Revati’s Blog

Schizoposting

Types of People in the Psych Ward

  1. The Actively Psychotic
    He’s only interested in destruction, of plates and cups, of the rules, of innocently spread magazines on the tables, of the trays of pills they run after him with, of the piercing shrieks of his own mind, of the paranoia that climbs all over him like spiders that he cannot tear off, that he screams in terror, seeing things others cannot, that only he, the damned, can. He’s locked in the cage that he rattles desperately, constantly being grabbed by the techs and shoved down onto the cold, dirty maple wood floor and having needles injected into his thighs, his shoulders, wherever they can get him fastest as he sobs in phantom pain. He pleads for freedom, and is restrained for it. He paces the halls, mumbling madly to himself until he tires himself out, until the meds kick in, until he is granted mercy, granted mercy from his own brain. Sometimes he will eat. Eventually he will. And that’s how they will know he’s getting better. He will remember that strawberries look better than they taste. He will remember that decaf coffee doesn’t feel quite right. He will remember that there are white tulips growing in the little courtyard the unit has. The one-on-one tech assigned to watch him at all times, following him around like a satellite, will finally put her clipboard away and leave a camera-shaped hole behind her. He will get his phone privileges back. He will shave.
  2. The Depressive
    The intensely, morbidly depressed – he sleeps all day, he refuses to leave the bed, not for anything, not even for meals (even the most violently psychoticly insane of them all come out for meals), and he’s the saddest little lump you will ever see, a little white thing on the bed, growing stale over the days, barely moving. They try everything on him. They pump him full of everything they can possibly think of. He accepts his meds with shaky, yellow hands. He throws up blood in his vomit. He can’t open his eyes all the way; they’re bruised and bloodshot. Sometimes he’ll pace around his room, head bent, long, black hair in his eyes, drooping as if he were constantly walking in the rain. The staff will bring trays of food into his room, and they will go back mostly untouched. Maybe a chicken sandwich with a bite taken out of it. An almost plastic cup of black tea. They give him headphones that you can listen to the radio on. He lies in bed and listens. He listens as the world goes on around him, without him.
  3. The Normal One
    Why are you here? she gets asked all the time. A relatively normal, humdrum middle-aged woman with short, curly blonde hair like noodles and round glasses. She sits around. She colors. She wears a mild expression. Why are you here? She volunteers to talk during group therapy. She’s a mother. She used to work in advertising. She’s just a little anxious, that’s all. She takes notes during all the meetings with all the staff and the doctors and caretakers and god-knows-who else, taking her binder everywhere, full of its tons and tons of worksheets, and her journal full to bursting with all her notes, of endless pages of tight scribbles, barely anything visible in the running lines of black handwriting, with that mild smile, pen gripped a bit tightly. Why are you here? Her husband just overreacted sometimes; after all, she hadn’t burned herself since high school, so there was no point in all this fuss, of course she’ll take her medication; of course she’ll sign up for a psychiatrist, therapist, social worker; anything you need, anything at all to get the fuck out of here, and promise to never run after the dog with a butcher knife ever again.
  4. The Frequent Flyer
    He’s in here all the time. He overdoses, he gets DUI’s, sometimes he just walks in, sweating opiates, veins blue with poison. They know what to do. They put him in detox, and as soon as he’s done screaming and crying and hallucinating and peeing blood and swearing, he becomes decent to deal with. He doesn’t like the food but he has three staff members he will actually talk to, the rest he is coolly pleasant. They beg him to stop, telling him he’s throwing his life down the drain, he can’t go on like this, did he know how high his blood-alcohol level was when he was brought into the ER, he’s going to die if he keeps on, all his family is sick of him, he’s lost his job, he’s lost his friends, the rehabs are sick of him, he’s exhausted his resources, why does he keep doing this, why can’t he put the bottle down, what exactly does he find at the bottom of that vodka bottle that nothing else matters, when will this end, how can this end but in one way, and how can he not see it?
  5. The Maniac
    Another person who has a one-on-one. The Maniac is one of the most annoying people on the unit. She has gone from beautiful and tempting and flirty to constantly babbling, incapable of sitting, running around, chattering to anyone who will listen and anyone who won’t, chasing people down the hallways, a skeletal impersonation of someone, no longer a person. Even the staff is exhausted with her. When she’s hypomanic, she’s the right way, with her hair tossing, her nails perfect, and her smile enchanting, intoxicating, but the slope is slippery, and she’d gone straight into a four inch slash into her thigh with a box-cutter, nobody knew why, but there she was, all patched up, and locked up, pacing the halls with her pent-up energy, battering the walls, panicking, caged, nothing to do, nowhere to go, nowhere to put all that mania, screaming, laughing, unable to release all that energy. They give her ice packs to put on her wrists. But what the hell were ice packs to do when she was used to burning herself with a lighter? Her arms were covered with patches of red and purple scar tissue, over and over again, no room left for her hair to grow. Her one-on-one follows her around the unit as she runs from room to room in a frenzy, trying to burn that mania, having loads of fun, but hating the hospital, but mania, like hope, can be spent and spent and never extinguished, until at last they persuaded her into taking some Klonopin and let her lurch into a restless sleep, fully dressed, on top of the bedcovers.
