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My Experience Seeking Mental Health Help at a University Clinic

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When I was a teenager, being hospitalized for mental illness was a big joke. The local facility was located on a street called Wayne Ave. Wayne Ave., despite whatever else was located there (a pizza restaurant, I think), was shorthand for “crazy.” (This was no doubt an annoyance to people who actually lived on Wayne Ave., of which there were many. Now the former mental facility is a hospice.)

I knew by then that I was mentally unbalanced, but it never occurred to me that I would end up in Wayne Ave. It was an address used only to tease other kids, which was uncomfortable enough.

By the time I got to college, I was aware that I was in trouble, mentally. I had turned down the offer to see the school district psychologist in high school, delusional and afraid that it would show up in my permanent record and prevent me from getting into a good (or any) university.

I did, however, get into a very good university. (No idea if they took my lack of mental health treatment into consideration.) But by this time I was really suffering mentally and emotionally. I tried at least one therapy group, but was able to breeze through it without making any notable progress, thanks to my ability to “act normal” for an hour at a time.

Still, I figured it was just a matter of time until my mental disorders manifested themselves sufficiently to be generally noticed. Maybe even noticed enough to be diagnosed. And I was waxing delusional. I felt sure that at some point in my life I would be hospitalized for my illness. I just wanted to make it through college and work at a paying job for at least two years, if I could, in hopes of getting Social Security. (I said I was delusional.)

Along the way, though, I was (sort of) hospitalized for mental illness. I say “sort of,” because I went to the university clinic, a small facility with about a dozen beds, most of them used for students with flu and the like. There was a sort of witticism going around campus: It’s a short trip from Willard Straight (the student union building) to Willard State (the nearest psychiatric facility). Again, going to a psychiatric facility was considered a joke.

I was nearing the end of a disastrous relationship, self-injuring, self-medicating and vaguely suicidal. I checked in to the campus clinic. I don’t remember much of it, my brain obviously not working too well at the time. I had to tell them I wasn’t really suicidal, or else they would have called my parents, which I definitely didn’t want.

I do remember a nurse who would look in on me as I lay in bed crying. I don’t remember what if any treatment they prescribed. In my memory, mostly they just let me cry.

One very peculiar thing happened, though. The man of the disastrous relationship “checked me out” for an evening (much as you would check out a library book) to go to a dinner with someone in editing or publishing that he thought might help me get that coveted job after college. I don’t remember the dinner being a hit, and of course no job ever came from it. Then I was checked back into the clinic for a few more days of crying. I don’t remember how long I stayed or why I was finally released. It was altogether a peculiar experience, and the gaps in my memory have swallowed most of it.

I don’t think it actually helped me at all, other than to confirm to me that I was indeed ill, with some kind of mental disorder, and to reinforce my delusions. It also, I think, hastened the dissolution of that relationship, which proved to be a good thing in the long run. Was it all a ploy by the boyfriend to establish that I was the “sick one” for the purposes of couples counseling, which I had convinced him to try at one point? I’ll never know.

But since that time, I have never been hospitalized for my bipolar disorder. I have been properly diagnosed and treated. I now take psychotropic meds faithfully and see a therapist. I have been working for decades, except during a major depressive episode, when I learned how hard indeed it is to get Social Security for a psychiatric disability.

I suspect my hospitalization was far from typical. After all, it was dozens of years ago and not in a dedicated mental hospital or ward. I can’t say whether it helped me or not. But it’s an experience I never want to repeat – and, at last, something I never expect to endure again.

Getty image by Stígur Már Karlsson /Heimsmyndir

Originally published: January 21, 2022
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