My Week in South Oaks Mental Hospital
It was a relief to sign myself into South Oaks at first, out of my care and into the professionals’. As hard as it was to admit to my parents their ‘thriving’ 18-year-old son was unravelling, hearing voices and held together by a cocktail of substances, I felt I had no choice. With my overnight bag neatly packed, I stepped through those doors as if it were my first day at a new school, believing this could be the place that finally got me.
But I was wrong. While I had imagined supportive group sessions bonding over shared trauma, followed by deep dives on the couch in daily therapy, and analysis where we finally get to the root of our neuroses, and then healing them, I soon learned that those places are for the wealthy in Maui or Malibu, not a state-run facility on suburban Long Island like our insurance covered.
Instead, I met the psychiatrist once when he re-diagnosed me in a 20-minute intake, and therapy was a rambling, chaotic group session of returning neurotics one-upping each other with war stories. Fellow patients quickly ostracized me as the amateur with no police record, hard drug addiction, or violent past: those were the trophies others waved that I came here to avoid.
I came voluntarily.
No court order or family threat. Just terror after seeing what happens when left to my own devices and fully eroded trust in myself, my feelings, and instincts.
I was ready to sign it all over.
This was just 10 weeks after I’d arrived at the dorms for my first semester, and it became clear my behavior was unsustainable. Mumbling to myself in hallways, pulling my hair out during lectures, sleeping 3 hours a night despite swallowing sleeping pills all day:
My roommate ‘anonymously’ reported me to the campus health center, where I entered therapy, struggling to maintain eye contact and navigate how much I could share with this hired stranger.
But that was tame and properly privileged compared to the other patients in the ‘dual diagnosis’ clinic (with a mental illness and addiction), suffering from withdrawals and self-inflicted wounds.
I may have had marijuana, cocaine, and opiates in my system, but I wasn’t an addict. I smoked pot habitually, but I rarely did cocaine, and opiates were whatever; if someone had pills, I stole & swallowed them, whatever.
But now, twice a day I inhaled a paper shot glass of meds, and for the first time in years, I slept through the night. Going unconscious for 8 hours a day, taking new drugs and the rebellious Roseanne helped get me ‘stable’.
Roseanne didn’t care about the rules, regulations, and discrimination of the place. She could be pleasant and polite, but when she wanted something, she spoke up, acted out, or did whatever she needed to. Roseanne gave no fucks as opposed to the never-ending flow of fucks I fretted over.
For her, I pretended to smoke cigarettes so she could have two, but really, it was to be her friend. And get outside. Smoking was just the one sanctioned addiction we could maintain. Staff doled them out, one per regimented break, and we lined up like hungry, helpless children for our ‘ticket’ to the outside courtyard and some privacy away from the fluorescent lights.
Like me, Roseanne was bipolar after being incorrectly diagnosed with unipolar depression.
Like me, she had a season outside herself when her first doctor gave her antidepressants alone, resulting in a major manic upswing where she ignored all responsibilities, fucked people she didn’t like, indiscriminately took drugs, accrued debt, and almost ruined her life.
If I had met her on the outside, she could’ve passed as just another fast-talking, hard-living girl I wanted to hang with but was also intimidated by. Yet since getting stabilized that first time, Roseanne kept returning. Taking her meds long enough to undo the most recent mess and then jumping back off the deep end.
‘The good thing about being here is that your problems go away for a minute. All the temptations, responsibilities, anyone after you for the shit you pulled on a tear can’t get you in here.’ She began her monologue that afternoon. ‘But this place ain’t here to fix you,'
She ashed her cigarette in the air and explained that the establishment and staff have to churn you through their system with enough proof you’ve ‘improved’ in a measurable increment to justify the insurance charge.
“All they know is what happened at your intake, so at your check-in, change your ‘Often’ to ‘Sometimes’ or ‘Not At All’,’ she explained between mentholated drags, “force yourself to make eye contact and smile, or in my case, just don’t be a total bitch”.
We laughed, and I dared to look right at her, imagining her prematurely lined face in makeup, wearing street clothes, her auburn hair done up. I grabbed the cigarette from her fingers and took a drag after never having smoked before this week.
“But I told them I was hearing voices, isn’t that a reason to legally keep me here?”
“Lie to them, Brett. What are you gonna stay here until everything is perfect? Besides, aren’t the voices…getting quieter?”
I looked up at our small patch of sky and decided she was right. The raging, racing activity in my head had slowed down the last few days, focused. It still wasn’t particularly pleasant but it was more linear and less frantic. I just had to get the fuck out of here and move on with my life, get back to school in the city, put this behind me. I had wasted too long just letting this happen and expecting someone else to fix it.
‘Yeah, wow,’ I looked down at the ground, scratching the back of my head ‘I didn’t realize it but you’re right, I do feel a little different.’
‘Meds work dude,’ she crushed her cigarette underfoot, ‘You just gotta keep taking them, but that shit gets boring.’
Roseanne turned to walk back in as we heeded the final call. I picked up her cigarette butts from the floor and dropped them in the coffee can by the door as I re-entered South Oaks for the last time.