  6. The Drug-Withdrawer
    She’s hell incarnate, a Lilith of destruction, and she’s going through the meth withdrawal, and taking everybody with her. Every single moment she is awake and capable of opening her mouth, she’s screaming slurs and obscenities. The first few days are the worst. She rages up and down the hallways. Most wards are equipped to handle one person’s episode at a time. Not here. The psychotics go on with their screams, so does she, but she’s not hallucinating, she’s cursing the staff, she wants everything she cannot have – more meth, benzos, to get the fuck out of here. She keeps trying to snatch her one-on-one’s keycard and now the security guards are involved. It takes several shots of tranqs to get her down. She’s covered in puke. She lurches from her bed to the nursing station snarling at them, telling them that they’re going to hell, to jail, to prison for wrongfully locking her up and not giving her the goddamn benzos. She has the tolerance of a horse. She’s put in restraints, and her howls echo through the unit like moans of the insane, the damned screams of a person experiencing rock bottom, covered in blood and piss.
  7. The Paranoid Schizo
    The paranoid schizophrenic is not a person you want to make eye contact with. He is a jumpy individual, mostly keeping to himself, but the slightest thing can set him off. He’s full of quirks, like a strangely wired clock. He doesn’t eat a long list of foods, carefully separating them on his plate with his plastic fork. He drinks coffee with exactly three and a half packets of sugar in it. He makes sure he is third in line for meds. He lies on the pavement in the little courtyard and looks at the sky and dreams of things he never speaks about. He is at all times a few terrible thoughts away from The Actively Psychotic. The nurses know this. And they know the warning signs. If he goes mute, the rocking back and forth, muttering to himself, if he’s pacing too fast, he’s crying, not eating, not getting out of bed, but not sleeping either. Usually sleep is the first thing to go. Then a gentle cup of pills is handed to him, and he will either take it and the crisis will be averted, or a bootyjuice situation will happen. And the longer you go, the wiser you get about this type of fork in the road.
  8. The Suicidal First-Timer
    He is usually a young person, maybe even a teenager. He’s never been in one of these facilities before. He is terrified, his green eyes are wide, but he’s hulking, over six feet, tight in his standard-issue pale blue scrubs, not knowing where to look, where to stand, how to hold his hands. His attempt was half-assed, a sob for attention, a poor, neglected young thing, way out of his depth with a stomach full of Tylenol, sweating as he stumbled out into the living room to announce what he had done. And then there was his parents’ expressions, the red and blue of the screaming ambulance, that horrible tube that went down his throat, the searing, unbearable pain, the blinding lights, so many people talking to him, all at once. I didn’t mean it, he kept saying, I didn’t mean it. But it was too late. It’s hard to convince those psych folks of your innocence, especially if you’d taken a bottle full of pills, and even if you hadn’t, even if you said one wrong sentence in therapy, it could be damning. One wrong move and bam, you were locked up for three weeks. The First-Timer eats his meals on time, and is the first in line for meds. He never asks for anything extra, and volunteers during groups. He doesn’t even know what meds he’s taking. He just wants to get out and never speak of it again. He’s one of the only patients with consistent visitors.
  9. The TV-Remote Nazi
    She’s got nothing better to do. She’s grumpy, she’s old, and she complains about everything, from the food to the staff to the ink spot on the armchair to her meds to the doctor’s tie. She has one show she will watch continuously, sitting in the same spot, as if she had sprouted from it, and she won’t let anybody else change the channel. Most people are going through too much of their own shit to care much about this. She’s the same way during art group, and music group, and damn near everything else. Pick the channel, pick the song, pick the video, and everything in between. You can kind of tell she’s been a steamroller her whole life and nobody’s ever called her out on it. And the fight isn’t even really worth it. You have to save your energy for the things that matter, like making sure your doctor isn’t giving you meds that you know will give you a seizure, or the social worker is actually listening when you tell him that you have a place to live.
  10. The Pretty One
    Every ward has one of these. Even in the loose scrubs, you can tell she’s got a figure that artists like to draw, the curves in her hips, the swells in the right places. Her eyes are almond-shaped, melancholy lashes longer at the corners, cruel and wild, one of those women whose dark honey sweetness drips over their skin like moon-blood, demonic, yet languid. She’s oh so nice to the staff and they give her anything she wants. She’s so polite, but dark, terrible as obsidian, tormented by strange things, making their home in her notebooks: these awful drawings, huge monsters with googly eyes and teeth leaking blood, bewitching images of nightmarish things, transferred from soul to paper, all with the scratchy ink-pens they give you at psych wards. It’s clear she’s done some things, things she’s haunted by, unspeakable. The staff lets her drink coffee whenever she wants. She remembers all their names, and makes sure to call them by them. They give her special treats not allowed to other patients, extra sugar, ice cubes for her tea, let her do laundry whenever she wants, don’t mind it if she goes into other people’s rooms, heat up her blankets, let her use the phone whenever she wants, and even bring her food from the outside if she happens to say she misses vanilla milkshakes. She’s half fairy-tale, half-survival.

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    Anonymous

    I’m like 3 of these

    Reply