I was a rather well-read child who was as captivated by nonfiction as I was fiction. I was seven when a teacher decided that as a punishment I would have to read a page from the dictionary. That had a latent manifest effect of me putting Webster on my reading list for the year. Best birthday gift that my grandmother ever gave was both a Webster and an Oxford--Grandma Liz may have teased me about it, but holy fuck if the woman did not simply understand me.
I was eight the first time I read my first Stephen King book: Firestarter. That was also the year that I was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder. That hospitalization was perhaps the scariest period of my young life. All I really knew was Mom said that we were going to a special park, but instead we went to big brick building that smelled like the Jefferson City Walls. The doors slammed behind us as we went deeper inward and the windows disappeared. We went down a green hall that had a flickering light. We went through a final set where we were met by a man who had to have been related to the Hulk (couldn't have been him as he was a normal white guy, not green) and he took the bag that Mom had been carrying before making her sign some paperwork. That is when my mother told me that they (her and my siblings) had to go, but that I was staying. Then they left.
We as a society have a tendency to ignore both children and the mentally ill. We talk about them but rarely to them. We assume that because they are young that they cannot understand--and the concept that children should have a right to informed consent is relatively new...and primarily reserved for physical illnesses.
They didn't explain why I was there or how long I would be. They didn't explain why they needed my blood or why they wanted me to take the pills. I shared a room for the first few days, but one day in the course getting my blood drawn yet again, my roommate was packed and gone with no explanation to where or why. And through it all was the smell of the place: stale and stinky like the place where they kept Daddy. There was no going outside and there was no books beyond the boring kids books. Regardless of whatever rules you think they should have followed, no one explained me what the fuck was going on beyond the phrase "we're trying to make you better" with no explanation as to what that meant.
With no distractions and no explanation, my little storyteller and overly informed self started coming up with my own theories as to what was going on. Mom had made no secret that she couldn't handle me--or rather she didn't pay attention to the kid curled up with a book in the corner when she talked to my grandmother or on the phone to various people and said kid had ears. Everyone fights with their siblings, though, and why would I want to read a book whose chapters were barely a flip of a page with boring stories when there were things like Beowulf or The Tell-Tale Heart or The Lost Years of Merlin--and the principal was stupid for thinking that calling Mom would force me to read a stupid book still mostly pictures. In hindsight, maybe calling her a bitch on top of it was a bit disrespectful, but surely the letter of apology that Grandma made me write was an acceptable sign of contrition. I had already known that they can lock you up and throw away the key for practically nothing--they had done it to Daddy and this place smelled like that one did. Then again, I had just finished Firestarter before Mom brought me here and all the staff would tell me is that they were going to make me better. Was this some kind of governmental research facility where they took in people for experimentation? I hadn't died yet from the pills they were giving me--did that mean that I was part of the control group or that the drugs were slow acting? Then again, I was not unaware of what the other kids called me on the playground and Mom had said once that it was unnatural how much I read, so maybe I really was a freak and "better" would be like the other kids. And wasn't that a wistful thought! Other kids seemed so happy and they didn't seem to have trouble talking to each other or to adults. Other kids didn't seem to boil uncontrollably with unexpected rage or not be able to sleep for days on end. What if they couldn't make me "better"? Would I be stuck in there forever and never see Grandma again or Daddy or Tigger or hell, even at that point snotty PJ or too quiet Jonny or the baby Jessica?
Thank God for West. West was the teenager whose room was directly across the hall from mine. Looking back now, he couldn't have been more than fourteen, but he was the one who explained that I wasn't in a prison or a government research facility--I was in a hospital in the mental ward. He was the one who finally got the vitals nurse to tell me my diagnosis and the name of the medication, both of which he recognized because he was Bipolar being treated with lithium as well. He was the one to explain that they weren't secretly vampires when they insisted in drawing blood every day, but that they were checking to make sure they didn't overdose me. When I was not able to sleep, he saw no problem with keeping me entertained. He had a marble and we would roll it back and forth across the hall--the challenge was to not get caught by the night nurse. When he was discharged, he managed to smuggle one of his books to read. To date, I still think IT was the longest book that I have read from cover to cover.
Once I understood what was going on, things got better quickly. I stopped fighting the staff and I agreed to the pills. The information that I had on what was wrong and how they were going to fix me was sketchy at best--but I understood that they were trying to make me not be other. And that I wanted more than anything else. I just wanted it all to end...and if I had to take a pill to do that, then that was acceptable.
But a lot of unnecessary psychological trauma could have been avoided if they hadn't assumed that because I was eight that I couldn't possibly understand and didn't need to be told what was going on. If a child had cancer, doctors go out of their way to explain every step of the way, and if not doctors, then the nurse or parents. The fact that they didn't because it was a mental illness is just an example of the institutionalized stigmatization of the mentally ill that goes on in our society. They locked me away and had it not been for West, I would have continued to have fought them every step of the way.
All because they assumed that I could not understand.
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