my time on a psych ward 2005

found these old photos from my mobile phone, from when I was an a psych ward in 2005. Below describes my time on that ward.

He was wearing three pairs of trousers, and stank of urine. He would pee himself and instead of change out of his soiled trousers, he would put another pair on. He had the strange habit of pouring water over himself. His socks were usually half-way off his feet. The pyjama shirt he wore was always stained. Wherever he walked he left a snail trail of spilled liquid. I did wonder what his life was like leading up to this sad pitiful end to his life. Was he ever happy? I don’t know. And he doesn’t know either. That’s the tragedy of dementia. We were told to shut the door to our rooms so George couldn’t enter and take our belongings. But a closed door was no barrier to George; he came in anyway and took things like toothbrushes and flannels. Not to keep though; they usually ended up on someone else’s bed. I actually developed a soft spot for him, even when he blocked up the toilet with toilet rolls and his pants, or snatched people’s food from their plate.

A nurse came to do the admission paperwork. It was a mundane and bureaucratic exercise interviewing me about the state of my soul. The nurse then showed me around the ward. We started at the nurses’ station. She pointed one way, ‘That’s the smoking room’ and in the opposite direction ‘that’s the TV room.’ ‘There’s no TV in the TV room’ a passing patient informed. There were a few more communal areas and finally the dining area. People were having their dinner when I was shown the area. A stout Irish woman called Eleanor said to me, “Who are you visiting?”

“No, I am here to stay for a while.” She threw open her arms. I felt silly but went up to her to be hugged by her and pressed into her bosom. “It’s heaven here,’ she told me. You’re totally off your rocker, I thought to myself.

I stayed in the dining area as it was nearly time for supper. The next person I met was also called Eleanor. She had the demeanour of a nervy school teacher, pixy looking with mousey hair. She told me she was God. It was good to see a woman who thought she was God, that women were having a better class of delusion.

She was into channelling everyone and absorbing the guilt of the universe. She was as middle class as hell, making her stick out. She told me over my food that I was kidnapped by the king of Nepal. She was too jittery for my liking and I stayed out of her way. I did give her some of my washing liquid so she could wash her clothes. I was obviously the wrong thing to do because she then suddenly turned on me, saying I was in the centre point for all the contamination of evil in the universe. I felt like it so agreed with her.

We all had our own rooms, which I was thankful for. On the aquamarine door to my room was a name plate, with hundreds of rubbed out names of people who have moved on, and some of those people rubbed out permanently because the pain was too much. Behind my newly scrawled name were names that couldn’t be rubbed out, like: PROF, Frank, MIX92 FLY, LiLi, and Jesus…

The loudest person on the ward was a middle aged Greek woman. She was a figure of fun for the staff to tease, an annoyance to other patients, and a burden to her family. This is what madness has done to her, seemingly the thing that made her who she was had gone. That there was just no person behind that ravaged face was the accepted notion about her. But as I waited behind her as she clumsily made two cups of tea, her soul shone through her eyes just for a split second: she was still very much alive and still very much special. She handed the teas to the nurses who couldn’t go home because of the London bomb blasts.

The next day she was back to her tortured routine and she pulled the hair of one of the nurses, screaming, “You thieving bitch, give me back my trousers, you thieving bitch!” For all the time I was on the ward, she continued to protest about her stolen clothes. I never did get down to the bottom of the mystery of where her clothes went, whether the staff or patients did actually steal it, or whether she never had them at all.

The days went by, some days had less screams than others. The only unusual day on the ward during my stay was when there was the constant wail of sirens, more than usual. St Thomas is a general hospital too. Then I got a text from my mum, saying there had been bomb blasts in London, on the tube and on a bus. Later I found out suicide bombers had detonated devices. Shit. It made me aware how detached us guys were from the outside world. We didn’t seem so mad now. The detachment was ensured by the fact we had no TV in the TV room, and nurses who kept to the age old tradition alive of who could talk least to their patients.

TV ROOM WITHOUT THE TV

Do you know I’m here? Inside a saint.

stuck in a room on a psych ward that overlooks the Thames

jigsaw pieces of the Houses of Parliament show

in the missing pieces that are the old trees

swaying

The windows are open

only a few inches mind

so we can’t jump out of our pain

so we have to endure the TV room without the TV

so no-one hears our screams, our rants, tears,

our inappropriate laughter at a world terrorising itself

so no-one can see our journeys on a 1000 miles of corridors

or our skin being torn in protest of a life it has to

cage and enclose.

Do you hear us? Or don’t we exist?

We don’t exist, I think,

because those here before me have scrawled

on the sills: ‘SAVE US’ and nobody has

The trees outside have camouflaged us lost people well.

I have yet to be an inpatient on a psychiatric ward where the all the nurses did their jobs. This is what some MH nurses think their job is: Sitting slumped in a chair, looking at their nails; a patient tries to speak to them, they go deaf or release a bored sigh. Or if you are really super qualified, mimic someone’s distressed shouting or screaming back at them. An arsehole called Wilbert did this when the Greek woman in question shared a table with me for lunch. She was no longer shouting, but was in fact subdued and depressed. ‘Maw Wah Wha’ he threw at her. “Please don’t do that,” she murmured, her head bowed.

But there were amazing nurses too. One called Iman, who did the night shift, she would talk with me at night, assured me. Knowing she was on the night shift, I felt protected and cared for.

Time on a psych ward is either total tragedy or total comedy - there is no in-between. Except the soul-destroying boredom. There was some exercise on offer, nothing special. I don’t think our psychiatric patient exercise program will top the video charts. It was held in the dining room by Byron, a smiling Rastafarian. He brought Reggae to exercise to. I caught snatches of lyrics, such as: ‘Please let me go… How do I get out of here…’ The routine consisted of very basic steps, but could I get it right? Drowsy from medication and wearing my jeans without a belt because they confiscated it when I was admitted, I was all over the place. And my jeans kept falling down. One step forward, one step back was just too complicated for me, and I decided I would not come to the next session.