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

a snot umbilical.
    I suppose if you looked at and dealt with people doing this kind of repulsive crap all day, you’d be hard-pressed to see them as fully human, too. That’s how it must have seemed to the staff, and that on top of the exasperation of having to shove someone like Sweet Girl into the shower because she smelled bad enough to make your eyes water. It wasn’t likely to engender respect. And even though I felt defensive of my fellow patients, sometimes I could really see the other point of view.
    I’d look at Clean, for example, in all his foul, pestering regression, and catch myself thinking, “You should be put through a meat grinder and fed to cats and dogs.” I’m not proud of that, but I thought it. I thought it vehemently and with relish and with the most visceral disgust and hatred I have ever felt for another human being. Because as much as Clean could inspire the profoundest pity in me, his childish, relentless, mindless life force made me loathe him. Watching him eat, listening to the slurping, slapping noises he made as he sucked the anemic meat and drippy fat of a deep-fried chicken wing off the bone, I wanted to make elaborate and creative use of my ballpoint pen in all the forbidden, murderous ways that the staff had ever seen or imagined.
    I wasn’t on Haldol or any of the other doozies my ward mates were ingesting three times a day, so I enjoyed a comparatively stunning range of motion and mental agility. I had not been reduced to repellency. Yet. Or was I deluded? When you spend your days with society’s rejects, the indigent insane, who are by turns caught in the chloroform embrace of modern medicine, chemically infantilized, swathed in institutionalized helplessness, then coughed out the bottom of the system stoned and spiritless to languish on the street until the next arrest, you begin to wonder about your perspective on what’s acceptable. These people are not acceptable as is. They are made mildly more acceptable when tranquilized or debilitated, or they are made less of a nuisance anyway, which is most of the point. Like kids on Ritalin, we medicate them mostly to make life easier for us, not them, to make them easier to handle, and the sight of them less guilt- or revulsion-inducing.

Casey came on to the ward on my third day, reeling in disbelief. She might as well have been wearing a sign that said, “I don’t belong here.” She was in shock, trying to figure out how she had gone from breaking down in tears in her therapist’s office to being committed to a public ward with a bunch of homeless psychotics. I remembered the feeling well. I’d felt the same way that first time I’d found myself in the bin.
    Her story was very similar to mine. She’d gotten depressed, said something vague about suicide, and had unwittingly set the whole confinement system in motion. Only instead of committing herself under advisement, as I had done, her doctor frog-marched her down to Meriwether personally and checked in via emergency.
    She’d spent her first night in the same hole as I’d spent mine. Same inflight foldout chair. Same loud staff at the picnic table all night. She even confirmed that one of the night orderlies had once again taken a three-hour nap in one of the empty beds.
    The next day she’d been shuffled up to the twentieth floor with the rest of us and gotten dumped in a room with Deborah, who made her usual memorable first impression.
    “How’d you like me to break your neck for you?” she said, and Casey put her face under her pillow and cried.
    I couldn’t help smiling at this. Not outwardly, of course, when Casey told me—as she told me all the rest of it, while standing in my room with her arms crossed—but inwardly, to myself, knowing that Deborah was just giving Casey a little comedown from her superiority complex. Casey had this air about her, not just of someone who didn’t belong in Meriwether because she wasn’t sufficiently crazy, but of someone who