The room is in the building at College and Spadina. The room doesn’t have any windows, but it does have a clock, so you can know what time of day it is. What you can’t know is when you will be let out (but to be fair, involuntarily hospitalization can be a maximum of 72 hours). There are armchairs along the perimeter of the area and in the middle. There are about six of us at the moment. Some will be released soon and new ones will arrive. None of us want to be waiting here, twisting on the pale green chairs. Also most don’t agree that they should be here. A young black woman is banging on the locked door of the staff room, a nurse comes out. The woman is nearly dressed with a designer purse and fur boots. She starts pacing back and forth. “If I knew what this place is like, – she yells at the nurse, – I would have never come here. Look at me, I don’t need to be here. I don’t cut myself and shit.” The nurse talks to her calmly, she tells her what she tells everyone – you have to wait to speak with the psychiatrist. The woman continues to yell that she is not like the rest of us. She complained to her family doctor about stress at work and the doctor referred her to this address, told her that she could get a note for stress leave. She just wants a note, she assures that she doesn’t cut herself.
As of that is what we all do. If only it was that simple – you either cut yourself and are insane, or you don’t, and are not. I’ve never cut myself and yet I voluntarily checked myself into the CAMH ER. I also didn’t think that I needed to be in there, but there was no other way. I wanted to be set free from my inflamed brain, from the malfunctioning neuronal synapses. I wanted to be free to get lost in writings of other people’s ideas, to play Bach’s Gavotte, to be attracted and be attractive. I wanted to be released from the dark well inside my own mind. I wanted to suppress the hell, to get the intravenous immunoglobulin treatment. But how to convince them, how to make them understand that is what I needed?
After sometime the black woman was released. I was still waiting. There was renewed yelling, coming from a different patient. Similar to the woman who just left, she was yelling at the nurse that she didn’t need to be here. She was also getting extremely agitated, I think if she had something to throw, she would. The whole room now was aware that she was old enough to have ten children and that she didn’t want this visit on her record. Her sister couldn’t take care of her own kids and who would then be doing it if not her? But with a CAMH visit on the papers, maybe she wouldn’t be allowed to take the children in. The nurse tried to explain that visiting CAMH was not same as police record, but the woman already went into rage, reasoning does not work at that point.
So why do we all scream in fear – I shouldn’t be here, I am not like the rest of them? We must have evolved to have this fear of being declared insane. Insane means being banned from the tribe, starving alone in the savannah. It’s hard to let go of that basic fear of being abandoned by our tribe. Even in the isolated room at CAMH, where only the doctors and about five other strangers could hear you, we still don’t want to admit that something could be wrong. We could admit cancer, meningitis, infertility, but not that we are not mentally well. Most diseases are just affecting our body, but it is our mind that makes us who we are. And if there is something wrong with that, then what are we? Of course this is not what I think, this is an assumption of what goes on through people’s minds in this state of fear. There is no separation from mind and body, both are a combination of cells, proteins, amino acids. Signalling to each other, reproducing. And any part of the whole mechanism can malfunction.
I would say – learn to accept. You didn’t choose this body, you just sort of woke up in it. I would have chosen another model, if I could, but no choices were given. Well here I am, at CAMH ER, because some signals are malfunctioning, and it’s not my fault. This is the situation though, and I have to accept.
Notes of a Neuropsychiatry Amateur 