The roundabout
Reflections from the psych ward (again)
I write this from the psych hospital, where I have been locked up for 18 days. [I type this into my computer upon returning home, after being there for 21 days.]. I believe my discharge is in 3-4 days, but I’m not sure, as it already has been postponed three times due to side effects and medication management. I really miss life on the outside and the coping tools I can access there: weighted blanket, comfy pillows, piano, familiar food. I miss having my electronics and being able to type up my writing instead of scribbling with stubby little golf pencils as I am doing now. Life in a hospital sucks, and this being my third hospitalization in just 4 months makes me want to despair. Except that I’m manic right now, and despair in mania tends to feel more like hot anger for me.
In some ways I’m doing swellingly, having created over 160 artworks (most rapidly and intuitively drawn with oil pastels, crayons, and/or markers), dozens of origami, and twelve new poems. Mania turns my hyperfixating and creative capacities on overdrive. It’s actually not as pleasant as its creative products might suggest. It is not fun to routinely wake up at around 2 am having nothing to do except pace, make art or origami, or failingly attempt to go back to sleep.
I ended up here again because despite my being consistent with my medications, a period of autistic burnout transformed into a manic episode more severe than anything I’d experienced before. The psychological mechanism is probably similar to how depressive episodes can trigger manic episodes for bipolar people (and vice versa), but there does not seem to be much research done on this phenomenon, perhaps because most people are concerned about differentiating autism from bipolar, rather than exploring the intersections that many people experience.
Mania has made me do some quite unusual things, like climb a refrigerator and torrentially text a friend at midnight cryptic messages including a remix of Baa Baa Black Sheep (“Waa waa black jeep, have you got control? Yes sir, yes sir, three wheels full…”). After around five or six days of this, my condition worsened, and I knew that I needed to go to the hospital. The problem was, I was stuck at my parents’ house (because I was resting there during burnout and did not want to risk driving my car), and my parents were vehemently against my going to the hospital again, even suggesting that my repeated hospital visits were the cause of my worsening mental health. My father had the audacity to claim that I “liked” the hospital, when actually I hate it and only wish to go if I really need to. Whereas in depression I am at risk of doing something dangerous because I want to hurt myself, in mania I am tempted to do dangerous, even life-threatening things just for fun, as some part of me starts to believe that I can break the laws of physics.
So, since my parents wouldn’t take me to the hospital, my psych nurse sent an ambulance to the home in order to get me to appropriate care. The resulting heated arguments with my parents increased the intensity of the mania for a few days, and I was so glad to be in the hospital when that happened. It was the same hospital as I was at twice in the fall, so its familiarity was comforting even if its aesthetics were not.
So now it’s a waiting game until the nurse practitioner decides that I am good to be discharged. She postponed my discharge date three times for reasons that I consider to be only 30% sensical, especially since multiple times she was wrong and I was right. I want to get out so badly! Average stays are 7-10 days, so this being my 18th feels ridiculous. Yet there have been people who’ve been in hospitals for much longer than that, including one person I met when I was hospitalized in October, who had been there for seven months.
I feel scared for what the coming months will bring. If I can have a severe manic episode while medicated, what does that mean for my stability long-term? I also experienced some minor hallucinations for the first time earlier in this episode, in which I perceived something that some part of me logically knew couldn’t be real but some part of me actually experienced as real. The instances disoriented me and made me afraid for myself. I have previously been labelled as psychotic because of catatonic-like states, derealization, and speech and thought disturbances, but those experiences can also be attributed to autism and/or trauma. Seeing visual patterns like a game board on my forearms as well as the floor, walls, and ceiling seems more like psychosis proper.
I really hope I don’t have to go to a hospital again. It’s tiring to be here so many times. But I also can’t control the dances of my brain, especially in my early twenties when neurologically I am still intensely growing and pruning. All I can do is try my best to care for myself and seek help when I need it.
Currently as I type this, I am at my parents’ house, still hypomanic. My fear is that I will become depressed after this. But even if I do, I know that I can cope.