Nothing will make you believe the idea that psych wards are made to punish deviation from the norm quite like spending a few days in one.
The psych ward is designed in a lot of ways.
1. The ward is a panopticon (key point)
Imagine being admitted, they take everything you brought in with you; from your phone to your wallet to your clothes. then they put you in a glass box. This is your room. Next door to you is a man who can’t or won’t speak English. He is constantly murmuring prayers. Next door to you is an old friend who today believes that you are (quite literally) the devil’s advocate.
The wall is glass. The door is glass. There is no lock. There is a curtain, kept just high enough off the floor for them to see your feet if you are walking around the room. You are always watched. And always judged. You can read, a week later in your exit report, if you so choose. What the doctors and nurses thought of you. You can scan through the sterile notes and analyses they made about you. You can see yourself as a medical object. It will not be pleasant. You will not be able to unsee it.
2. The ward is control
You start with nothing, as nothing. You earn phone privileges. You earn shower privileges. You earn the privilege to walk around the main ward, to use a pencil, to watch the television. You earn the privilege of being treated like a person. If you fail the test you become that sad thing. They can restrain you, handcuffed to the bed. They can take away everything. In the psych ward you are no longer a person.
You wonder if staying in the psych ward might not make you more crazy. You hate the thought as you think it. What is “crazy” but an ableist label. Haven’t you said before that the world is crazy, that every person is crazy in their own way and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s harder to believe those things in a psych ward. Here crazy is a bad grade on your report card. You’ve always been a straight A student. So you stop being crazy, at least visibly. You stop doing crazy. You cry only in bed, where no one can see you. Like normal people do. Because we have defined sanity as productivity. Cry on your own time, in your own space. Suffer in silence. This is sanity.
3. The ward is frightening
I want you to imagine. Really imagine. You are locked in a hallway with a group of crazy people. Your choices for human interaction are: the one who talks a mile a minute and believes they can read your mind, the one who has substituted all regular speech with prayer, the one who forgets what you last spoke about each time he sees you, the one who does not speak at all. You do not know these people. Many of them are larger and stronger than you. The nurses sit in a locked booth and ignore you as much as they can. You can’t believe they would step in fast enough if anything serious were to happen. One of the men in the ward keeps walking by your room and pulling the curtain aside to peak in. Each time a nurse scolds him and he walks away and then comes back and does it again.
4. You know the way out
When they first bring you to the ER they put you on suicide watch. A nurse sits beside you all day. Every time you cry she tells you, “Stop. You’ll get yourself in trouble. Don’t you know they’re taking notes? Don’t you know they’re monitoring your heart? They can tell when you cry and it does not make them happy. Stop crying. Stop crying or they’ll lock you up.”
You know the way to leave is to look normal, to stop crying. You know that staying will only make you helpless and subhuman and crazy and scared. You do not want to stay. So you practice looking normal. You’re lucky because you can. Because you lack the hallucinations or delusions that make normalcy impossible to even feign.
The thing about being in the psych ward is that it was never a place that could help me, and was never intended to be a place that could help me. It was and is a place meant to scare me into lying to myself and everyone around me, swearing I was perfect and normal and cured and anything and everything that would let me out.
Normalcy haunts us all
Specters of health wait in the wings
What is this body for?
To work, efficiently, a perfect machine-
To play, savor hedonistic joy-
To serve, society and family.
Am I not my own?
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