Don't Call Me Crazy
“- Oh, and your discharge date is the 6th of January.”
Doctor Wass blinks at me over a sheet of paper. I mutter something and smile, but it doesn’t reach my eyes. Outside the room, I’m walking fast, there are hot tears on my cheeks. “Slow down”, a nurse shouts from the office. I try to slam my bedroom door, forgetting the anti-slam feature. Even our anger is contained here. It closes with an annoyingly soft puff of air. I want to scream. I think of the hole in our living room wall covered by my parent’s wedding photograph. I punch the wall.
My least favourite nurse is wrapping bandages around my knuckles and arm, talking in her baby voice to me about the consequences of bottling things up. When she’s done, she pats me on the head like a dog, “There we go, all better.”
I’ll admit, my reaction to being told I was being released from the psychiatric hospital where I’d spent the last eleven months wasn’t exactly normal or healthy, but I wouldn’t describe myself as any of those things anyway. I attempted to kill myself so that the date would be pushed back. They moved it to two weeks later.
I feel ashamed about how desperately I’ve tried to cling to my time in the psych ward when everyone told me how happy I should be that I was going home. Saying goodbye to my friends on my last day was the worst heartbreak ever. The other girls on the ward had become my sisters, I watched their faces at the window waving as my dad’s car drove up the drive for the last time. Finally, I’d found people like me and felt the true meaning of friendship. Without each other, we wouldn’t have made it through that time. It’s a bond impossible to let go of.
Where my home life was inconsistent and disruptive, the ward was predictable and safe. I liked people checking in on me constantly, when the nurses silently slipped the blood sugar monitor onto my finger or squeezed it like a sachet of ketchup, I confused it for love. During my first week, a girl called Emma, who was on her third admission, proudly showed me pictures of her at her sickest, people thought I had cancer, she whispered with a wistful look on her face. Her five-year plan was to be back in here. Girls on the ward talked aspirationally about being thin again, like they’d forgotten what it was actually like to be so frail you can’t stand up. Their career path was to become a lifer, the name for patients who stay in the system for life, that we’d learned from watching Girl, interrupted every night. The options for working-class girls in the North were so sparse that, at least, being in the hospital gave us a purpose. The appeal was tempting, I was more popular than I’d ever been in school and had real friends, not like the girls at school who seemed to be continually plotting stuff behind my back, ready to embarrass me.
People diagnosed with anorexia are more likely to have autism. When I look back at the girls on the ward, between us, we had a bingo card of autistic traits, poor eye contact, repetitive behaviours, and refusing to use any other spoon but a teaspoon. These ‘quirks’ were drilled out of us by staff barking commands like ‘take bigger bites, make your food touch, don’t eat the crusts first.’ We obliged through gritted teeth so that our walks wouldn’t get taken off us. I still do these behaviours and would argue they have more to do with my autism than anorexia though it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. We fought against the ward’s rules, protesting we were being treated like prisoners! But given the chance, I don’t think many of us would have left early. We relished being allowed to go mad and took refuge in having a place to hide from the demands and expectations that had landed us in there.
When I bring up my year in the hospital, people want me to change the subject or tell them how traumatic it was, with all the gory details. They don’t want to know that it’s the sanest I’ve ever felt. Now I realise this is a normal autistic reaction to living in a safe environment with rules, structure and no exposure to the outside, neuro-typical world. Re-entering the world after being cocooned from the sharp edges of life (literally, my room was anti-ligature) felt like being a scared, naked baby again. Who was going to look after me out there? The answer had to be me.
Thank you for writing this. I had a very similar experience, when I was in my twenties (also Autistic). More than twenty years later things are undoubtedly better — and I never became a “lifer”, more out patient — but living through that never leaves you. I used to be really bloody angry about that because I wanted to excise those memories but now it’s a chapter that I’m glad I didn’t erase. It was courageous to write this article, and I understand the palatability factor all to well. But good on you for putting this out there. I have a feeling that many more people will also be able to relate and feel relieved at not being alone. Jo
I'm a new subscriber and I am so glad I found your substack. I deal with mental illness on a different scale and I think it's important to understand the depth of where the human mind and body can go. Your description at the end is interesting and it reminds me of when I had my first baby in the hospital. Nurses and doctors took care of us, helped us with this delicate baby. When they released us into the real world, I was so scared. They would let me out there with this baby, on my own! There can be comfort in knowing you're cocooned in a place meant to keep you safe and healthy.