I should have never said anything. I knew better. Susan warned me.
The headaches have been getting worse lately. Well, they’re not headaches so much, because it feels more like a void in my brain. It’s not painful. The worst part is the memory loss. You know that feeling where you walk into a room and can’t remember why you went in there? It’s like that, except all the time. I can tell when it’ll happen, too. My left eye goes blindingly white and I start to walk like back in my drinking days. I’ve affectionately named it the “Brain Hole”.
I was about ready to put an actual hole in my head to make it go away. After a half-hour on hold with the suicide help line, I hung up and called my ex-wife. This is where I fucked up. She called the cops and they showed up at my door a couple of hours later to kidnap me at gunpoint. Well, assault-rifle point, technically.
So now I’m in the back of an ambulance on my way to the hospital. The medic is nice enough. I know a lot of these folks by name, but not by face, from my time as a 911 dispatcher. We share casual conversation during the hour-long trip down the mountain, neither of us mentioning why we’re here in the first place.
I’m completely capable of walking, but they make me ride the gurney from the ambulance to the emergency room, then they lift me to a wheelie bed like I can’t do it for myself. Expectedly, this hospital doesn’t have any rooms available, so they roll my conveyance against a wall in the corridor, near the nurse’s station. In the rooms on either side of me, patients scream and shout.
The security guard escorts me to the restroom at the end of the hall and has me strip naked with the door open. She gives me some paper scrubs, about six sizes too large, and a pair of brown hospital socks. My uniform for the weekend.
Before long, the nurse comes out from behind her desk and asks me a series of questions between jamming a thermometer in my mouth and pumping up a blood-pressure cuff.
“Are you hearing voices?”
“Are you thinking about hurting yourself or anyone else?”
“Do you have a plan?”
Regardless of what I’m thinking about, I know to answer these questions in the negative, otherwise they’ll hold me hostage for longer than seventy-two hours or pump me full of meds. In this case, I followed Susan’s advice. When she called me from this place, I think it was her second or third stay, we’d laugh about the irony of these so-called “mental health” facilities. They bring you in for thinking about suicide, then want to punish you for talking about it. If not here, where?
I attempt to count the dots in the acoustic ceiling tiles innumerable times to keep my mind active while waiting out my sentence. Every hour or so, the nurse does her same routine. At one point, they stick me in a room and a psychiatrist on a video monitor asks me the same questions. He doesn’t seem to take my description of the Brain Hole seriously, either.
“What do you want us to do for you?” The nurse asks from behind the counter. I’ve lost all track of time and, of course, they have the clock facing in a direction where they can see it and I can’t.
“I don’t know, do some blood tests, have my head scanned? I want to know that what’s happening isn’t organic.”
It’s daylight again when the EMTs come to pick me up and haul me off to the next holding facility. I never did hear anything about getting those tests run. The last six months have been spent battling with my insurance company to see a specialist. No doubt they wouldn’t make it easy on me this time around.
An orderly slams open the security door and beckons us inside. I sit complacently as the medics wheel me in on the gurney, waiting for permission to stand again. The man in the white scrubs takes my bag and, without bothering to look in it, shoves it into a locked closet with dozens of other suitcases, backpacks and plastic bags.
Past the second set of locked double doors a nurse stands behind a counter, watching patients pace the halls and talk to themselves. She escorts me to a small closet where she takes my blood pressure and other vitals. The equipment reads twenty-two respirations per minute. That is definitely wrong. I count my breath at about eight or ten per minute. Still faster than usual.
After another round of prosaic questions, she leads me to the room at the end of the hall, tells me which of the three beds is mine and closes the door, leaving me inside, in the dark. I flip the switch and the overhead fluorescents come to life like a thousand suns. There are blinds on the window, but they can’t be opened. I decide to sit in the dark.
After several hours on the edge of my bed, staring into nothingness, a nurse comes to ask me, in a condescending tone, if I was planning to take my meds tonight. I don’t typically take medication, so I’m not sure what they’re planning to give me. I trek my way down the corridor and am given a paper cup with Ativan and my choice of either cran-apple or orange juice. She makes a note on her clipboard when I reject the juice in favor of water.
Before heading back to bed we all have to line up, shoulder-to-shoulder in the hallway to have our vitals checked. When it’s my turn, the nurse asks the identical questions she asked when I came in:
“Why are you here?”
“I was thinking about hurting myself.”
“Do you feel that way now?”
“No.”
“Are you hearing voices?”
“No. I’m not schizo. I’m feeling depressed and have headaches.” I learned at the last place not to refer to it as a “Brain Hole”. It doesn’t matter that the pamphlet they gave me when I got here said I had a right to medical treatment. Susan had the same problem. Near the end, she was almost unrecognizable. When her illness got worse, she couldn’t eat and deteriorated rapidly those last couple of years. She told me that anytime she was feeling sick in here, they’d just send her to bed.
Tearing the Velcro band from around my arm, the nurse sends me back to my room for the night. The other two beds are now occupied. One roommate is fast asleep, the other is sitting bolt-upright on his bed, staring at the dark wall. I’m lucky to bunk with these guys and not whoever is screaming in the room across the hall.

There’s an early-morning wakeup call and within five minutes I line up with the forty-or-so others in my ward and we march, single-file, to the cafeteria. Typically, I don’t leave the house without a shower. I feel gross.
The nurse takes careful notes regarding what patients do, or don’t, elect to take from the counter. The food is bland, burned and mostly-unidentifiable as real food. A lone lunch-lady denies additional portions of anything, but passes out dozens of packets of sugar, syrup or ketchup to each patient. I’m not a nutritionist, but I can’t see how one egg, one piece of bread and some runny oatmeal, drowned in processed sugar, qualifies as a balanced meal. “At least we aren’t here for our health,” he thinks sarcastically.
