American Studies

Nina Sharma looks back at her time in a psych ward.

Princeton House

The white man sitting across from me was the hospital director. He looked like a suburban dad – one of those dads that goes running with their kid and maybe smokes pot by the toolshed. I tried to talk and make words. I tried to list out all that I was on at that point but really I just wanted to lay my head on his desk and shut my eyes. “You are on too much and you need to sleep,” he said. I had wanted to hate him, to distrust him, but I didn’t.

He called my parents in and offered an option. “There are no free beds right now, but we can place her on the substance abuse floor.” It would be a lie, a cheat, just to get in the door. Technically, there was an issue with substances but just that I had been over-prescribed. The dosages were too strong. I was slipping down stairs. My head was a fog. But the violent thoughts still hadn’t stopped. And after two weeks of a B-grade horror movie playing involuntarily in my head, I said, “Please, someone, check me in.” 

I was in the second semester of my masters graduate program in American Studies. A week later, it would have been spring break.

The hospital was close to and shared the name of a hallowed university, not the one I was skipping out of for the week. “Princeton House” it is called, as if it was an eating club. The hospital was selected for what it was not – not close to my parents’ house in northern Jersey and thus out of sight of any fellow doctor colleagues and friends. And yet, even then it was, much like Princeton, hard to get in. 

The substance abuse floor struck me as a bit cheerful. They didn’t wear the mantle of mental disorder as heavily, I thought. They could blame at least a percentage of whatever they had gone through on drugs. My mental illness on the other hand was a personal shortcoming.

My roommate was a girl around my age, late twenties, and though we arrived at the same time, she had fallen in with a crowd already. It did feel like I was in college in that way, I felt that same desperation to belong. I worried about being the only Indian girl, the rich girl, the quiet girl, the masters degree in progress girl, the only girl who was detoxing from what she was legally prescribed, the only girl who didn’t act out but instead was quietly imploding.

 My head was a fog. But the violent thoughts still hadn’t stopped. And after two weeks of a B-grade horror movie playing involuntarily in my head, I said, “Please, someone, check me in.” 

“How ya doin’, shweethat,” my roommate would say to me.  She spoke normally to everyone else but reserved this 1940s old-timey movie voice just for me. For some reason I thought this was a sign that she knew I did not belong.

Soon enough I was moved. I don’t remember if it was the same day or the next.  That fog, that desire to lay my head down anywhere I could, was still there.

The new room wasn’t so different from the last. They were all spare and not unlike any other type of dorm room: two twin beds, nightstand with lights, a dresser, and an adjoining bathroom. You had to look close to see the hospital parts. The bathroom suicide-proof. The windows looking out into a halcyon view but unable to be opened. The wood furniture too sturdy to be broken up into anything with which you could harm yourself or others – “institutional furniture” it is called, the same type used in prisons. 

This new roommate was very different from the first. She was an old lady, white-haired, thin, her wrinkly skin nearly translucent. She reminded me of my Kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Willard. She was curled up with a book and when I came in she barely looked up. “I like reading too,” is all I said. She didn’t say anything but smiled and dipped her head back into her pages.

“Oh good,” I thought. “This will be mellow.” 

Order the book…

That night, as sleep descended like poured concrete, I woke up to a long, deep-throated moan.

I tried to swat it away as if it was a bad dream but it wouldn’t stop.

I turned over on my side and saw my roommate’s petite body curled up, her chest in her knees. She rocked and held tufts of her white hair fisted in her hands – a cotton ball she was all but ready to maul.

I turned back but the moans kept coming, desolate and wild and piercing right through my eyelids.

I rubbed at my eyes and stumbled to my feet.

You had to look close to see the hospital parts. The bathroom suicide-proof. The windows looking out into a halcyon view but unable to be opened. The wood furniture too sturdy to be broken up into anything with which you could harm yourself or others... 

The nursing station was a few short steps away from our room but each step across the bedroom linoleum and onto the ugly grey carpet of the dayroom felt a mile and change, the old lady’s moans lurching behind my undead stagger.

“Something is happening.”

The night nurses, three bored and huddled together over a computer, seemed just as surprised at my wakefulness as I was.

“Something is happening,” I said to them.

They rushed in then, all three, not with shots or restraints, just their voices – sharp, sassy Jersey tongues. “Tell those voices to fuck off!” they said. It was all very The Real Housewives of the Mental Hospital. “Tell them to SHUT. THE HELL. UP.” “Jerks! All of them!”

I couldn’t believe it. The moans dissipated and the rocking stopped.

Even so, the nurses remained by the old lady’s side.

I shut my eyes then. I didn’t know what would happen next. I didn’t know if I’d get to sleep. 

All I knew is that these women, all Jersey grit, made schizophrenia into something just as ordinary as a Menlo Park Mall parking lot traffic jam, something you could stand up to and shout down and then get a Cinnabon. And that meant everything in the world to me.