My first impression of an observation room was on an acute ward when I was just a teenager. It had a curtained window with the office on the other side. All the staff had to do was peekaboo through the curtain and they had eyes on you. I forget if there was a camera or not. There was a clock permanently frozen on 3am though, the animal hour.
A lady doctor entered and told me to pull my pants down. I think she wanted to see if my phallus was swollen from masturbation, but she pretended she was checking for hernias. I felt mildly violated. Then she ran me through a Rorschach test, which I probably got all wrong, as I was just a silly teen who didn’t know anything.
It was near Christmas, so the nurses provided red wine and got us all pissed. Hard to believe that, isn’t it, in a psychiatric facility? I spewed up in the toilet after smoking some weed as well. Just another typical weekend on booze and drugs. Except now I was detained in a nuthouse doing it.
When I left the observation room someone else moved in. She was a young girl called Jen in blue casual jeans, blocky black boots and a red wooly jumper, with short back and sides boyish hair and glasses. I fell for her instantly. All we ever said is hello and goodbye to one another, but we shared so much with our combined knowledge of that room. I never ever saw her again after I left, but I remain thinking about her until this very day. She used to just stand there in the room, looking at nothing, as if in prayer, with the door open.
There’s loads more to the story. I was allowed out to college on leave. Teachers were coming to visit me. I wrote my first book in there. After six months they let me out into a bail hostel and my life almost continued to roll along as normal, except for displacement, stigma and trauma. I put psych units behind me all through my twenties, which were enjoyed getting high when possible, usually on cannabis and ecstasy. I worked a few regular jobs but always signed on the dole.
At age 33 I started hearing voices. The rest as they say is history. It was a manic time of running around the woods with no clothes on and shouting at shadows. I was admitted into the same hospital and the same observation room. I woke up in there in a stupor and recognised the place instantly, with an unforgettable sense of shuddersome disquietude.
I thought I’d never left. I thought I’d imagined my whole life.
That feeling was more than surreal, it was multiform and many-sided. I had great doubt about the nature of reality and perception. How could I end up back in the same room, 16 years later?
That obs room, the second time around, still proves to be one of the maddest experiences of my life. It’s hard to describe my mental state within. Basically I stared into space for over two whole days in a state of fear and wonder, hearing voices and hallucinating vividly. I won’t go into what I was seeing, as I’ve already descripted that thoroughly in another book, but the shock of being suddenly ‘awake’ to all the conspiracies of the world was all-consuming.
There were strange shape-shifting figures at my window, mystical timeless patterns on the walls, space beings were performing experiments and procedures on me, the hairs on my body were combed into picturesque conformations, it was all going off and big time; the most I could do was sit there drooling, listening to people battering my head who weren’t there.
Eventually I ‘came down’ and was let out onto the ward. Same thing, Christmas time, but with no booze or weed. Weed would have been the last thing I wanted. It still is. I fear no mortal, but have an intense dislike for being stoned. It makes music sound improved, and enhances the visual cortex, but those things are not worth the compromising paranoia. If I was in a safe environment with lovely people then I’d consider it. As it is, whenever I try and toke a little, I end up hearing growls and hisses from under the cupboard. Or are they deep within my mind?
I considered killing myself in the cistern somehow, by
doing a headstand and breaking my neck on purpose. At one point my skin was
sticking to the mattress, I thought years had passed again in some type of time
warp. I felt condemned to that room, fated to a lifetime of never getting out. The
worse thing was, there was no Jen this time to think about when recovering. Like
the first time, I started writing about what I was going through. It wasn’t
pretty reading. All the nightmares reached back into childhood.
Luckily they only kept hold of me for several weeks, before tipping me out back home. But this spell was only the beginning of a chain of psychotic reactions which still haunt me to this present day, the only difference is I handle them a lot better. I could never give up the drugs, and I could never strike out for staying clean for the long duration. All of my trauma-based memories are still intact and very much alive, and not only that, but they get added to almost every weekend, it seems. You’ll be aware of a few of them here. Others I keep to myself. I’m going through something very difficult at the moment, but who wants to hear about monsters under the sink for example, because rationale gets in the way.
I suppose all this is a chemical imbalance, and I need treatment.
Patient's Signature: ADON




