The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness (9 page)

"You need to consult a psychiatrist right away," he said in a
measured tone. "You need to be on antidepressant medicine. You're in
danger, Elyn." This was serious business, he explained. I couldn't
afford to wait.

I thanked Richard and Jean for their concern, and told them I
would think about everything they'd said. But I was not persuaded.
Pills? Something chemical to go into my body and muck about with it?
No, that would be wrong. That's what I'd been taught at Operation
Re-Entry, that's what I believed. My father's voice:
Pull yourself
together, Elyn.
There could be no drugs—everything was all up to me.
And me wasn't worth much.
I'm not sick. I'm just a bad, defective,
stupid, and evil person. Maybe if I'd talk less I wouldn't spread my
evil around.

I needed to present another paper in my weekly seminar, but could
not write. A feverish all-nighter produced three or four pages of pure
drivel. Gobbledygook. Junk. Nevertheless, I read it aloud. Eyebrows
rose. But there was no laughter, only silence. I had thoroughly
humiliated myself in front of my Oxford colleagues.
I have come to
Oxford and I have failed. I am a bad person. I deserve to die.

I suddenly knew, as sure as I'd ever known anything in my life,
that if I tried to kill myself, I would succeed. Richard's words came
back to me, and this time I really heard them: I
was
in danger. This
was serious. I could die. And so many others—my parents, my
brothers, my friends, the ones I'd allowed myself to actually care
for—they would be badly hurt. However much pain I was in, however
dimly attractive an ending to this might be—I could not bring that
kind of pain to the people I loved and who loved me.

There was no time left to think, or consider, or strategize my way
out of this. I called Dr. Johnson, a doctor I'd been assigned as my
general practitioner when I first arrived, and urgently requested an
appointment for that very day.

Once at Dr. Johnson's office, I said I was feeling depressed. He
asked me why, and to my monosyllabic answers he reassured me that
I could come and talk to him from time to time, as I felt the need. He'd
no doubt seen his share of stressed-out students; perhaps I was simply
another.

"I think I need to see a psychiatrist," I said.

"I think I can help you, if you allow me," he said. I hadn't slept in
days, or bathed, or changed clothes—even I knew that I looked like
hell, why couldn't he? Why wasn't he more alarmed? Couldn't he see?
Didn't he know?

Dr. Johnson started to ask the same questions Richard had asked.
Was I sad? Had I lost pleasure in usually pleasurable things? How
were my sleeping and eating? Even though my answers were as they
had been to Richard's questions, Johnson didn't yet seem much
concerned. And then he asked if I'd thought about hurting myself.

"Yes," I said.

"Have you actually done anything?"

"Yes." And I showed him a quarter-sized burn on my hand, which
had come from deliberately touching an electric heater.

The expression on his face underwent a subtle change. "What
about killing yourself?" he asked. "Have you thought about that as
well?"

"Yes."

He leaned in closer. "How might you do that?" he asked.

"I have a full bottle of Inderal. A friend said it would kill me," I
said. Although I'd stopped taking the drug, I'd never thrown it out. I'd
also given some thought to touching the bars of the electric heater in
my dorm room and electrocuting myself, I told him. "Or maybe douse
myself with gasoline, set myself on fire. That might be best, because I
am bad and deserve to suffer." Then I started muttering gibberish,
something which I hadn't yet done in front of anyone I knew.

Dr. Johnson asked me to wait outside for a few moments, then
called me back into his office to say he had made an appointment for
one o'clock that afternoon at the Warneford, the psychiatric division
of Oxford's medical school.

"Will you be able to get there?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Will you go?"

"Yes." I was desperate. I held my own life in my hands, and it was
suddenly too heavy to be left there.

I called for a taxi from my dormitory telephone. One of the
"scouts" (as Oxford cleaning people were called) overheard me
mention the Warneford. I cringed under her squinty gaze.
Yes, yes,
you are right, I am a piece of shit, and I am going to the place for bad
people.

