My First Day in a Mental Hospital in the 1990's

My first day as an inpatient in a mental hospital in the 1990's

        “How long have you been here?” the gaunt, unshaven man asked the Glaswegian lady sitting next to me, his fingers tapping the table too fast for my liking. He had a feral, haunted look in his eyes, and the smell of rotting eggs hung around him like an unwanted guest. The three of us sat on hard plastic chairs around a hard plastic table in the bleak hospital canteen. A canteen that was far from welcoming; white walls, white floors, metal sinks and kitchen staff who looked like they would have chewed off their arms to be somewhere else.

Anywhere else.

 

On nearby tables, other patients picked at their flavourless food, muttering quietly, or pushing it around their plates with no intention of letting it anywhere near their mouths. It was my first breakfast as an inpatient in the Royal Edinburgh Psychiatric Hospital, and it was not a meal I ever want to repeat. I was seventeen and felt like a calf separated from the herd, surrounded by strangers who bristled with madness. Potent sedatives had taken the edge off my paranoia, but I continued to live in an imaginary horror movie playing inside my head.

Maggie, the lady sitting next to me, filled the silence with words I did not want to hear. She was a white-haired pensioner who looked like she had spent her entire life drunk but hadn’t enjoyed a drop. For the last twenty minutes, she had told me about her endless journey through the Scottish mental health system, rarely drawing breath. Forty years in and out of psychiatric institutes, Maggie had been around the block and was proud of it. She had seen it all, and was at home amidst the screams and violence, which I was soon to discover were a part of everyday life in a mental hospital in the nineties. I, on the other hand, was not old enough to order a pint and her tales filled me with dread.

“Nine months,” Maggie replied to the gaunt, unshaven man, as if commenting on the weather. “I’ve got no idea when I’ll get out.

“Oh, my God,” I panicked, still silent. “What if they never let me out of this place?” My heart hollowed, my stomach tightened and before I knew it, I was running towards a sink. Reaching the sink in the nick of time, I spewed vomit all over it and the floor around me. The crowded canteen fell silent and every patient capable of doing so stopped talking and stared straight at me. Once the retching was over, a mixture of embarrassment and loneliness hit me like a slab of concrete. A kind-hearted nurse rushed to my side and put a comforting hand on my back.

“It’s okay, Oliver. It’s not your fault. I’ll clear this up,” she reassured me, poking through my sick with the end of her biro to see if my morning pills had been digested. It was the autumn of 1993, I was only a teenager, soft spoken and small for my age. I had barely eaten or slept for two weeks and was in the grip of a deep and horrifying manic psychosis. 

I wanted to cry. 

I wanted to scream. 

I wanted out.

This blog is an excerpt from Oliver Seligman's book, Befriending Bipolar: a patient's perspective. 

Oliver has a Youtube channel called: @livingbetterwithbipolar       

Here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/@livingbetterwithbipolar