End Game of Manic Depression

I recently found myself on the 9th floor of a local hospital. The Psychiatric ward.

"Found myself" is a bit misleading. The way a person usually ends up in the psych ward is not as glamorous as Hollywood would lead us lemmings to believe. We're not usually carried in screaming. Most of us enter in a non-eventful fasion, with little fanfare...but we leave behind us a series of destructive and remarkable events. Finally we enter into care voluntarily, a little subdued from our previous state of agitation or psychosis (not always), and smarting from broken relationships and a stinging pride.

Have you ever wondered what a hospital psych ward is really like? Sound scary? A bit uneasy about the idea? Especially the prospect of YOU being the committed one? I think it may not surprise you that I liked it.

Yes, like.

I have never checked myself into a hospital, though I should have on at least 2 other occasions. The idea of going into a psych ward, since my first psychotic episode, has never frighted me. If a stay in the hospital seems like a great idea as compared to the scary and evil you live in your head outside the hospital, then you're guaranteed to be a good 9th floor candidate.

Being admitted into the hospital doesn't look weird generally. No thrashing, muttering, and pulling your hair while rapidly shuffling around the ER with your bum hanging out the ill fitted robe. That is the exception, really.

Usually, our families are the one's who bring us in. Not always, but often they're the ones left who will help. I mean, manic depression drives people away. I don't drive people away. But I let my brain chemistry and what it does to me drive people away.

Usually we are cooperative because we know we aren't coping outside the hospital walls.


Washington is a voluntary commitment state only. I'm not too proud to say that I have needed to check myself into a hospital, even before this time. However, I AM too proud to have actually done it those two times before.

Perhaps it is my 43rd year of life that convinced me there was only something to gainby going in this time. Maybe it was the very broken and shattered relationship that seemed at stake. Perhaps it was the frightening effect of the things I was seeing...things that were not real but which I had to convince myself otherwise nevertheless. Whatever the reasons, they absolutely added up to my going WAY out of the box and becoming a ward of the hospital for a couple weeks.

Doctors, nurses, social workers, OT's, psychiatrists, all converged on me with great care and concern. That in itself was healing. I literally turned myself off for a number of days. In the controlled and compassionate environment my head began to mend.

I have, in the past, lay in my bed or just stayed inside and done what I could to stay alive during the days of suicide, depression, and rapid cycling of thoughts. I slept, walked, tried to do normalcy until the symptoms abated. It was not easy. It wasn't unlike squeezing dry super-glue through a tiny hole. Something like waiting out a mood may sound easy, but "easy" is NOT losing days of my life to the voracious appetite of the imbalanced organ in my head.

For the first 4-5 days of my hospital stay I received my care passively. I did, in fact, shuffle around the halls...when I wasn't sleeping. I was given medications to slow my brain down, and it slowed all of me down. I slept and slept and slept. I finally woke up not knowing the day nor caring to find out.

They were taking care of me. Waking me to give me my meds, waking me to eat, waking me to talk about how I was doing. "I don't know," was generally my reply at that point. I didn't care how I felt. I had stopped thinking. And that is a good thing for someone like me.

There were other people around me and I didn't care. I didn't want to have to care. I always care. This time it was about me being given a small period of time to find and do something extraordinary, different, and life changing...

2 B Continued...