Three Weeks at the Mental Health Ward

*All names have been changed in order to protect vulnerable populations.*

Things were going really well with our son…and then, they weren’t.

He’s eighteen years old and on the Autism Spectrum, with OCD, fairly severe ADHD, anxiety and a general difficulty with emotional control that’s typical for many people with autism. Life with him cannot be a smooth ride, but, like I said, we thought it was going ok.

One night, at 2am to be precise, our son just couldn’t get over a routine he had made that wasn’t working out for him the way he had expected. Before he could be calmed down, he smashed multiple holes in our walls. We thought we could help him pull himself together, as we had done in the past. But, his breakdown continued. By day #3, there were 17 smashed walls and five cabinet and closet doors ripped off their hinges. At this time, there was nothing left to do but get the police involved. Our son is over six feet tall and, besides the fact that our house was in shambles, my husband and I were afraid to sleep.

It was the saddest thing to see the police take our son to the emergency room in a cop car. Once there, our son freaked out again and had to be restrained by three security guards and placed in a padded room, until a room at the mental health ward became available. My husband cried.

We didn’t know how long our son would stay at the mental health ward.

The first goal was to adjust his medications in a safe environment in order to better control his anxiety as well as lower the OCD. The second goal was for him to understand that freedom comes with a responsibility to be safe and keep those around you safe. Therefore, his number one priority, above all routines and quirks, had to become distinguishing anxiety from anger, and expressing anger without physical violence. EVERY TIME.

I had never been inside a locked mental health ward before. I didn’t have time to worry about what it would be like though. Our son was there, and so, we had to be there as needed. My husband and I got into a routine. I spent 9am-noon at the ward. Then I ran to work and our son spent the day alone. In the evening, my husband and I would go in from 6-8pm and have dinner with our son. Schedules are important for autistic people, so even if he didn’t want to hang out with us the entire time during those hours, he was calmer knowing that this is when we would be there.

The first couple of days, we did, in fact, spend little time with him. Our son was a loopy zombie with the amount of anti-anxiety meds he was receiving and the majority of the time he was passing out. So, I, or me and my husband, would sit in the common room and that’s how we started to get to know the other inhabitants of the facility.

Sophia was the first to introduce herself to me. She was a beautiful, 18-year-old, who, like our son, had Autism and was in fact admitted the same night, for the same reason. She gave me a picture she had colored and asked me to give it to our son. She said he looked sad and she wanted to make him happy again. Sophia had a hard time with eye contact so she stared out the window at the snow covered river below as she talked to me.

“It’s beautiful,” she said, “I want to go home, but sometimes I’m happy that I’m here, because I don’t hear people shooting at night here.”

Sophia had stress induced seizures. When she was placed under high duress, she would have a seizure. When she lost control of herself, she would then also black out and have no recollection afterwards of what she had done. Being autistic, Sophia also told me everything about her life, filter free.

“When I was younger, my mom was in bad shape and her boyfriend had to restrain her. When he restrained her, my mom always told me to hide. Then I would hide and call 911 if my mom wasn’t conscious anymore. Then, in the mornings, it was the most wonderful time with my mom, because she would play music and we would sing and she would tell me everything is alright while we tried to clean up everything her boyfriend broke. But then, he would come back and break everything again, until social services took me away.”

I despised Sophia’s mother. Then I met her.

She had cleaned herself up, gone back to school, gotten a career and gotten her daughter back. One day she broke down crying in the hallway, after leaving the mental health ward. She was wailing in heart wrenching sobs, her husband supporting her so she wouldn’t fall down (she had married a healthy, kind man). I loved Sophia at this point – a fragile soul who would sing Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah in the voice of an angel in the common room, to make the other patients happy. It was hard for me to not hate anyone who could put Sophia in harmful situations, but looking at her mother, I could only imagine what she had to come from, and then come out of, to get to where she was. And, my heart broke for her mother, who knew that no matter how hard she tried now, she couldn’t take the past away from her daughter.

As our son calmed and his meds were lowered, we began to go on walks with him around the premises, talking about his feelings, thoughts and progress. We also encouraged him to say hello to other people and participate in activities with them. Sophia was the first person he spoke to and hearing their similarities made him feel that maybe he could learn from the people here. So, we started to get to know some others.