When I arrived at the Warneford, I was quickly ushered into a
small, windowless room with beige walls. There, a young woman with
sandy-colored hair and a hint of freckles introduced herself as Dr.
Smythe. She was not at all forbidding or official in her manner, and I
tried to calm down sufficiently to pay respectful attention to the
questions she was asking. But my head kept jerking in the direction of
the door, as though it wanted to lead me and my body out of the room.

Our talk went on for what seemed two or three hours. There were
many questions about my childhood, and even more questions about
my life right then. I remember thinking she seemed not to like me. At
that point, though, I was quite certain no one liked me.
There is
nothing about me to like.

Finally, Dr. Smythe asked me to step out into the waiting room,
where I sat nervously for about twenty minutes, wondering what was
going to happen next. When she called me back into her office, there
were five or six other doctors present, mostly middle-aged to older
men. Suddenly, I was frightened, as though I were in the center of a
bull's-eye.

Dr. Smythe introduced me to Dr. Russell, the one speaking for the
treatment team. As he proceeded to ask questions (much the same as
Dr. Smythe had asked earlier), I grew increasingly uncomfortable with
his stern demeanor. There was a deliberate tone in his voice—of
judgment, of disdain. His language was formal and yet somehow not
respectful, as though to say, "I wall make the decisions here, and you
wall do as I say."

Finally, Dr. Russell said, "We'd like you to become a patient in our
day hospital."

Terrified (and angry, both at the suggestion and his manner of
speaking to me), I refused outright. I wanted help, not incarceration. I
looked at the door behind him; it led out. Out.

"It's a day hospital, Miss Saks. You would be able to go home and

sleep in your own bed at night."

"No," I said flatly. "I don't belong in a hospital. I'm not crazy. This
isn't the right place for me."

He was undeterred. "It is our opinion that you need the support
and help of a day hospital." The other doctors were looking at me as
though I were a specimen in ajar.

"I'll be fine," I insisted, "as long as I can see a psychiatrist once or
twice a week."

"That would not be enough," Russell said firmly. "You really need
to come into the day hospital."

"No way!" I said, springing out of my chair and running as fast as I
could out of the room, and out of the hospital. I kept waiting to hear
the sound of footsteps behind me, their angry voices, someone yelling,
"Stop that woman!" But it didn't happen. I'd left them behind.

When I hit the street, I couldn't figure out at first which direction
to walk in, and didn't see any phone booths to call a taxi. So I just kept
walking. My breath was coming hard and fast, my heart was pounding
so hard I was certain passersby could see it.

I walked another nearly two miles to get back to my dorm. Once
there, I called Jean and Richard and told them what had happened.
Immediately, they insisted that I needed to follow the doctor's
recommendation. "No!" I said, and hung up, defiant and scared and
completely at a loss for what to do next.

That night was terrible. I lay awake in a pool of sweat, unable to
sleep, a mantra running through my head:
I am a piece of shit and I
deserve to die. I am a piece of shit and I deserve to die. I am a piece of
shit and I deserve to die.
Time stopped. By the middle of the night, I
was convinced day would never come again. The thoughts of death
were all around me; I realized then that they had begun the summer
before, like a small trickle in a creek where I had gone wading. Since
then, the water had been steadily rising. Now it was deep and fast and
slowly threatening to cover my head.

The next morning, haggard and beaten, I managed to call the
hospital and reach Dr. Smythe. "I'm glad you called," she said.
"Please, come in as soon as you can."

That lonely night had served its purpose. No one had locked me up
against my wall. I entered the hospital voluntarily. If I were going to be
a mental patient, at least it would be by my choice and no one else's.

chapter five

S
ET AMONG THE
green and gently rolling hills of Oxfordshire, the
Warneford Hospital could easily have been mistaken for the sprawling
estate of a British country gentleman—as nervous and distracted as I
was in the backseat of the taxi that was taking me there, I would not
have been surprised to see horses and hounds charging across the
lawns in pursuit of a frightened fox.

