What follows is a repost from something I wrote on a discussion forum I frequent, with minor edits. I couldn't initially decide whether to turn this into a journal entry or another installment to "Adventures in College", but I figured this method would make it a little more visible.

Hey, everybody. I just got back from a stay at the hospital, where I was brought in after an attack of the nerves occurred at the wrong place and the wrong time. As it happened, I was with friends, and they were concerned for my welfare when I was on the ground, convulsing and punching myself in the head, so they called an ambulance. It's a little ironic, because I feel that if I had been alone at the time, the situation would have passed relatively easily; in fact, I felt more or less okay by the time the police and the paramedics arrived, though I was pretty rattled by the incident, especially since it happened in public, and sore on the right side of my face. After some brief questioning, they led me to the ambulance, and I was actually well enough to carry myself there on my own two feet.

Once I got to the emergency room, I checked in at the desk and had to surrender my jacket and my shoes, since I was considered a threat to myself. The hospital wanted to run some tests (further irony, that I would be brought off a college campus and still have to deal with tests), so they took me to a rest area, whereupon I was quickly freaked out by the other patients. The guy in the room outside of mine kept wailing incoherently, and the guy in the bed next to me kept arguing with him; he was drunk, and I was concerned that a fight might break out. The staff came in and checked my vital signs and took some blood samples, and since after a while, the arguing between the two rabble-rousers hadn't died down, they moved me to a more out-of-the-way location.

While I was in that new area, another student from the college came in, who happened to have exactly the same birthday as me, and if I haven't been taking advantage of being 21, he was picking up the slack. He'd put away six or seven beers, along with a few helpings of some other drink which I can't recall. He wasn't belligerent or raving, though; in fact, he seemed to be on the verge of tears. I took pity of him and opened the privacy curtain between us so I could talk to him, which made him feel better. He was discharged within an hour, and one the nurses complimented me for my empathy. It wouldn't last.

I stole a couple hours of pseudo-sleep, then was woken up and brought via wheelchair to an impromptu psychiatric interview. In explaining what had happened, disheveled, annoyed, and groggy as I was, I must not have made a good impression; after the interview, I was left in the room for two solid hours, without hearing word one from the staff, aside from the base political musings of two security guards standing in the hallway.

The interviewer came back at 7:00 a.m. (Sunday morning), by which point I hadn't properly slept for 24 hours and was really out of it. She explained to me that because I had been deemed a threat to myself (my self-contained reaction: Aw, shit) I could be detained, even against my will. I tried to protest, explaining that I felt okay and had to get back to school as soon as possible, but she wasn't having any of it. Too tired to be properly pissed off, they put me in the wheelchair again and brought me up to the behavioral health unit. I got my jacket and my shoes back, but had to give up my keys, since the place was a "safe area" and they were thought to be a safety hazard. They gave me a bracelet, a room, and a bed, and I immediately crashed and spent most of Sunday asleep.

I woke up intermittently, and at one point I found out my parents were coming to see me, for which I was especially grateful considering it was a three-hour drive. The arrived sometime after dinner, and I explained what had happened, and asked that they bring me some things from my dorm room (clothes, toiletries, books) and send out correspondences to people at school. They left to take care of that, and when they returned, they'd also brought me a copy of George Carlin's Napalm & Silly Putty, as well as a phone card so I could call them or anyone else I may have needed to. A word about the phone card, though: for calls made within NY state (among others), the minutes are depleted at three times the usual rate. Fuck AT&T.

My parents eventually left for the night and found a hotel so they could visit me the next day, so as far as I was concerned, the day was pretty much over. Unfortunately, that turned out not to be the case, as I was paired up with a real messed up piece of crap for a roommate: a barely intelligible man who mumbled every word he spoke; bore a large, open sore on his half-dead foot; read nothing but department store circulars and asked for my opinions on their products; carried a spare tire that approached the size of an actual tire, and had a heart rate of 120 or more; and snored at 50 decibels, at least. I got only half the sleep I had wanted, but even more annoying was how he apologized profusely the morning after, when all I wanted of him was for him to shut his trap.

Once I was awake, I gathered some intel about my surroundings, and derived little comfort from what I learned: There was a notice on the wall that explained how I could be detained against my will for up to 15 days, which would have been an academic death sentence. The walls had scattered messages, many of them religious and all of them trite, making such banal claims as "God loves you" or "You're part of a perfect plan" or, in the case of one that had been written on the community whiteboard my another patient, "I love myself!" I also learned that "in order to have an effective rehabilitation", I would have to attend supervised group meetings with other patients, but I had no desire to mingle with people for whom the above sentiments would have been poignant, taking part in such things as "communication group", "activity group", "spirituality group" (ugh), et al. Since I felt confident in my mental stability, I resolved not to attend any groups whatsoever, and used the time to read; during my stay, I read the entirety of Hamlet, a quarter of Middlemarch, all of Napalm & Silly Putty, several short stories, and two "Get Fuzzy" collections.

A lot of the other patients in the unit were seriously screwed up, and cemented my desire not to associate with them. In addition to my roommate, there was dim-witted racist girl about my age who spent half her time wandering about wearing a bathrobe and a dazed expression; a slightly younger girl who, despite having landed herself in there by kicking, punching, and breaking the nose of a girl who'd insulted her family, laughed nervously like an embarrassed virgin schoolgirl every time conversation among the patients (I keep wanting to use the term "inmates") turned even slightly lurid, and had the audacity to say that I was rude; a man who constantly smelled of shit; multiple women who always looked to be on the verge of tears and spent more time sobbing and waling than they did actually talking; and a man who looked to be a round 75 and had all the maturity and verbal dexterity of a two-year-old.

