Psych Ward - Blog Posts
two months ago in psych ward
after my last toxic psychosis… never touching that shit again
hey. got involuntarily admitted for 3 weeks. i won't touch much upon the hell i went through but let's just say i am extremely jaded and bitter and angry. i have a severe bruise on my leg from attacking objects, and some more bruises elsewhere. my knees are further fucked from medical neglect. i was threatened with restraint within hours of arriving. nothing feels real and i keep breaking down in tears.
i just got out today. my bestie picked me up, we hung out, it was cathartic. i was going to be put into inpatient rehab, then i realized i didn't want to be locked up and was just being manipulated. then i tried for respite and outpatient, but respite won't have a bed until after thanksgiving. i'm terrified to even go now because i want to keep what control of my life i have left.
so now i'm home. with my abusive family. no one has seemed happy to see me. only my mom visited me, when i asked her to bring something. my psychiatrist at the ward broke HIPPA and told my mom i'm an addict, who then told my aunt, and now my whole family knows. my father included. i have already abused drugs within half an hour of being home.
i don't even have the option of relaxing in my own room, which i had begun turning into a safe haven, because my family turned it into storage. there is virtually no walking room and it is a massive safety hazard to me. they also killed half my roses, and the others are barely alive. they said they'd take care fo them. fuck my life. fuck all of this.
why is everything i touch dying.
My Kins are genuinely getting scary
Please someone do a psycho analysis on me I need to know what this means
Tw: Failed Suicide attempt, Suicidal thoughts, Self harm (hinted), Abuse of Power, Psych Wards, Implied other forms of Abuse, Severe Mental Illness, Forceful Medication (Mentioned)
My time in the mental hospital wasnt fun. Of course no ones reallly is but regardeless. It wasn‘t necessarily the worst, but i have some horror stories. Like when an adult patient came into the childrens ward becuase he was „still in highschool“ and was loudly argued with and then had to be dragged out by the police. Or when i got put in the bad corner for tapping on the wals during quit time and then when i asked for a pen and paper to write down my feelings ,a coping mechanism we had just talked about in group, i was denied and then was left becuase someone else started having a breakdown and asked to be moved to the other mental illness timeout corner so i was less likely to hurt myself ,literally taking initiative and attempting to do the best for my own mental health, and was then called attention seeking for bothering someone when my fellow patient was having a breakdown (the guy who i was asking permission from was just sitting at a desk). What i hated the most was the fact that i wasn’t allowed to say goodbye to anyone because they took me away during quiet time and when i started arguing they threatened to keep me for another week. Sure i have more stories, there was a nine year old who was both suicidal and homicidal, but guess What? She was nice. She had to be put on paper only gowns, lived in the white room, had to be forcefully fed meds, and had been to that specific hospital 5 times alone, and she treated me with more compassion then any of the nurses did. We were friends, i helped her draw, and she confided in me terrible things she had not told anyone about her home-life because i treated her like a human. I never saw her again. The point to this, above all else, is that this system doesn’t work. I felt just as suicidal as I had before but now I was more scared to tell the truth about that because I didn’t want to go back. The people in power have no one to check that they are actually helping and the patients become inmates more often then not. And I know that ill try and commit again, and i hope to god that i‘ll succeed, because i can not go back there again.
TW: self-harm / suicide
I recently experienced my 3rd psychiatric hospitalization in 4 years and my first involuntary one. Well, partially involuntary. I wanna discuss this one for a couple reasons; firstly because it's the first one that's happened since I started this blog and second because it's the first one where I attempted to document my thoughts during my stay.
I started out with a wide-ruled notebook, but was later offered a pocket-sized college ruled one that I vastly preferred, so I copied everything I'd written up to that point including ripping out some of my doodles that were small enough to fit.
It started at noon on July 3rd. I had a scheduled therapy appointment during which I confessed to thoughts of self-harm. My therapist and my caseworker arranged for me to be transported to an emergency room and from there I would be taken to the first open bed they could find in a psychiatric institution. All of this I agreed to voluntarily.
I've censored the location and the doctor's name for privacy reasons. The "crying, slobbering fit" was so severe I was physically incapable of forming intelligible words. Every single time I write the name of a specific drug I spell it incorrectly because I was told the names out loud but not given anything with a label to read.
Some doodles I did post anxiety attack. I think that's the correct term for what happened. I'm still trying to find the appropriate terminology for whatever it is that's wrong with me.