After breakfast, we are allowed thirty minutes to clean ourselves. The three occupants of our room all manage to shower in the allotted time. After we clean ourselves, the nurses come around to take our soap, toothbrushes and mouthwash. They’ve made it clear that this will be our only opportunity to use any sanitary items until this time tomorrow. Are they afraid we’ll try to eat the soap?
Before lunch, we have required exercise time. Once again, we line up way too close to each other and are marched down the hall to the ‘gym’. I attempt to use one of the exercise bikes for a moment, giving up as the pedals spin freely. They’re electric bikes, but the cords have all been cut. I grab a basketball from the rack and attempt to shoot it into the one hoop, against a far wall. It sticks between the rim and backboard, too flat to bounce. The other patients spin their wheels and dribble their flat balls. The atmosphere of the room makes me feel like if I don’t pretend, I’ll be punished.
They drive us like cattle back to our ward, only to immediately turn around and take us to the cafeteria. Lunch is more of the same. One dry chicken breast, one piece of bread, one iceberg wedge and all the ketchup, ranch dressing and sugar packets one can carry.
The daily calendar on the wall in my ward says there is a ‘group’ at three. Otherwise, no other activities are scheduled for today. Some patients choose to pace the halls or sleep, but most hang out in the common room, watching network TV and coloring with crayons. Seems like these are my only choices. I settle on Judge Judy and take a seat as far away from everybody as I can.
After seventy-three minutes of trash TV and staring at the clock, a nurse calls me into the closet to have my vitals checked again. She asks me the same questions as before. This time, I elaborate on the headaches and add some detail about having difficulty balancing while walking. I even throw in something about speech problems for good measure. The nurse removes the cuff and tells me to send in the next patient from the hall.
‘Group’ therapy consists of an hour of the most manic or delusional patients monopolizing the room by arguing with the indifferent social worker who sits at the head of a long table – or each other. Any hope for sharing or healing went out the door in the first thirty seconds and the counselor has no interest in reigning it in, dryly asking, “And how does that make you feel?”, no matter what delirious rant the patient would go on.
I won’t bore you with the details of dinner. Suffice it to say, every meal consisted of us lining up and being paraded down the halls to choke down what may as well have been cardboard, kitty litter and charcoal.
It’s been twenty-four hours. I still haven’t seen a doctor. The most medical attention I’ve received is having my blood-pressure checked. The most psychiatric care I’ve received was that Ativan.
I restlessly watch more network TV until what I’ve determined is the most appropriate bedtime to make myself look ‘normal’, which I decide is just after they offer me my ‘medication’.
This place is starting to get to me. Neglectful staff, bad food, no way to exercise our minds and bodies. It’s no wonder people come home from these places worse than when they left. If it weren’t for the pills, I don’t think I could sleep here. It’s everything that’s not home.
The next morning, after another round of questioning from the nurse and another unpalatable breakfast, I finally meet with a psychiatrist. She asks me the identical questions as the nurse. This time I elaborate even further on the headaches, not sure what notes the nurses have left in my file, if any. I tell her I have severe headaches, memory loss, vision and balance problems. Any individual with no medical training might suspect I had a stroke, the way I was describing the symptoms. All this so-called professional had to say before sending me back into the care of Judge Judy was, “It’s probably just depression. You can talk about it in group.”
This time, when we go to the gym, I only spend a couple of minutes pretending to exercise on their broken equipment before joining a young woman sitting in the corner in playing with a giant Jenga set. I’ve tried to avoid interacting with other patients since I’ve been here, unsure why they are here and what might set them off. That’s in addition to my general eschewal of any close contact with people. The nurses are watching and judging, so I make polite conversation with the girl as we play. She must be heavily medicated, not much of what she says makes sense. I can understand the words, just not the way she’s putting them together.
For the rest of my stay, it’s more of the same. The same questions from the nurses, with their same indifference to my care. When I meet with the shrink the next day, I’m crying, telling her I’m scared. That’s no small feat for me. Despite being raised in a culture of toxic masculinity, I don’t typically have any difficulty expressing the way I feel. Seldom, though, am I brought to tears. Her response is that if I don’t stop being emotional, she’ll keep me here past the seventy-two hours.
Monday morning I have an appointment with the man the staff refer to as the ‘good doctor’ (while simultaneously making racist jokes about the mean doctor within earshot of patients). Dr. Chaya tells me that I shouldn’t be in this facility and I’m not getting appropriate care. He recognizes what I’ve had to say about the way things have been this weekend and all he can say is that he hears it a lot and wishes he could do something to change it.
After choking down my last terrible meal, they return my personal belongings and send me out the door. They don’t ask if I have a ride home. All they provide me with is a paper with the phone number and address for the county health department, so I can “continue my care.”
I probably won’t. Not with them, at least.
My friend, Susan, tried to get help from the county. Before she died, she called every number she could find, from adult protective services to the sheriff. Nobody would help her. She said at one point that APS told her the fact she’s able to call for herself must mean she’s able to care for herself.
I spent just one weekend of my life being treated the way she, and many others, have been treated their entire lives. For one weekend, I didn’t matter. I was less than a person. Completely helpless. In their ignorance, Susan’s family kept encouraging her to go through the same torment, the same as my family has done to me. She hated doctors and hospitals, but all people could do was keep telling her to “get help”. It’s not all they could do; it was all they did. I don’t know if I could have been the person to help her or not, but I know that there was no help, no healing, happening in the places they kept sending her.
Here I am, following in her footsteps. Lost, helpless, alone. But still alive.