In fact, many of the patients were immature and childish. Self-absorption was rampant, and complaints, no matter how trivial, were constant, and naturally heedless of simultaneous complaints made by other patients. Senses of humor were utterly juvenile, or worse, as in the case of some patients who only laughed at stories where somebody got hurt. Several of the patients could barely dress themselves. And I lost count of how many times the "You don't know me!" defense came up. That said, not all of them were antisocial fuck-ups—some patients were genuinely okay. One of them was a man from Nicaragua who seemed earnestly distressed about his situation and was determined to get better. We played ping-pong. And it was hard to begrudge the deaf woman who never said a word to me or, as far as I could tell, anyone else.

I saw my parents later in the day, and they confirmed that correspondences had been sent, and we further discussed my situation, both mentally and academically. They told me that the associate dean of students at my school had been notified, and that he had sent word of my being hospitalized to my professors, so at worst, I faced academic leave or an extension, instead of ruination. I also saw a doctor who gave me a more thorough interview, and prescribed me some medicine designed to prevent seizures, alleviate bipolar disorder, and act as a mood stabilizer. Things were looking fairly stable, so I said goodbye to my parents and they headed for home.

The biggest problem from then on was that the lower-ranking staff at the hospital never took me seriously. I can sort of understand, considering the people they tended to deal with, and my general association with them, but it was still taxing. They spoke to us with condescension and feigned consideration; it seemed like they were humoring us more than anything. I couldn't ask for anything without feeling awkward, and holding an actual conversation between them was impossible. I felt I deserved better than this, because I felt I was sane. I do have problems from time to time, but they're not chronic; aside from when the incidents actually occur, I'm generally fine, at least at a level where psychiatric intervention wasn't required. I didn't see any reason to be stuck in there.

I tried hard to appear as rational as I could, doing my best to stay well-dressed, properly groomed, and courteous while acting lucid. This was hindered, however, by the continued snoring of my roommate, who repeatedly caused me to lose sleep during the night, forcing me to make it up by sleeping till noon and completely destroying my morning routine. As a result, I had to deal with the staff and even some doctors in a half-dressed, disheveled state, which did little to project the image of sanity. The lost sleep also cut into my reading time, and that, combined with other grievances, made me constantly irritable, which threw me into further doubt regarding my prospects. One member of the staff, after waking me up in the middle of the night, asked accusingly why I was so "jittery". Well, call me crazy, but I would think that when a generally sane person is unwillingly confined to a mental hospital, forced to associate with human train wrecks, made to fall behind on his work, deprived of most forms of communication, treated with condescension, and unable to sleep, he's bound to get a little wound up, don't you?

Fortunately, the doctors I saw (there were quite a few, as they were all specialists) were actually smart, professional, and courteous, and from my dealings with them, they could tell I wasn't the sort of person who belonged there. A neurologist felt that the convulsing I had experienced wasn't a seizure. A psychiatrist who interviewed me and gave me a 344-item questionnaire determined me to be neither psychotic nor schizophrenic. I had an EEG, which detected no abnormal brain activity. The medical doctor (whose exact specialization I forget) I saw every day pushed for a fast release. After a few days of becoming fed up, I joked to her that "I must be feeling better, because I find myself wanting to inflict violence on other people, instead of myself", and she actually laughed at that. I'm sure that if I had used the same line on the nurses, I would have been dealt with as a threat.

Everything came to a head this morning, when I was scheduled to be discharged at 11:00. I had called my roommate at college two days before, and arranged for him to meet me in the hospital's main lobby to give me a ride back to school. Unfortunately, this arrangement had been made as a result of poor communication from the staff, as I was under the impression that when I was discharged, it would be in the lobby itself, and not the individual unit I was staying in. Because of the way patients in the unit were handled, I wasn't allowed to go down to the lobby myself to check whether he had arrived, even with supervision. It took half an hour before the staff sent someone to check for him, and it turned out that, as per our arrangements, he had been in the lobby since 11:00, and we had both been waiting independent of each other while the staff ignored me. As I finally left, I said out loud that I had nothing but contempt for the place.

It's worth mentioning that there *were* a few reprieves during my stay there. For one, the phone card allowed me to talk to my family every night, providing a window into a world that was both more caring and more rational. And the food there was actually pretty good. Better than what I had been expecting, at least. Also, my roommate at the hospital was discharged a day before I was, so after four consecutive nights of disturbed sleep, for my last night I was transferred from the double room to a single, where I could read in peace and got plenty of sleep. And I made it out of the hospital without attending a single group session, and as a bonus, scribbled some atheistic messages on the whiteboard before I left, to counter the attitude of godliness that inhabited the place. I wonder how the other patients might react to it?

Oh, also, as a sort of weird aside to this whole thing, while checking my vitals (a regular procedure), my temperature and blood pressure were optimal, but my heart rate kept registering at unusually low levels, typically around 55, and twice going as low as 48. At one point I was sent downstairs for an ultrasound examination of my heart, which was really cool and kind of gross. They also equipped me with a 24-hour halter monitor, which unfortunately required them to shave off around 25% of my chest hair. So for the next few weeks, I have to go around feeling like I've got mange.

So now I'm back, after five and a half days, and I'm still ironing out the rough spots, but as near as I can figure, the incident that led to this whole thing resulted from a combination of bad memories, an overactive imagination, and recurring feelings of guilt. I've attended a counseling session on campus, which, to my surprise, turned out to be pretty helpful, and I'm staying on the medicine I had prescribed to me for the time being. I'm eager to get back to my work, and get in contact with my friends, and to catch up on everything I've missed online, but before I do any more of that, I want to take care of the six days' growth I've got on my face. It's not easy getting hold of a razor in a mental health ward.