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Notes on Sadness, Death, and Depression
I know the seasonal sadness is kicking in because everything feels like a chore.
I have a ticket for NY Comic Con Thursday and I don’t really want to go. I had plans for a Mako Mori cosplay, but I don’t think I can afford to get my hair relaxed at the moment.
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It’ll probably cost around $100 in this city. I’m having trouble justifying dropping that amount on credit for hair, but I also already have my ticket and already have most of the outfit.
Decision-making is hard.
My ex said he like me because of my “emotional nakedness.” He was ER doctor. He wasn’t into unnecessary suffering, so he would often talk families into pulling the plug on their demented, elderly who were dying and in pain. He’d come home after his 14-hour long residency shifts, and he’d be too tired for sex so we’d spoon on his couch while he talked about who he “killed” that day. I loved him a lot, but it didn’t work out because he wanted to have babies.
I turn 25 in a month, and I’m thinking about going up to Ithaca for my birthday. I had my best birthday up there when I was 21. I want to relive the upstate experience, which mostly involves being drunk and communing with nature.
I had the SAT scores and leadership cred to get into Cornell, but I didn’t apply. Instead I went to Cornell’s bastard sister school, Wells, because I wanted to surround myself with people I was better than. It was a decent strategy until I got horribly depressed and failed a literature final and then dropped out.
I applied to CUNY after that, for the very flippant reason I was dating a guy in NYC, but then Wells withheld my transcript because they mistakenly believed I owed them money. That eventually got worked out, and now I live in NYC, but I still haven’t gone back to school.
I miss driving, but I do not miss car insurance premiums.
I was once involuntarily hospitalized for marking a “5” on a 1-5 survey in a medical study. The question was something like, “How often to do you think about death?” I tried to explain to the doctors that mostly I got lazy towards the end of the survey and there were legitimate philosophical reasons for thinking about death, and they wrote down in the report that I was “being defensive.” I shut up when I realized things were going poorly and then they said I was, “guarded and evasive” and being “purposefully vague.” I lived a lifetime of Kafka novels that week.
While I was there, one of the many horrible things that happened was when they strapped a schizophrenic, Korean girl named Jacqueline down, just for calling a nurse a “bitch.” They kicked me out of my room so they restrain her to my bed. The entire time she kept screaming for Eddie; she had a tattoo of his name on her ankle surrounded by roses. It’s kinda sad and romantic—being in love with a made-up person.
American society is supposed to be civilized but we are still really barbarians.
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The Psychiatric Ward and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev
Or: An Oddly Personal Reaction to the News.
I was once in a psychiatric hospital against my will. And yes, they can get just as terrible as mainstream media can make them seem. I don’t keep my mental health problems a secret. Or my involuntary commitment a secret; it’s not an experience I care to repress or forget. At the same time, I’ve never publicly blogged about it before it now.
It happened 16 months ago, and although it’s left an indelible mark on my psyche, I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to get the experience out in a single entry. “The Psych Ward Story” is a complicated story and when asked why it happened I usually sigh and say, “an unfortunate series of events.”
There were lots of traumatic aspects of the ordeal in addition to the obvious confinement: Being denied birth control by the Catholic hospital. Being transferred to another hospital in a poorer area with an under-trained and under-educated staff. Being prescribed psychotropic drugs that I knew from extensive experience were not going to help or agree with me. Being misdiagnosed.* Being falsely accused of being danger to myself.
But the incident that I would ping in my head as “the most wrong” in the week-long experience was when my doctor refused to give me access to my court paperwork and refused to give me the identity or phone number of the public defender. (There were also a nurse and a counselor present at my first and only meeting with the psychiatrist. They were silent.)
It was as simple and as curt as a “No.” My basic rights, probably as citizen and most definitely as a patient, were flagrantly violated.
I never did pursue a civil lawsuit. Besides legal fees and the desire to not re-live the experience, it was disheartening but unsurprising to learn that my requests to pursue my legal options to formally contest the confinement were never documented. My hopeless crying at the psychiatrist’s dismissal of me was ironically* recorded by the doctor in the progress notes as, “Patient thinks [referring to self in third person] does not care.”
These days I get emotional when reading about anything remotely related to civil rights violations, specifically unjust treatment during confinement. Some days I’m afraid I’m becoming a libertarian. I don’t know enough about trauma to talk about it on a medical level, but I do know that I never used to start crying when reading about the disgrace that is Guantanamo. And I have no doubt that had the psych ward incident not have happened, I would not avoid listening to the Bradley Manning tapes out of fear of having a panic attack.
So today when I read that the Boston Marathon bombing suspect was not Mirandized, my immediate thoughts were, “That’s terrible!” and then “I bet Glenn Greenwald is going to go off about this.”
Greenwald already did:
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I cried a lot at that editorial. Not that I want to hyperbolize my experience by comparing it to individuals of national interest or make a plea on behalf of all those that have undergone civil or criminal commitment. I just wanted to make note of the highly personal ways individuals can react to current events based on their own experiences.
Today, in a weird way, I find myself having empathy for a terrorist. Or, to be fully politically correct, an alleged terrorist. I too have made had my fundamental rights abrogated in the name of “safety.” And as an American and an idealist, it makes me very sad.
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*My only long-standing diagnosis is Major Depressive Disorder. The same inpatient psychiatrist who shit on my Due Process later carelessly listed the “Final Diagnosis” on my discharge report as “Schizophrenia.”