Nasthalthia
She was trying hard to seem and be intimidating but beautiful at the same time, and fun and funny. She once is said to have masturbated with a banana in the smoking room and then put it back in the bowl of fruit on the nurses’ desk. She picked on people, also stood up for people. She acted cliquish at times. She bragged about her hard and controversial past-- being in the forensic psych hospital, Pinel, and being a stripper at one point, and losing her child to social services-- or what her past was supposedly like, and whether it was true or not it was because it was better than being ashamed. Whether that shame she had felt had been because of her bad past, or her lack of a past. I had no idea what was true and what wasn’t about what she said about her life, or about anything, partially because she said herself that when someone lied she’d meet that lie with a bigger one about her own life, and that was how she dealt with liars.
She was destitute, to the point where the only stuff she had to her name was the two changes of clothes she always wore. Someone asked one day why she was so upset and another person said “It’s because the staff and the government and the judge want to take away her stuff.” By “stuff”, he either meant physical property or money or both.
“She doesn’t have any stuff,” another guy said when I told him about it. But maybe she did, in storage somewhere, or at someone’s house, or in a bank account.
Around that time, I heard the social worker, Ian, angrily yelling at her, “If you can’t take care of yourself I can and will get a judge to assign someone to take care of you!”
I was a bit shocked yet not shocked at the anger and at the paternalism exhibited by Ian. And at the mixture of anger and paternalism depending on each other and working together to make her life miserable. How could Ian not know he was destroying Nasthalthia’s life and mental health? Making her feel overall, long-term worse, not better? Making her life worse, not better? Didn’t Ian realize that stigma is born whenever and wherever help (or supposed help) and punishment are intertwined?
I saw her running out of a room crying not long after a meeting she was having. She left behind a pamphlet about the public curator on the table.
Nobody deserves or needs to be treated like property, with no right to speak for themself, as though they’re nothing, or not a person, or not sentient. It bothers them to be allowed NO control over their own life, their own destiny, their own quality of life. It’s humiliating and puts a cramp on the person’s freedom. It’s humiliating BECAUSE it puts a cramp on the person’s freedom to act sentient and thus seem sentient to others.
Not long after I saw her running out of the room crying, I heard she was in the psychiatric intensive care unit at the Douglas. Another patient, Mariska, told me she reassured Nasthalthia before she went, “This isn’t Pinel.” But not as bad doesn’t mean not bad... and just because a place isn’t for criminals doesn’t mean the people get treated less like criminals than a criminal place. “Hopefully she’ll get the attention she needs in intensive care,” Mariska said. She also told me about how another patient held her while she cried, which probably helped her more than being locked in a secure ward did.
Donia
She got so little stimulation that she didn’t have enough stimulation to look for stimulation. The lack of stimulation was from laying around depressed for so long.
Her stimulation, as she put it, came to her through her mouth... she was a real foodie. She and I would order food together, and I felt so bad for her that I let her use me for food from the corner store or from restaurants. She did pay for the food sometimes, though, after having to lie to her sister to get money from her, saying it was for art supplies rather than food.
She went from too skinny to very obese while in there... there was nothing to do but eat sometimes, and it was often so boring in there that the only thing we could think of to say was “Pass the chips.” Her medication also made her gain weight.
She often didn’t have the motivation to get up to shower even, and her room stank like an unrefrigerated morgue... it literally smelled like what I imagined mortuary sludge to smell like. Her teeth were rotting in her mouth, so that might have been the smell of death I smelled on her.
They were giving her electroconvulsive therapy and she didn’t even have the motivation to say no to it.
The ECT did not do a thing to get her more motivated, and years later she’s still laying in bed eating and watching TV when she does anything at all.
Arsenia
This girl was sobbing in her room and then I heard screams from her room. It was the other girls she shared her room with.
Security was in her room, and I heard the staff had pulled down her pants and given her an injection in her butt.
My friend Donia and I demanded to know what was going on. The nurse named Lenisha told us, “She was saying she wanted to die. We couldn’t let her die, so we had to give her an injection. See, look; she’s not knocked out; she’s up using the phone; she’s okay.”
Maybe she was using the phone to call her lawyer.
The next day Arsenia, so sweaty from anxiety that her hair and clothes were drenched, was frantic, telling Donia that security was going to kill her.
“Come on, you need a shower,” Donia said. They had been trying to convince her to take a shower.
