Haldol. I fought that too, and moaned, and passed out.

I still remember that day with crystalline clarity. I wanted to die and believed I’d been kidnapped for scientific experimentation. I woke up dressed in color-coded scrubs, blue for suicide risk, and trapped in that little room. I tried the door, but it was locked.

I wrote all about this in my book. Took over 10 chapters. It’s published now and I think a lot about what went down and how I’ve changed. I think I’ve changed. I can work, I can function. On my current drug cocktail I’m more stable than I’ve been in a long time. Maybe years. I still hear voices and weird sounds sometimes, and I have more in common with those patients in the mental hospital than I do the nurses with which I work. That’s a very sobering realization.

Around this time last year, I was in a mental hospital just a couple blocks from Sacred Heart called Inland Northwest Behavioral Health, or INBH. I tried to run. Detained, strapped down in the ER, and drugged again. I just wanted to be left alone to kill myself. The police brought me in. Spent two and a half days locked in that little room before they moved me to INBH. And I drive by that place every time I am going to work. And every time, I panic a little, and have flashbacks, and feel the feelings. I don’t think that can ever go away.

So both my drive here and working within Sacred Heart is triggering. I’m just a nurse assistant but I get exposed to everything. Patients in restraints, hearing voices, psychotic, going through all manner of things I went through. I mentioned it to a couple coworkers, very casually and very vaguely. “Wow, this brings back bad memories.”

“You’ve been in restraints?”

“Yes. But you’ll just have to read about it.”

I’ve only really spoken aloud about it with Dr. Black. Ceila and Shelly read my journal and know what happened. But actually talking about it is entirely different.

And now I fight not to be defined by bipolar and mental illness. By suicidal tendencies and a propensity toward hearing what’s not there. I wonder what they would think of me now? Dr Patel, from INBH. Would he be happy with my progress? Whatever that progress happens to be? Or Shirley, who processed my admission and would often give me my nighttime meds? Or Nancy, who forced me to wear the turtle suit right before I was going to hang myself with my pants? I think about these things a lot. Every time I drive by that place, I think of these things.