This next part of the series starts by detailing my admittance to the psychiatric hospital and what my feelings and thoughts were as I was going through this process. I also wanted to share what it was actually like being a patient in a psych hospital, something I never thought I would experience firsthand.
*Names have been changed to protect other people’s privacy and identities.
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The front lobby of the (psych) hospital was warm and inviting, decorated nicely – it had a tv in the waiting room which was playing an episode of How I Met Your Mother. After you are admitted and get checked in, you are taken back behind a few locked doors, and you begin to realize it is all a facade. Behind closed doors, there is no more warm inviting atmosphere. There is no paint on the walls, no warm and fuzzy decorations or atmosphere… just white cinder blocks. There are 2 “units” as they call them. And there is no fraternizing between units, you have to go through locked doors to pass between the units. Each unit is set with a nurse’s station in the middle and 4 “pods” surrounding the station. A pod is basically a collection of rooms, a suite if you will (although calling it a suite has too nice of a connotation): a living room, bedrooms, and bathrooms. The nurse’s station is basically a large central desk where the nurses on duty sit and check files, answer the telephones, etc. Us patients are not allowed to go behind the nurse’s desk. In each pod, the living room area has couches and tables, and a tv (although the tv is behind a glass case – I guess maybe it is considered a safety hazard.) There are two bathrooms with showers in each pod. And there are 4 individual bedrooms off of the living room where patients sleep. Each room is furnished with 2 wooden bed frames (flimsy mattresses included), wooden nightstands and wooden dressers – although there are no drawers on the dresser, so it’s really more like an open bookcase. There are two thin vertical strips of windows in each room, but they are frosted over so you cannot see the outside. Another thing I didn’t realize, getting to be outside was a luxury at this place. Mostly you are cooped up inside all of the time.
So, after I had signed my life away (I mean, checked in) and said goodbye to Dean, I begin to think that maybe this was a mistake. The very first thing I was asked to do was to strip down totally naked. There were two nurses in this little room with me and they needed to see what scars or marks I already had on my body, obviously the reason being to know if I obtained any new injuries while staying in the hospital. Not that it was a huge deal, I had just had a baby and was used to people seeing all kinds of parts of my body exposed, but it was a little strange. And I had not been informed that this was part of the welcome you get after you get admitted.
After that they took me behind two more locked doors to where I saw the unit where I would be living. This was where I really started to get scared. As I said, the decor was non-existent and it was cold and drab. The nurses showed me to my pod, put sheets on my bed, and then basically left and didn’t tell me what I was supposed to do or how anything worked. I decided to sit down on the couch in the living area of the pod. Two other people were in the room – one I couldn’t tell if it was a girl or boy. This person had short hair and was very stocky, and I couldn’t tell if he or she had breasts or not, or if it was just an illusion from being a bit overweight. The other person was exactly the image you would expect to see in a psych hospital: wearing just a hospital gown, no shoes, long unkempt tangled hair, long beard that had not been shaved or groomed in probably weeks… Not to mention he kept laughing maniacally and staring at me. (I am not making this up, I promise!) They both sat down on the couches and started talking. Mostly it was about when they would be able to get out, hoping that each new day would bring freedom. The conversation was also interspersed with a lot of profanity, mostly the f-word, which I later realized was just part of the culture here among patients at Abilene Behavioral. That and smoking, almost everyone smoked. But I’ll get to that later.
Threads of Anxiety 