Arsenia reiterated that if she did security would kill her. Perhaps what she meant was that she did not want to be caught by staff naked again. Or maybe she wanted to be so gross and disgusting to staff that they wouldn’t want to touch her again, as them pulling down her pants had been traumatizing for her.
She left worse than when she’d come in.
But that day, they got her a soft drink she could drink (she was addicted to soda) instead of taking her shower right away, hoping it would calm her down enough where she’d want to take a shower.
Months later, she still had trouble taking a shower.
Valentino
He made a point to point out to me who talked to everyone and who the cliquish people were.
Sasha
She was one of the cliquish girls who sometimes picked on others, though I think she kind of felt a pang of bad-about-it. She was friendly to those she picked on when she wasn’t hanging out with Nasthalthia and the other one, Karolina, who was moody who ran little scams on other patients.
Karolina
She ran a little scam where she told my friend Jean-Pierre she’d tell his fortune for two dollars, then when he gave her the two dollars she said she now charged three dollars and wouldn’t tell his fortune till he gave her the extra dollar. She was impatient with people’s little quirks (like Jean-Pierre making up cute alternative names to call people that he thought sounded like what their name should be based on their personality) though she had her own, and told people off for “not being nice” and “being rude” when they mentioned her hypocrisy and little scam. Other times she showed her faulty human side shamelessly, admitting she shat on herself in her sleep and had to get up and wash herself during the night. She was kind to people when she wanted something. I flat-out said that about her more than once and both times she told me to be nice, not to be rude.
Looking back, it wasn’t her fault she was hungry and craving cigarettes too, and locked up unable to go outside when she wanted to. Of course her only recourse was to beg, borrow, steal and scam to get extra or alternative food-- one of the few pleasures she could get-- and her cigarettes. Of course the only way she could maintain her supply was to maintain her scams, which meant discrediting people who talked about them or shutting them up with guilt or shame tactics.
Allegra
She was miserable and depressed when she came in, and said spontaneously to me one day, out of the blue, “I had an abortion and a miscarriage.”
She drew pictures of a big flower that she said was her and two small ones that she said were her two daughters. I wondered if the two daughters were the abortion and miscarriage she’d had.
She said she did not regret having the abortion, but maybe in another way she did regret it. Like regretting having to.
One day she, me, and our roommate Taycora were laying down in our room. She said, “Are both of you awake? I want to tell you something.”
We waited. She busted out with, “I’m gay. Bisexual, actually.”
She was gone the next day or so. Maybe the truth literally set her free.
Philana
She seemed to me at the time to be so out of it. Yet she spoke normally. It was just how she acted that made my brainwashed ass think she was terminally out of it. No one is TERMINALLY out of it, and those who are out of it temporarily are only because they’re distracted by something so important to them that it’s more important than their surroundings. I learned this about myself gradually too.
She introduced herself to me by standing in our room (we were roommates for a while) cleaning the small sink with a toothbrush. She told me to do the same. Literally, in French, “Do this, okay?”
She ran around wearing a hospital gown that was open in the back, showing her thin underwear over her fat ass. She drew pictures for the psychiatrist (with notes of appreciation for him) and taped them to the nurses’ desk hoping the psych would see them. She said “Bon appetit” to everyone who would listen at lunch when we were eating the most disgusting slop, and really meant the “Bon appetit,” it wasn’t sarcasm. She ran down the hallway kicking the closed doors, then said she couldn’t help but do it. She washed the bedding that belonged to the hospital in the patients’ washer, which was unnecessary, as the hospital took that bedding off the unit to wash it, and her doing this held up the washer for people who needed it for their clothes. I found her annoying, and felt guilty for finding her annoying. But at the same time, no one’s aura jives perfectly with everyone else’s. One can see everyone else as equal human beings and still not be compatible with their vibe.
So she was annoying to me, but she shared her candy with me and our other roommate, Lorraine. And when I was sad she hugged me. She picked up on when I was annoyed and sad and angry and scared and humiliated. It was a complex feeling I had but I think, looking back, that she understood it. Nobody is less there as in a soul/mind being less existent; people are just in different places.
Miep
Miep was there for months before she was even given the papers from the court about her own case. So she was a prisoner without fully knowing why or being able to defend herself for months. That might be because when she did get her papers, the damn report on her was about thirty pages long... they might have been taking that time to write up a long report on how crazy she supposedly was.
Pranciena
“I am not criminal!” she said over and over to the staff at the desk. She asked, then demanded, to be allowed to go outside, but was refused. They told her they didn’t trust her to come back.
