Free Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin by Norah Vincent

straight, and she was only a little over five feet tall. Like Clean, she was diabetic and her belly was similarly localized and protruding, perfectly round and proud like a baby just about due. Also like Clean, she enjoyed her sweets, especially fruity beverages like the blueberry juice shakes that my visitors sometimes brought me and packets of peanut M&M’s, which I learned to request on her behalf.
    Looking back, it’s hard to believe that I was ever afraid of Deborah. She was like some errant WASP homunculus who had tripped sideways out of her good breeding via Great Aunt Eugenia’s bad genes and landed on the street. As it turned out, she had a big soft spot for me, and when the antics fell away, she was perfectly harmless.
    “I just want to follow you around and look at you,” she’d say. “You’re the freshest face I’ve seen.”
    She said she had a room somewhere in the city, but she spent most of her time on the street, in the parks, or sitting on benches feeding the pigeons. Like Mother T, she’d been hauled in by the cops, probably for loitering or disturbing the peace. Like many of the other people on the ward, she’d been to Meriwether several times before, her last visit having been only two months prior to this one. Probably like most of the rest of them, she was on a cycle. She came in here, got meds, meals, and shelter, broke the choke hold of the delusions, left with some prescriptions, hit the street, stopped the meds, lost control, got arrested, landed back here, and did it all over again.
    She usually stopped taking the meds when she was out, for the same reason that everyone else did. The side effects were too bad. The fog, the sluggishness, the tardive dyskinesia—abnormal involuntary, spasmodic movements, especially of the face, lips, and tongue—and the overall shaking parkinsonism that so many of the dopamine-blocking antipsychotic medications induce. Deborah, like Clean and many of the others, was on Haldol, among other drugs, a moldy old neuroleptic first used in the 1950s and developed on the basis of an entirely unproven theory that psychosis is the result of abnormally high levels of dopamine in the brain. There is great debate within the scientific community about the safety and effectiveness of these drugs in reducing hallucinations and controlling delusions. If they work at all, they work because heavily sedating and inducing Parkinson’s in a person is a little like hitting them over the head with a frying pan, medicine practiced Three Stooges’ style. The blow will probably stop the agitation and devivify the psychotic experience, but, as with the antidepressants, not because it’s redressing a chemical imbalance, but because it’s creating one, one that some have argued amounts to brain damage, and is in no way precise, but tends instead to shut down the system wholesale. It’s the theory of person as pinball machine: unplug them and they’ll stop binging.
    It works. But then, lobotomy worked, too.
    And most of the people I met, Deborah included, did stop binging, or at least they stopped binging as loudly and insistently as they had when I first met them, but at the cost of one hell of a hangover. And that’s from only one drug.
    They were all on cocktails of antipsychotics and mood stabilizers: Haldol, Zyprexa, Depakote, lithium, Klonopin, Seroquel, Thorazine, and Risperdal, to name only a few. Depending on the time of day—we were given medication three times a day, at eight, five, and nine—and whether a person had been forcibly medicated or not, the patients were more or less sluggish, retarded, zombified, mush-mouthed, or dead to the world, drooling big lakes of syrup onto their bedsheets, as Sweet Girl did every single night I was there. She used to wake up in the morning—it was more like noon, really, when she could finally pry herself out of her cocoon—and when she lifted her head, there was a long, viscous rope hanging from her mouth to the mattress like