Built in the early 1800s (and once called the Warneford Lunatic
Asylum), the hospital was originally established "for the
accommodation of lunatics selected from the higher classes of
society." In those days, they used to routinely "bleed" the patients,
believing that the bad blood coming to the surface and leaving the
body would cool the overheated brain. If it were only that simple.

The day hospital was apart from the main building in an old,
tree-shaded house. At first, I expected a program like Operation
Re-Entry—intense, confrontational groups and a staff prepared to
sniff out and expose any duplicity among the patients. Within an hour
of arriving, however, I knew I was in the middle of something very
different. The daily routine consisted of a number of activities—group
therapy, one-to-one meetings with a psychiatrist, reading plays aloud,
board games (mostly Scrabble, which I played but could never win,
because I couldn't think straight). But much of our time was spent
sitting in a dayroom, furnished somewhat like a living room, where we
could talk, smoke, or just stare quietly off into space. But it was not a
living room. Anyone would have known in a heartbeat that this was a
place for mental patients.

Sitting in one corner was a young man rocking back and forth on
the chair, talking gibberish to himself, with a blank stare, hair that
hadn't been washed in weeks, and the remnants of his last meal on
and around him. I was told he was from an upper-class, wealthy,
accomplished family. All of his siblings had gone to Oxford; he'd
ended up here instead.

This was the first seriously ill psychiatric patient I'd ever seen. He
scared me to death. It was the first time I imagined that I could be
that
sick.
Will I end up like him?

The days at the Warneford turned into a week, then a second week.
I canceled my appointments with my tutor, using what no doubt
sounded like completely lame excuses (on the other hand, he was
probably quite familiar with the sporadically unpredictable comings
and goings of moody graduate students). There was no attendance
taken at lectures, so my absence there went unremarked. As for the
work itself, I was convinced I would be able to keep up with my
reading and somehow catch up...After all, this was temporary. This
was like a bad cold, or a bout of the flu. Something had gone wrong; it
was simply a matter of finding out what that something was and fixing
it.

I slept each night in my own bed, tried to read before shutting out
the light, then rose the next day and trudged back to the Warneford. It
was at this point, I think, that my life truly began to operate as though
it were being lived on two trains, their tracks side by side. On one
track, the train held the things of the "real world"—my academic
schedule and responsibilities, my books, my connection to my family
(whom so far I'd managed to convince, on a series of blessedly brief
long-distance phone calls, that everything at Oxford was going just
fine, thanks). On the other track: the increasingly confusing and even
frightening inner workings of my mind. The struggle was to keep the
trains parallel on their tracks, and not have them suddenly and
violently collide with each other.

Daily, my thoughts grew more disorganized. I'd start a sentence,
then be unable to remember where I was going with it. I began to
stammer severely, to the point where I could barely finish a thought.
No one could stand to listen to me talk; some of the patients made fun
of me. Disengaged from my surroundings, I sat in the dayroom for
hours at a time, jiggling my legs (I couldn't sit still, no matter how I
tried), not noticing who came in or out, not speaking at all. I was
convinced I was evil. Or maybe I
was
crazy—after all, I was sitting in a
mental hospital, wasn't I? Evil, crazy; evil, crazy. Which was it? Or
was it both?

One by one, each member of the staff tried to talk me into using
antidepressant medication. Their recommendation surprised me. I
thought they would encourage me to take something that would calm
my body or organize my speech. Either way, antianxiety or
antidepressant, I was adamant in my refusal.
All mind-altering drugs
are bad. I am weak, I simply need to get stronger, try a little harder,
and all will be well.
Was that the sentient part of my mind speaking,
or the fractured part? I could not tell.

I spent most of one desperate weekend walking alone near the
university, in a beautiful place called Christ Church Meadows. But the
beauty of my surroundings made no impact on me at all; for all I knew
I could have been walking in an underground cave. I felt only
desperation, and a profound isolation that every day seemed to
burrow more deeply into me. What a waste of oxygen it was for me to
draw breath. Suddenly, the solution presented itself: killing myself.
There it was again. And it seemed the best option.
I'll douse myself
with gasoline and light a match. A fitting end for a person as evil as
I.