Let's call the place [Redacted Hospital].

The breakfast served was usually cold scrambled eggs, toast, and some sort of weak, rubbery breakfast meat. When the breakfasts were still lukewarm, we ate quickly, filled with excitement.

Why was the food cold? Because the hospital was a giant compound, housing hundreds of mental patients. Every meal had to be individually wrapped, then they were all sent out at the same time on a single truck. Whenever we weren't first or second in line to receive the food (rotating schedule), it would be cold.

The nurses were always on their phones. They mostly wanted everyone to shut the fuck up so they could continue texting/social media.

I was in the short term ward for presenting manic in public. I tried to fight the cops.

Then my manic ass kept acting up in the first hospital they sent me to, sprinting around pressing fire alarms until a real fire truck pulled up.

For what reasons were there so many big red fire alarms easily accessible to mental patients? I will never know. A rather large nurse tackled me, then sat her entire body weight on my back, rendering me unable.to do anything but wheeze.

Staff then manhandled me into the tiny restraint room. They were tightening the cuffs around my wrists and ankles when I said I had to use the bathroom. They told me to just piss myself. They didn't care.

The big nurse who crushed my back snapped, "Now you're going to [Redacted Hospital], and you're not going to like it there!".

I was transported across town in chains by police to the new place.

[Redacted Hospital] also had a long term ward there, for people whose families abandoned them. In general, they had nothing to their names or nowhere to go.

The people in the long term ward had oddly similar facial expressions. We would pass each other while the nurses walked us in lines down the hallways, or they'd occasionally have group activities that together. I learned that many of the long term patients had been placed on multiple, multiple, multiple antipsychotic drugs.

The glazed eyes of most the long termers did not point straight. I don't know why that had tended to happen to nearly all them, although I suspect it's a particularly nasty side effect of a certain drug.

I don't recall a single long term person who wasn't morbidly obese. During group, they would sit complacently throughout, occasionally piping up with a slow, single-clause thought when prompted by an instructor. The instructors gave high praise when one of them completed a comprehensible sentence.

The doctor did not give one single flying fuck about these people he basically turns into zombies. I bet he's still doing it to this very day. He tried to put me on some stupid, shitty antipsychotics, knowing damn well I hate feeling foggy in the head. I cheeked the pills and washed them down the sink whenever I could.

I told him multiple times I did not like the drugs, but he would not listen. With a quick little wave of his hand to shut me up, he let me know he didn't give a shit about the people there. He was obviously a highly paid man, and this was his main place of practice, but he only came in once or maybe twice a week.

During my second week there, after being sexually harassed by some other, significantly older mentally ill women whom I had to share a room with, I threatened suicide unless he let me return home.

I laid it out clearly for him:

"I hate this place. I WILL kill myself unless I am released. I won't tell you how. I won't tell you when. But I have a plan, it's easy, and I will do it. Do you want a lawsuit?"

He looked alarmed, so I repeated the question, slowly.

(My plan was to climb up the super high chain link fence, then leap down directly onto my head on the concrete. No one would have/could have stopped me.)

He completed the necessary exit paperwork for me by afternoon the next day. Less than 48 hours of making a childish suicide threat, I was released.

So many people had spent years there, minds wasting away to nothing while the doctor basically killed them slowly.

Fuck that place. I still can't have my scrambled eggs any less than steaming hot.

Thank you for reading about my traumatizing experience.