Reading ‘Girl, Interrupted’ in the Psych Ward

https://goo.gl/EfWFbN

By that point, I hadn’t slept in weeks. I’m not a good sleeper to begin with, and then one dose of Cymbalta — which my psychiatrist had prescribed in the hopes that it would help manage not just my moods but my increasingly debilitating joint pain — broke my brain. I stopped sleeping altogether; even an increased dose of my extra-strength prescription sleeping pill couldn’t touch it. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t read. I couldn’t write. My mind moved in rapid circles, the same awful cycles of thought over and over again. My muscles ached from a body that was locked in constant state of fight-or-flight. Day bled into night bled into another day bled into another night bled into yet another day.

I tried breaking my days and nights down into hour-long increments, then into quarter hours. I told myself that if I could survive from 3:15 am to 3:30 am, then I would be all right. But of course after that I always found myself staring down the barrel of another fifteen excruciating minutes.

Then one grey June afternoon I felt like I couldn’t survive even one more minute. I downed a bottle of sleeping pills and some whiskey, wrote a note, and got into bed. A few minutes later I got out of bed, shoved a few things into my backpack, stumbled down to the street and took a cab to the hospital.

I wound up on an involuntary 72-hour hold in the psychiatric ward of downtown hospital. As the nurse sorted through my hastily packed bag to remove anything forbidden — my pen, as it turned out, was a sharp, as were my bobby pins — she didn’t even pause when she pulled out my copy of Girl, Interrupted. Maybe she didn’t bother to read the title. Or, more likely, I wasn’t the first to bring this book in with me.

Kaysen’s account of her years spent in a mental hospital may seem like a strange choice for someone actually facing time in one, but to me it seemed like the most natural thing in the world. If I’d been traveling to Greece I would have brought a Lonely Planet guide or whatever, something that would give me the lay of the land and help me understand the local customs. Since no one has seen fit yet to print a patients’ guidebook to psychiatric wards, Girl, Interrupted — the first chapter of which is titled Toward a Topography of the Parallel Universe — would have to do.