Dr. Strong

About a week and a half after my first admission to a psychiatric hospital I was informed that I would not be going home for my thirteenth birthday despite having been lead to believe that I would be released by then. Needless to say, I became upset. I yelled at the staff members and was crying. I was told to calm down and escorted into the time out room.

The "time out" room was a room with padded walls. There was just a small window in the door so that staff could keep an eye on me. I was hysterically crying and pacing the floor. I would occasionally see a staff member peek through the window at me. I just couldn't understand why I wasn't being allowed to go home. I had done what they had asked, tried to follow their rules, and when I had been admitted I had been told that I would probably be home in time for my birthday.

I started to feel like the staff members walking by were making fun of me. At first I would shout at them that I wanted to go home but started to feel embarassed by my display. I was angry and punched the padded walls in frustration. In my inexperience I thought that was acceptable and even expected. The walls seemed almost designed for the purpose. I had even had psychiatrists suggest punching a pillow to relieve my anger and the walls seemed like a fine substitute to me. When one of the staff members spotted me punching the walls I found out that I was mistaken.

The staff member that came in to talk to me was one that I had never liked. He seemed arrogant to me, and he almost seemed to smile when he told you what to do. In all fairness, I don't know for sure if he was creepy, but I certainly felt that way. I always felt like he was secretly laughing when I cried.

He told me that I had to calm down or they would be forced to restrain me. I called him names and told him to leave me alone. I screamed orders for him to get out, but of course that didn't work. Another staff member joined him and they began to restrain me.

On the surface of it restraint sounds like such a passive response to a situation. I felt like I was under attack. I hadn't hit anyone, or threatened anyone, or hurt myself. I was only ranting and crying and chances are if they hadn't decided to physically restrain me that it would have ended like any other adolescent temper tantrum with me getting exhausted and falling asleep. Instead, I had two grown men pulling me to the floor and calling for back up because I resisted.

I honestly can't figure out how they expected me to react to being physically attacked. A million ways that they could have stopped the situation from escalating but because they didn't like how I was talking to them they decided to restrain me.

I heard the call over the intercom for "Dr. Strong" (the code for extra help in a restraint) and I knew that meant that there would be staff from every unit in the facility responding. I had heard horror stories about "Dr. Strong" restraints and I couldn't control my terror. The harder they held me the harder I fought. Staff members began crowding into the time out room, a veritable standing room only crowd. By that point I was beyond reasoning and all I could see were adults all around me and not one of them was responding to me with anything I would recognize as compassion. I was face down on the floor with my arms and legs being held down. At one point there was a knee in my back but when I started to complain that I couldn't breathe the knee generously moved away.

It was at this point that a nurse walked into the room holding a plastic cup with what looked like juice in it. She called my name to get my attention and I managed to lift my head up high enough to look up at her. She told me to drink what she was holding. I couldn't believe that she was serious. I was face down on the floor kicking and fighting and she wanted me to take a drink? How would I even have managed to drink it from that position if I had wanted to? I yelled my refusal at her.

Her response to me was "Fine, then I'll go get the needle". Before she had even turned around to leave the room I started begging her to drink it. "No, it's too late. You made your choice." I hadn't known that it was a choice. I hadn't been told that I had a chance to drink or get stuck with a needle. I hadn't even been told why she had wanted me to drink it. She still had the cup in her hand when I realized that the other option was the needle; and yet she refused to give it to me.

I can't even describe how desperately I started crying and begging for the cup to drink. When the nurse came back in the room she continued to ignore my pleas and refused to even answer me. Her only words were instructions to the staff that were restraining me, to pull down my pants. God, the moment I realized that my pants were going to be pulled down to expose my naked backside in a room full of hostile people, I think something inside of me broke. When I managed to twist my head around enough to catch a glimpse of the smug creepy guy being one of the ones helping to get my pants down, all hope left me, and only instinctual primal fear remained.

I no longer felt like there was a chance that they would see how unfair this was. I no longer felt like there was a misunderstanding or wondered how they could do this. The only explaination seemed to be that they were monsters and there was no hope of my being saved. Even now, twenty years later, it is difficult for me to see their actions that day with any sort of objectivity.

Whatever drug they injected me with did not have the effect they intended. I fought harder than ever, only my screams no longer formed words. I remember being put into the "full restraint safety coat" (their term, the patients called them "body bags"). It is like a sleeping bag with your feet left exposed and with metal bars running the length of it. It seemed as if every time that I thought it couldn't get worse, it did. The feeling of utter helplessness overwhelmed me to the point that I didn't feel as if I was connected to anything around me anymore. There was no way that I could have imagined something like this happening and even knowing what I know now, it's still hard for me to believe.

That day I learned that I was alone. I learned that safety was a relative expression, and I knew that no one would ever understand what it was like unless they had been through it themselves. My most important lesson however was that I had no control. I learned that as a child, and as a psychiatric patient that I didn't have the right to refuse anything. If someone tells you to drink then you should drink, or face the consequences. I learned that it didn't matter how wrong it was, they were the ones with the power, and fighting it only made things worse.

You would think that this would have taught me to toe the line since I knew what would happen if I didn't. Instead it almost filled me with a sense of the inevitable, as if it didn't matter what I did, I was going to lose, so I might as well go down fighting. If I slipped and talked back to an adult, I could almost see the nurse walking away with the juice cup...my decision to be defiant too late to take back.

About eight years ago, and about twelve years after my stay at that particular facility, an eleven year old boy died there. He was being held face down, just as I had been. He had been restrained because he talked back to a staff member after he had already been put into the padded room. I felt lucky that I hadn't been killed myself; but what I didn't feel at the news, was surprise.