I hope you're all prepared for many more 12 Monkeys references. Also just wanted to share the story of "Book Club Guy." There are several phrases I will never pronounce the same again thanks to him. He was discharged relatively quickly and I miss him every day.
The old man in question was barely capable of even standing and had apparently been in this hospital for close to a year. Incidents like the one described in the second paragraph happened more frequently as my stay went on as that particular patient grew more and more frustrated.
Also "Vitamin H" is a term for haldol that I heard somewhere once and I've been using it ever since.
At this point, my stay had boiled down to taking drugs and then sitting in front of the tv for hours. I felt that if that was all that was neccessary to keep me safe I could easily do that at home. I was told if I kept requesting to go home they would hold me involuntarily and so I pressed the issue really just to prove a point about how a "voluntary" status was bullshit. They essentially told me to put a pin in it and talk to the doctor again when he came back. Talks with the doctor rarely lasted more than a minute or two and I did not feel like waiting all night just to speak with someone for 60 seconds.
When the shift changed and the new nurses arrived I pressed the issue again and that's when they put me under the 96 hour hold. I requested a bible because I was bored and copied down a few verses that I liked. The hospital was a catholic institution so they had plenty of bibles lying around but only with the new testament and psalms. We also had prayers over the intercom every morning and night.
The thing that frustrated me most is that I was given very little time to talk to a professional of any kind. So one of the nurses offered to let me vent to them, which I did.
I was in the grip of another anxiety attack at the time. I was raising my voice, banging my head against the wall, pulling at my hair, etc. Me and the nurse were pacing back and forth down the hallway the whole time. At some point when I reached the end of the hallway, I turned around and a second nurse had arrived with syringe in hand and told me I needed something to calm me down.
We ended up compromising and just giving me a dose of clonazepam and sleeping in the quiet room so they could keep a closer eye on me, but I don't think I'll ever be able to fully trust nurses ever again.
If it wasn't obvious the book my parents had brought for me was Fear And Loathing in Las Vegas.
The last page or so was pretty all over the place. "The Corner Where You Can Hear God" was a corner where you could hear some type of machinery running 24/7 but only if you wedged yourself in with both shoulders against the wall. The patient who first pointed it out was half joking when he said it, but at some point I had taken to crawling into that corner to "pray." It brought some sort of comfort that I couldn't really explain.
Also fuck Wendy's and their stupid fucking ads.
I was released on July 11th at 11:52 am. As I was leaving the patient who had the outburst I wrote about on July 6th was melting down again. He insisted on leaving, and I quote, "TO-FUCKING-DAY!" He must have repeated that phrase at least a dozen times at the very top of his lungs. The image of him with half the nursing staff backed up against a wall, leaning further and further forward with each shout hasn't left my mind.
They insisted I not worry about it as they shoved me out the door.
As I write this now I don't really understand why I felt the need to write all this. I'm still not entirely sure what I've gained (or lost) from this experience.
As a child I was given a diagnosis that technically no longer exists. Our understanding of psychology changes every day. Our mental healthcare system doesn't.
I can't tell you how many times I've been told by a nurse that they just straight up don't know when one thing or another is supposed to happen. Nurses and patients alike are left hopelessly uninformed about decisions that affect the lives of countless people. If my 96 hour hold had ended on a weekend, I would have been forced to stay up to an additional 48 hours because hospitals can't be fucked to discharge people on weekends or holidays.
People who are less coherent than me, less capable of masking than me, less capable of controlling their emotions than me are trapped by the thousands in shoddy institutions run by emotionally disconnected bean counters kept alive by a dying backwater religion that steals billions from us every year.
I don't even know what to do anymore.
"There are no secrets!"
I blurt out at the dinner table. We are at my Great Aunt Linda's, in Somerset, Kentucky, for our annual family holiday get together. My cousin Brenda gives me a look I've never seen before. She looks at me like I'm an absolute lunatic. Like I just cut off the cat's head and am growling maniacally while its corpse drips blood from my jaw.
Only, that wasn't quite the case. In fact, I don't think anything I did or said deserved this kind of reaction. You see, I was 19 years old, and it was the year after my first year of college. My father and I had gotten into a nasty fight, but we hadn't discussed it yet. I said something to him about it in front of the whole family. Bad timing, I guess.
But in my mind, if in heaven or the afterlife, everything would be known -- why lie or try to cover things up in the present?
