Coming Undone by Terri White (ebook reader with highlight function .TXT) 📗

a man standing up, pushing his chair back, then changing his mind. Over and over again at speed. It takes me a moment to work out what’s happening, until his head snaps back and forth and one of the other patients shouts, ‘He’s having a fit!’

We call out to the nurses who, for pretty much the first time ever, aren’t standing there watching us. They run over and lay him carefully on the floor. We’re all sent into the other room, where we try to look through the window, but can’t quite see what’s happening. Some minutes later, he’s wheeled past us, an oxygen mask on his face.

The rumours circulate. He died, right there on the floor. He had a seizure brought on by ECT (Electroconvulsive Therapy). He’d had a stroke. He was in a coma. When he does return to the ward some days later, his eyes are empty and deep.

He’s not the only one undergoing ECT. The hospital, I’m told, are ‘bringing it back’, advocating it as a course of treatment for depression which doesn’t respond to medication in those patients who are the hardest to reach. One patient, a forty-something New Jersey wife and mother, has it every other day. She is bright, funny, sharp. She tells me her husband is something in the mafia, a mob boss. He controlled her for decades. They have two kids. She loves them; he controls them. Their marriage hit trouble; she sank into a deep and ever deeper depression until eventually he found her hanging from the light fitting in their bedroom.

‘He didn’t call an ambulance.’ She laughs. A friend saved her, got her medical attention. In the months since she’s been sectioned he’s been to see her just a handful of times. She speaks to her kids on the phone but they rarely visit. She’s torn as to whether it’s for the best. For them, for her. She suspects it’s for the best for him.

She is taken off for her treatment in the morning while we’re still asleep. As we eat breakfast, her unconscious body is wheeled past the break room. Heads swivel left and right to look as the gurney is wheeled past, wheels creaking. She’ll join us a couple of hours later, sore, a little quieter than normal.

One day I ask her: ‘Does it hurt?’

‘Yes,’ she answers. ‘They tell you it won’t, but it does. But mostly it’s the headache afterwards.’

‘And do you feel better?’

‘No,’ she says firmly. ‘They told me I had to have it to even begin the conversation about getting out as I felt just as depressed as I ever have done. But I still feel the same. I tell them I don’t so they don’t keep me in here forever.’

There’s the tall, intimidating brunette, who has a young daughter out in the world and another baby brewing in her belly. Her daughter sometimes comes to visit, her small eyes round and terrified as she clings to the woman who brings her in. The brunette’s fuzzy black hair is pulled back into a rough ponytail; she has brown, smudged circles under her dark eyes, tattoos on her arms. She dresses every day in jogging bottoms, pyjamas and vests. She tells me that she’s been addicted to drugs, to heroin, and has suffered multiple breakdowns. She’s worried about her daughter, having watched her own mother spend almost her entire childhood in a long-term institution in upstate New York. Her childhood memories were of her mum getting hospitalised, being gone for months, then years, coming back for brief periods before needing to go away again. She is painfully, excruciatingly aware of history repeating itself and is determined to do better, be better, get better. This determination is the only possible way I can explain the treatment she is exposing herself to: electric shock therapy while five months pregnant.

‘Oh God, how can that possibly be safe?’ I gasp at her as she rubs her belly. ‘When you get shook, when your bones get shook, doesn’t the baby get hurt?’

She shrugs and shakes her head at the same time. ‘No, the doctors told me it was perfectly safe.’ In here, she is safe from heroin, a drug that has followed her around for years. She’s tried everything to leave it behind, over and over. It’s impossible to tell where the mental illness ends and her drug addiction begins.

Almost every single person on the unit has a substance abuse issue. Drinks, pills, heroin, meth. I wonder what comes first: the booze, the drugs, or the madness? Do the addictions drive them crazy or are they simply trying to keep the hell at bay by whatever means necessary?

And everyone has their own story to tell. So much worse, it seems, than mine.

The fear is what connects us. The patients from different countries, of different ages, generations, backgrounds, lives outside of here. The fear that we’ll stay locked inside for weeks, months, years. Forever. Apart from Daniel.

He doesn’t want to go. His life outside is chaotic. Moving between homes of relatives, shelters, the streets. Getting access to his medication and taking care of his mental health is almost an impossibility. In here, he’s part of a community. He has a structure, a role. He matters.

At night, the supper trolley is brought out – snacks, sandwiches, fruit and yoghurt to tide us over until morning. And every night, the same thing happens. Louise, the woman I’d sat across from at breakfast on the first morning, who barely speaks a single, solitary word, walks into the break room, strides up to the trolley, takes a tuna-fish sandwich and sticks it down her pants, pulling her drawstring trousers tight over them. She walks around with it tucked in there all night. I can still hear her:

Sway, sway, shuffle, shuffle, rustle, rustle.

Mob Boss Wife shares a room with her and tells me that every night when they go to bed – at least two hours after the arrival of the supper trolley – Louise gets