Shortly before Christmas when I was 17 I was admitted to UCLA's Psychiatric Hospital again. This was during my Junior year of High School. At the time I was an active member of my school's Speech and Debate team. When I returned home I wrote this speech and competed with it for the rest of the competition season.
Want
to know a secret? I’m not who you think I am, not entirely, but that’s okay.
How about we be honest with each other today? I’ll be honest with you, and then
you be honest with yourself. I’ll go first. Over the past year I have been in
two different mental hospitals (or as my mother would prefer me to say,
psychiatric hospitals) three different times. The two most recent times I was
in the neuropsychiatric hospital at UCLA but I have also spent a little bit of
time in Good Samaritan here in town. Each time it was for anxiety, depression,
and psychotic symptoms. Now I would bet that your perception of me has already
changed from what it was originally because of this stigma attached to what I
just said.
Patrick W. Corrigan, a professor of
Psychology at the Illinois Institute of Technology, informs us that
“Stereotypes” depict “people with mental illness as being dangerous,
unpredictable, responsible for their illness, or generally incompetent”
(citation)
There
are many misconceptions people have about mental illness and mental hospitals.
Today I am going to prove all those people wrong. I learned a lot on the psych
unit and that is what I am here today to share with you.
The
very first thing I learned was that it’s not like it is in the movies. Have any
of you seen “A Beautiful Mind?” Well, about a month before I went into Good Sam
my therapist had me watch that movie; I’m not really sure why. About half-way
through the movie the main character, who is Schizophrenic, gets carted away to
a mental hospital. Shortly after that I shut the movie off without finishing
it. I didn’t like seeing him restrained and drugged. That is what I thought
going inpatient was like. When I think
of B Unit, the unit I was on in UCLA, it looks to me kind of like a college
dorm floor. Up two of the halls are a bunch of rooms. Everything is centered
around this big room that we call the Day Room where we spend all our free
time. In it there are comfy chairs, a big table and chairs where we ate our
meals, a tv we could watch movies on during visiting hours, and off to the side
is the nurses station. There were no empty white bedrooms, no people muttering
to themselves walking the hall, and definitely no straight jackets. We did have
a Seclusion Room, located in the Day Room where if a kid got uncontrollable and
became a danger to himself or others they would give him a PRN, (PRN means “As
Needed” so when you asked for a PRN they would give you a medication, such as
Thorazine, that just helps to calm you down) so they would give him a PRN and
put him in there until he calmed down.
The
second thing that I was happily surprised to learn is that you can have fun in
inpatient and you can even make friends.
The morning before I was first admitted I was talking to my Aunt and I
said to her, “Well maybe I’ll make friends.” She replied back saying,
“Okaaayyy, but is that really the type of people you want to make friends
with?” What I don’t think she understood at the time was that “they” are people
like me. They are people like me and they are people like you. The kids I met
in UCLA weren’t crazy, or scary, or bad. Some of the sweetest, more caring
people I have ever met, I met on Unit B. There were all different types of
people there, an unlikely group out in the real world, but we all generally got
along. Some of the kids I still talk to.
There
was work involved on the unit, we were there to get better and we had to go to
groups, and meetings, and see doctors, but we also had fun at the same time. We
had access to a deck with tables and chairs, balls, and a ping pong table. Some
of the groups we did were fun too like cooking group, Recreational Therapy,
Occupational Therapy, and Art Room. I’d
like to point out that while we made friends and could have fun in the
hospital, being there was not fun. It isn’t a place to be glamorized and
glorified. It’s a hospital. The kids there are there to get better.
Number
three. Community. Community was a group and how we began our day. It goes a
little like this. The staff running it picks someone to keep the journal and
then we’d all go around and when it got to your turn you would have to set a
goal for the day and a coping skill. While I was there one of my Communities
might be “to communicate better to the staff when I need something, and for a
coping skill I would color” Today it would look something like “do my best in
all of the rounds I compete in, and a coping skill would be to shuffle cards.”
Setting a goal like this is great for anyone to do.
Four.
No, your mother’s not Bipolar…..unless she is. I don’t know? Here’s the point
I’m trying to make. During my time in UCLA I saw people with many different
disorders. I remember that one time I was there a discussion that came up was
that we all hate it when someone uses disorders as adjectives. “Ugh, my mother
is so Bipolar, “I got so depressed in class today.” “Haha, you’re so OCD” These
words hold more weight than you think they do. You never know if when you use
these words in the lunch room if someone at your table happens to be bipolar.
You don’t know what others are dealing with.
Number
five. Pain is universal. Almost everyone you know is dealing with something
that you don’t know about. I would bet that some of you probably know at least
one person who has been in a mental hospital. When I was in Good Sam here in
Bakersfield, I was in an all-girls unit and from our group there were girls
from a large variety of high schools. You normally can’t tell by looking at a
person what is going on inside their head. Of the kids I met in my inpatient
stays: the saddest girl tried the hardest to make everyone else happy. The boy
who was on a court mandate was the gentlest person there. The girl with
stitches holding her arm together could make anyone laugh. The girl who
screamed at night could calm anyone down. I have found that in a lot of
instances the gentlest, most caring people are the ones with problems haunting
them that you couldn’t even imagine
Numbers
six and seven kind of go together. What I learned was that someone always has
it worse than you and that the pain doesn’t go away overnight. Good Sam was
more of a psychiatric hold facility. I was the only person there who wasn’t on
a hold for a suicide attempt. UCLA is a more long term care facility. Most
people stay about 2 or 3 weeks. Some stay less, some stay more. Most people
don’t leave completely better either. Actually, nobody leaves completely
better. Something people need to remember for themselves and for those around
them is that recovery is a process not perfection.
The
8th thing I learned was taught to me by D, my favorite staff, she
taught me to be my own advocate. I was
so used to other people saying what I needed that I wasn’t accustomed to doing
that for myself. But when you’re living in a hospital there’s no one there to
tell the staff or the doctors if you need something. You have to speak up for
yourself. You have to fight for yourself.
Perhaps
one of the best lessons I learned from my stay in UCLA was that people care.
The last time I stayed there it was for about two weeks in December of 2014 and
while there that time my favorite nurse was J. I knew J from when I had been
admitted there a couple months earlier and when she saw me she was like,
“Caitlin!” and I was like “J” and then we gave each other a hug. She hadn’t
seen me in months yet she still remembered my face and name. When you stay in
the “normal” hospital you have nurses but you don’t get to know them the same
way you do your staff when you are in a psychiatric hospital. They are there
most days, all day long with you. They know you. It wasn’t just the staff that
cared. All of us kids there took care of one another. If someone needed
something we did it. If someone need to talk we talked. If they needed us to
just be there we were there. If they needed a hug they were out of luck because
of body boundaries. We lived there, some of us for a while, so the staff and
the other kids on the unit became our family.
The
10th and most important thing I learned and I hope you learned from
this speech is that you can’t judge people because they are in a mental
hospital. Mental hospitals get a bad reputation. People get stigmatized for being there but there doesn’t
have to be that stigma. I see me and the kids I met in UCLA as smart and brave.
We needed the help and we knew it. Mental hospitals are a good thing. I learned
a lot there and I hope that you learned something too.
