I just got out of an involuntary 72-hour psychiatric hold, and boy is my humanity tired. I still feel like I’m being constantly watched, and I didn’t change my underpants for three days.
Listen. There are a lot of bad things about a psych ward. The food is mediocre, and no one understands that I’m lactose intolerant. Sometimes it’s too loud, and sometimes it’s too quiet. There’s no privacy. I was locked in an inescapable dungeon designed to thwart all kinds of attempts at liberation — including death. It is the panopticon I’ve always feared. The nurses clearly hated me. It exacerbated my paranoia. And: It’s boring.
But I could have handled all of that if they had just provided a halfway decent DVD selection.
I mean, “A Christmas Story 2”? Not even the original! “Enemy of the State”? Not with my paranoia and anxiety! Two copies of “The DUFF”? No one even knows that movie exists, and they have TWO copies! I finally settled on “The Ugly Truth,” but then the DVD was too scratched to watch.
A nurse told me that a copy of “Air Bud” had just been given back by a recently released patient, but when I asked her to get it she never did. Another nurse had no idea what a movie even was. Am I going insane here?
When I got home, I finally showered, changed my clothes, wrapped myself in a blanket and pulled out my special edition copy of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s “The Holy Mountain.” It was the safest I had felt in weeks.