“They want me to take medication for psychosis! I am not criminal!” she exclaimed.
I wonder if anyone ever explained to her that psychosis is not necessarily criminality and is not considered by that community to be psychopathy or sociopathy. She probably thought they thought the worst about her. I would have told her-- I wanted to get to know her better, she was nice-- but I was shy. I was afraid that even the rejected would reject me. That I was therefore even worse than them.
Pranciena tried to bring the staff’s attention to the fact that Igor, another patient, was sexually harassing her. She said the staff laughed at her when she told them. I had been pushed by Igor too; he had tried to convince me to have sex with him too even after I said no. So she wasn’t delusional. The staff were discriminating against her because of her mental illness, assuming the sexual come-ons were all in her head.
One nurse, Xavier, told her, “You’re going to have to choose between your pride, and going outside, because you won’t be allowed out unless you take the medication.”
I don’t think anyone had any kind of talk with her about stigma, about confidentiality, about side effects, or about medication options. If she’d known no one had to know, that there was no shame in it, that it didn’t mean she was admitting she was some sort of criminal, and that it wouldn’t cause her side effects, she might have taken the damn medication.
Adriano
Adriano exuded the kind of intelligence the so-called mainstream admired, and confidence. The kind of person who would be in the military.
He talked about being in the mob, about being beaten up, about being at Dawson College when it was shot up, about his parents calling in on him and having him involuntarily committed. He didn’t tell me why he was there, and I didn’t want to cross any lines by asking.
He did seem like the kind of guy I’d like if he looked different. I had a crush on Jean-Pierre though at the time, and he and a girl on the unit named Flavie were an item.
He was all confidence and no actual accuracy about things though... he was a bit of a nihilist, acting like no one could ever know anything, which isn’t true, and he once told me that the only person our friend Jean-Pierre would beat up would be himself, and that turned out not to be true. Then again, maybe was onto something... Jean-Pierre only beat up people who threatened him.
Even Adriano had quirks. He got the doctor to extend his weekend home visits to Tuesday, and he often sat chatting with people while strumming the tune of “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” again and again on his guitar.
Flavie
I met her in the smoking room. She had just been involuntarily committed. She sat in the smoking room wuith an unlit cigarette, rapping rap songs she made up as she went along. In one of her songs she said she admitted she was bipolar. She told me, “I’m going to court tomorrow. How does this sound for me to tell them: ‘I understand I’m bipolar and that I need treatment for bipolar.’ Will they let me out if I say that?”
I didn’t know, but said something like that it was worth a try. She borrowed a black dress from me to wear to court beccause all her clothes were hip-hop-like and didn’t look, as Adriano put it, “serious.” She also got into the habit of making shirts out of the hospital pillowcases by making holes in them with a pen for the head and arms and drawing and writing designs and words on them.
She had decided to quit school (she was taking commerce at Dawson College) and become a rapper, which her family was against. She showed us her design for her aspiring album, “Fuck Fam, I Want Fame.” The album cover looked to me like something a four-year-old had done, but then again, different tastes, and she might have had it professionally improved anyway.
Her mania made me jealous of her a bit, and I was very happy to find that she was my new roommate. She walked fast, smiled a lot, put up collages she made in our room, did my makeup, made the pillowcase shirts, flirted and chatted with Adriano, and was very engaging and engaged with everyone.
She came back from court disappointed; they were making her stay. She was put on a high dose of Abilify, an antipsychotic often used to calm down bipolar mania, and soon was saying she’d been manic before and sounded apologetic for how she’d been before, though there had been nothing wrong with how she’d acted at least inside the facility. The medication made her gain a lot of weight and turned her back into Miss Prim and Proper Commerce Student. It was interesting.
She had, I think, felt stigmatized by her bipolar diagnosis, and that was why she had acted so proud of it when doing her rap songs, then later wanted nothing to do with me and Jean-Pierre when she saw us on the grounds later after me and Jean-Pierre had been discharged and was visiting Donia on another unit, and Flavie had been re-admitted to the unit we’d been on before. She just got our attention to say hi-- she was sitting with her friend from outside who was visiting at the time-- and then dismissed us when we were chatting with her.
Rosie
She had ECT, and the more ECT treatments she had, the skinnier and more ghostly and out of it she looked. She looked fairly decently-fed and “together” and talked fairly “normal” when I first met her, but she didn’t really talk at all later on, and was skin and bones.
I think the ECT took away a lot of her memory and the psychological trauma from the ECT took away her memory too, and her motivation.
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