Meth Memoirs

Reflecting back on my most recent stay at the psych ward, I am shocked at how often I find myself feeling a sense of longing. It was a co-Ed unit, and there were thirty-two people in the unit with me at the time, which was max capacity. The common area for the patients was about the size of a middle class home's living room.

My first few days weren’t very noteworthy. I was detoxing off alcohol and heroin and largely staying to myself. But as my stay dragged on, I noticed something about myself that I identified in other patients who had been there for more than a few days. I felt a loss of inhibition; I felt extremely free.

When you’re in a space like that with so many people, the likes of which end up in psych wards, you quickly start to feel on edge. There’s a constant underlying agitation and a feeling of powerlessness. Then a transformation takes place. You realize that were you at some brunch or other “civil” setting, you would have to contain your emotions, temper them for the sake of your mask.

The psych ward is the final frontier, the Wild West. It is one of the last places where somebody will attack you for looking at them wrong or for phrasing something in such a way that triggers their psychosis. And I adapted.

I was talking to one of my friends I made there, and he made a comment about putting a cigarette out in someone’s anus; people are very vulgar in these environments. A psychotic dude who had become known for screaming on the phone at his mom, who he accused of putting a bomb in his guitar, decided to comment on my friend's cigarette remark.

He said “Yeah, dude, you burnt a hole in my pants” to which my friend and I were confused by. I replied that he had done that himself. He responded loudly shouting, “You don’t fucking know me!”. Mind you, this was at six AM. I yelled back “Don’t ever fucking yell at me. I will fucking kill right here.” I knew he would not do anything. His balls would fall off anytime he was not yelling at his mom over the phone.

So, I felt free to express how I really felt at any moment without layering on any politeness. When this older lady P*****, would mumble to herself about “greasers” or N-words, rock and roll, and her career as a pornstar in her youth, I would tell her to shut the fuck up. She would frequently become hysterical and move beyond mumbling to outright screaming out loud a stream of consciousness characterized by racism, vitriol towards the staff, and stories from her glory days in the 80s. Me and the other more lucid members of the patients would all proceed to tell her to shut up.

That’s how it was. People outright stating they hated each other and calling one another crazy for their respective delusions. I did not witness what was said beforehand, but I witnessed two of the biggest guys there charging at one another while the orderlies held them back. There was the country boy who was silent while trying to push through the orderlies and the opposition, a man from Gulfton Houston with arms the size of most adult men’s quads. As they pulled each other away to be put into their respective time out rooms, the Houstonite repeatedly yelled “I’ll kill you” at the redneck.

The Houstonite agreed to take a pill to sedate him and subdue the desire for violence that burned within him. The nurses prepared a shot for the country boy while he paced around in a room within a long horizontal window which all of the rest of us patients looked at him through. The Houstonite took his pill, and they released him from whatever room they had him locked in to take him to his bunk. As they walked him to his room, the country boy, who had been placed in a group room with multiple doors, managed to open the one door that was always locked. They instantly began exchanging blows. They did not pause or exchange any words. The country boy got pushed back through the door he came through and the staff continued to escort the houstonite back to his room.

This was one fight of many, and there was always some commotion to breathe a little excitement into the otherwise monotonous character of hospital stays. Every night, this guy, who my first introduction to was when he shared a picture of a bloody figure of Jesus on a crucifix stating it represented his desire for eternal pain for the world and his own internal pain, would scream his lungs out every time we were told it was time for bed. I could not make out what he was saying but figured it was thematically similar to his outburst during the day. When a woman patient notified him that a frisbee he randomly threw almost hit someone, he screamed back at her, “So it’s fair for me to be tortured by satanic sex traffickers, huh, I deserve to be tortured and suffer eternal pain from demonic sex traffickers.” Or something like that.

I, and those who were there during my stay, mostly deteriorated with each passing day. I became crude and confrontational. It was one of the few freedoms awarded to people in these places. Others, became more manic, delusional, and combative. A girl who was at first almost entirely lucid during my first few days there began pacing in circles around the nurses bay talking out loud to herself. She could talk for hours, finding some string to connect topics that nonetheless were incomprehensible. A boy told me about how a girl whom he had become infatuated with was sending him subliminal messages through her instagram stories to confirm that she was receiving his telepathic messages. His messages were regarding solving a “murder mystery”. The mystery involved his paramour’s friend who killed herself. Despite not knowing the dead girl personally, he thought he could hear her telepathically reaching out to him. He believed this on the first day I met him and on the last day I saw him.

I admit I’m ashamed that I long for the sort of freedom I thought I had found during my stay. The freedom to be cruel. Everyone there was harboring deep feelings of anger, grief, and impotence. We took that out on each other. We were 32 who had been cramped into a space the size of a pool house. We were all just maniacs intruding on one another’s need for privacy, for silence.

However, I realized it was not my ability to be crude and express my anger that I missed. It was honesty. Cruelty is an American cultural tradition. However, it is always veiled. The genocide of indigenous tribes in the American southwest was ordained by God himself. However, this was not cruelty ,because Americans were chosen to spread democratic self government and our morally superior American way of life. Slavery was thought of as a paternalistic relationship , with the white slave-owners serving as mentors to prevent African slaves from devolving to barbarism. The same argument followed from imperialism.

Even at the casual level, your average individual possesses an immense amount of cruelty, while possessing the rhetoric to not seem as so. I have heard business majors say, “ I hate seeing all these homeless people on the streets. They’re crazy. They need to get rid of them.” and then “It’s a shame they got addicted to drugs and ended up like that.” This faux empathy is still an indictment of the homeless population, the fault is still on the people who use drugs to tolerate a life on the streets. Their insanity is from their own lack of mental fortitude.

In the psych ward, I was immediately intrigued by the brashness of one patient saying to another “shut your crazy ass up, we're trying to watch a movie.” I was drawn to this raw honesty but recognized the tragedy of it. Us undesirables, outcasts, had adopted the same attitude towards one another that the privileged classes held. Perhaps, we had grown tired of being ceaselessly condemned. Perhaps, we knew we had no power to be at the top of society, but we could at least forced the person next to us beneath us.