There was John, the ex-meth addict. John would never recover, because his brain no longer had the capacity to. One moment he was lucid and then, he would randomly run screaming into a wall. John was an advertisement for a drug-free life.

Then there was Mike. Mike was 26-years-old and looked like the high school cool guy. You know, the one who knew where the parties were, tripped the chubby kid and made up cruel names for the weird kid. I didn’t like Mike. He would snort when the other patients were doing puzzles and laugh when he saw them do chair yoga.

Lisa wouldn’t talk to us. I thought she was also a meth addict because of her freakishly skeletal weight and the fact that she wouldn’t stop speed walking the premises.

Jiya was the only patient that terrified me. She carried around a huge bible and prayed up and down the hallways. She would get louder and louder, screaming novenas with her eyes bulging out more and more with each verse, until the staff would make her stop because the other patients couldn’t take it anymore. She reminded me of tales of exorcisms and people in the middle ages killing someone because they thought the devil had possessed them. I couldn’t decide if Jiya would have been the possessed one, or the one to kill those she believed to be possessed. Either way, we would veer away quickly whenever I heard her shrieking prayers in a mix of Hindi and English.

And then there was Dion. She was admitted a couple days after our son. She walked into the premises waving to everyone with a beaming smile, as if her 24-year-old self was entering a five-star resort. Her husband led her to the nurses’ station where she excitedly asked for a tour. I wondered if she was someone I should be scared of, as she ran up to me, exclaiming at how gorgeous I looked. Her wide smile seemed like something taken out of a cartoon and stuck on a person.

I absolutely loved Paul, one of the personnel that would always take the time to speak with the patients, asking questions and making everyone feel somehow cared about. Dion seemed to calm down and smile more like a regular person as the days passed, and she particularly liked to share her thoughts with him. The two of them would always welcome my son at their table and listen to his autistic monologues about weather patterns over the decades.

One day, Paul was walking around agitated and I asked him what was up.

“I get released today,” he responded and I was shocked. Paul wasn’t staff. He was a patient. I covered my shock by asking whether he was anxious about life on the outside.

“What if I fu#@ up again? You don’t know what schizophrenia does to you when you stop your meds. I thought I could. Now I don’t even know if I have a wife to return to.”

“It’s the same with bi-polar” Dion added. “You think you can stop the meds when things are going well. But really, you’re just so tired of having to be a person who is on meds their whole life. You just want to be normal. You want to prove that you can…”

The two of them hugged.

I don’t know what Paul did to get him admitted when he stopped his meds. But, I do know that he was one of the kindest people I have ever met and I wanted to do more. Help him more.

I asked my son the next day if he was sad that Paul had left.

“Yes. But that’s ok. Mike talks to me lots.”

I was beyond surprised. Shitty-attitude Mike?

“He tells me about why he’s here and he says I’m lucky and smart and I’ll do great when I get out. And he always asks me about the weather.”

I couldn’t help myself. I asked what Mike told my son about his reasons for being at the mental health facility.

“He tried to hang himself off of a bridge. It’s the second time he tried to kill himself. No one has visited him since we came, you know.”

Our son was released after three weeks. His medications are better balanced and he’s working really hard and taking behavioral therapy much more seriously. We hope for the best for him.

The day after we took our son home, we returned to the hospital and asked for Mike. I have him an early Christmas present: a sweater. He said he would wear it on the day he was released because it was the only piece of clothing that was his. I never knew that everything he had was from a donation box that the nurses scrounged up for him. My husband and I gave him hugs. He cried.

I then saw Jiya, wandering around with her bible. I looked directly at her and told her that she looked pretty. She looked shocked. Then she smiled. I found out that her family, unable to understand her mental illness told her that she should pray. She grew to believe that she must be possessed by evil spirits and was terrified to stop praying.

The skinny girl that I thought was a meth addict had severe anorexia, most likely brought on by past abuse that she had not emotionally overcome. Controlling food was her way of feeling in control of her own life and fate.

As weird as it felt, I miss the mental health facility. We all screw up. Some of us more than others. But, everyone I met in there had a good soul. It may have been a sad experience for some. But for me, to see this much beauty in such an unexpected place opened my heart and filled me with gratitude and love. I thought about it for many nights. And I decided to become a registered psychologist. Even if I can’t give everyone everything that they are missing and yet deserving of, I can try. I want to try. It’s the point of life, isn’t it?