Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin by Norah Vincent Page B

and could explain the whole thing. I didn’t need Clean leaning in every two minutes to bug me about when my visitor was coming and whether or not he’d have cigarettes.
    “Norma?”
    I put my finger to my lips and pointed to the phone.
    “Oh, okay. I’m sorry, Norma.”
    He walked away.
    Two minutes tops and he was back.
    “Norma?”
    Again the finger routine, more emphatic this time. Another apology, another departure, then another approach.
    And finally from me,
    “Fuck, Clean. I’m busy here. Can’t you see?”
    It made you feel bad, like you’d slapped a puppy. But it had to be done. Callousness was one of the things that happened to you along with the other effects of being institutionalized. Callousness and, what? Xenophobia, I guess.
    To wit: it is significant that while I was making that phone call to my doc, I was holding the receiver with a paper towel.
    I know. You’d be justified in thinking that maybe I was getting classically obsessive-compulsive along with the rest of them, always thinking about germs. You would think so, that is, until you remember that each year alarming numbers of people contract fatal staph infections while in the hospital.
    But that is not the whole truth, or maybe not even the half of it. Not the real point.
    The point is, I held the receiver with a paper towel because I did not want to touch the things that my fellow patients had touched. That is the beginning of spiritual disgust. It starts in the body, in the nose, and moves to the skin, proverbially crawling, sliding first paper, then walls between itself and the unclean, then verminous other.
    And once that had happened, and you could admit it to yourself, that’s when you started to understand why the nurses were as grouchy as they were, and as distant and demeaning. They’d learned, as I had, first, that setting limits was paramount, but second and more shamefully, that good intentions were the casualties of contact—the same theoretically exalted human contact that I had started out so in favor of, and had seen soiled somewhere along the way.

Life at Meriwether was lived in patterns. Patterns of marked time and lost time, and doobie-do this, and doobie-do that.
    The Yenta turned to me in the dayroom one afternoon and said:
    “What month is it?”
    “December.”
    He looked surprised.
    “God, time is passing me by. The drugs make me so out of it I can’t think straight. It’s like waking up from a dream.”
    “So you don’t know how long you’ve been here?”
    “December what?”
    “Fifth.”
    He counted on his fingers.
    “Then, nineteen days.”
    “How did you get here?”
    “From rehab.”
    “How does that work?”
    “I was in rehab in this really dark and dingy place, and I just felt like hell. Really depressed. I was talking with my counselor in this glass-enclosed room and I made the mistake of telling her that I wanted to bash my head right through the glass. So they sent me over here to emergency with a bottle of antidepressants. While I was waiting to be checked in, I went into the bathroom and took the whole bottle at once. They kept me in the ICU for a couple of days, having convulsions and spasms and weird shit.”
    “What are you on now?”
    “Another antidepressant.”
    “Which one?”
    “Effexor.”
    “Oh jeez,” I said, and gave him a speech about the horrendous withdrawal that people who stop taking that drug can undergo. I told him what the docs probably weren’t telling him. After I told him, he confirmed that, yes, I was right. The docs hadn’t warned him.
    I’d been on Effexor at one point, and had gone off it abruptly under a doctor’s care. The doctor—actually, more than one doctor—hadn’t warned me that withdrawal from Effexor can, and in my case did, cause, among other joys, vivid, prolonged nightmares, fever, sweats, chills, dizziness, crying jags, and what I can only describe as brain zaps, a kind of electric shock sensation inside your skull. When I started