Welcome to the world of the 1 2 t h H a u s
The watery, elusive ocean. Where the ego, the self, individuality, becomes a mere drop in a vast sea. And the certain, reliable structures and fortitudes of material reality dissolve into a schizoaffective mod-podge of reality.
In astrology, the 12th house represents the end of the karmic zodiac wheel. It starts with Aries and the 1st house, then travels all the way around, till you end up with Pisces & the 12th. It rules over areas of life such as prisons, insane asylums, monestaries, rehabs, psych wards. Who wouldn't want to have their Sun sign there? Or Moon?
As you may be aware, the 12th house doesn't have the greatest of reputations. Planets here are elusive, hidden, not easily accessed. Like a monk, far away on a foggy, hilly terrain. With no cell phone or 2023 MacBook Air. Or a prisoner who lost his mind and is locked away for the rest of their life. Geez. At least something beautiful I heard about prisons and the 12th house, is that spiritually speaking, prisons and institutions are meant to save you from yourself.
Meaning, you can't harm others and create more karma for yourself when you're locked up. In practice though.... Prisons are pretty violent. But I've never been to prison. I have, however, been in and out of the psych ward for much of the beginning of my adult life.
It was mostly because of suicidal depression. Enter nervous breakdown from the immense pressure of being away from home in a small town for my first year of college. Being gay. Working class. It was a mess. What I thought would be an easy four year finish with a high paying job waiting for me, turned into a dead end. Nervous breakdown, bipolar diagnosis, joined a strange new religion (Hi Mormons <3) I took the Spring semester off after a week-long stint in the local psych ward. It would've been shorter, had they believed me about my throat hurting. I had tonsolitis.
Well, in my time away from school, I realized how s p i r i t u a l I was. I wanted to find the meaning of life. The right path. I researched and found that most religions didn't support homosexuality. Which sucked, because I was already out and had a boyfriend in high school. But I was raised by a paranoidly religious father in the Southern Baptist faith, and I had a fear of going to Hell. I also had a lot of toxic masculinity ideals internalized.
Eventually, I join the Mormon Church, but realize even among other church members, I was different. For instance, one afternoon on my porch at my Grandmas in Kentucky, I was praying/meditating -- all of a sudden, I just felt so transcendentally connected to the land. I imagined Native Americans on the hills by my house. It was an odd feeling. Dimensional.
At Church, I could see auras and glowing light emanating from other members, when they went up to the podium to bear their testimony. I found out later there was another kid in church who could see the same golden light. Most people didn't, though.
I would later read that people with Saturn in 9th house individuals are drawn to conservative religions such as Judaism, Catholicism, and Mormonism. I laughed and put the book down after I read that. The LDS Church was so important to me from 18-21. I was devastated when I had to choose being authentic to myself as a gay man over my religion. I really lost meaning and hope and drive, for my life.
The 12th house.
My father also has a twelfth house sun. Isn't that odd?
That we both have Sun in the 12th house. The issue is, I don't want to be like my father. I appreciate him, sure. Of course. But he acts a bit like a man lost at sea on a deserted island. His house a shack he built out of random wood. His best friend a volleyball. Except all of this while he's living in the middle of suburbia. That is the vibe, I fear.
I love him, I do. I also blame all the earth energy in his natal chart. I mean come on, the man quite literally ONLY has earth signs in his chart. Like no other element. What the hell?
So it leaves me to wonder.
How do us 12th house natives navigate the foggy, uncertain waters? How do we stay sane in a material world, when the veil is so thin to the other side? How do we find meaning and reason in a material, hostile world, when the peace and happiness of Heaven is right there, waiting for us?
Really, I must know. I'm almost 30. And I'm afraid I'm missing my moment. I want to be successful, but lately, every well I seem to throw my bucket down, turns out to be dry. I've fallen for the illusions long enough -- the only issue is, I can never tell what illusions I'm falling for until after the fact.
I didn't realize how crazy I was when I was younger when I was acting crazy. It was other peoples reactions, and my many, many, many psych ward visits that I realized I might not be the best suited for this world. It's so mean spirited, individualistic. I don't know how to cope or manage. Maybe this is the doom, the destiny, of my Sun in 12th house.
If I was a 3rd House Sun, I would be a writer or a journalist or a teacher. A 4th house Sun, a stay at home mom or run a daycare. A 9th house Sun, I'd be a professor or a travel agent or a psychaitrist.
What does a 12th house sun become? Shamanistic Healer?
I have no idea how to do that, and I've got bills, honey!