THE MENTAL HOSPITAL IN SOUTHEAST ASIA
One day, I had woken up in a room, not knowing how I got there. It had metal bars, similar to a prison cell. The three walls were painted with a calming shade of green, but I was anything but calm. I was screaming.
I thought I had gotten over my trauma, until a few days ago, I had a dream that brought me back to that place. I was lying strapped down in that green room as the doctor attached electrical nodes to my temples and administered Electroconvulsive Therapy. She had shoved white gauze in my mouth so I wouldn’t bite my own tongue. That white gauze would soon turn red.
There is a sudden pain as my eyesight goes dark. My body convulses, and I remain unconscious for several minutes afterwards.
I had forgotten what it felt like until I had that dream again. And now I cannot stop thinking about it. To be honest, I can’t remember exactly how many times I had electroconvulsive therapy. That’s the thing about it, it makes you forget.
I befriended a girl at that mental hospital. We spoke for two weeks about trivial things like k-pop music and korean dramas. There was nothing else to do but sit around and talk. There was nothing ‘wrong’ with her mental state. Rather, she was a practitioner of Falun Gong and her family did not approve. So they had her locked up in a mental institution.
When her father came to visit, the doctor threatened her that if she begged to go home, she would be given electroconvulsive therapy. And my friend did beg to go home, who wouldn’t? And so the doctor had people tie her down as she cried, and she was zapped in the head with electricity in the same manner I was.
I visited her after she regained consciousness. Her face was streaked with tears and she appeared dazed. She didn’t remember who I was, or what my name was. And we had been talking for two weeks, for hours every day. We had made plans that after we both left, she would come visit my house. But after she left, she never did call. Wherever she is now, I hope she is okay.
The other friend I made there is not doing so well. She’s in prison now. Her life story is unfortunate. She dropped out of school when she was young and started working. And she became very successful. But then she married an abusive man who savagely beats her. Later on her business ventures failed, and she owed people a lot of money. Her husband divorced her and married another woman, and her kids are with him while she remains institutionalized. She hasn’t seen her kids in a year. It’s too far for them to visit, not that her ex husband would take them to visit her anyway.
I don’t know the specifics, but I genuinely believe that she is a good person. She took care of me for months when I was literally insane. I cursed and yelled at her, but she still fed me and bathed me when I didn’t know anything. The nurses and orderlies didn’t bother to do any of that. They left the responsibility of caring for patients to other patients.
There were two women there who attempted to kill their children after their husbands had cheated on them. One jumped down a well with her baby in an attempted suicide, and the other gave poison to their kids to ingest. My father said that if their children had died, they would regret it for the rest of their lives.
That hospital was rather corrupt. If you bribed the nurses, they would bring you whatever food you wanted from outside. But you had to pay three to four times the usual price. We ate at 9am and 3pm every day. If you didn’t buy extra food, you only got two meals a day, and the meals there were rather plain. It was usually rice with two boiled eggs, or two small pieces of meat, and precisely two pieces. No one gets anything extra unless there were leftovers. From 3pm until bedtime at 9pm, there were no more meals unless you spent money to buy extra snacks.
Many people have spent years in this hospital with no visitors, and they had no money to buy anything. Not even toilet paper (yes, you had to buy your own). After eating, you had to wash the dishes yourself. There was no cleaning staff. Every Sunday, the patients had to scrub the bathroom themselves.
As for the bathroom, it was one big communal shower with squat toilets placed side by side. There is no privacy. Everyone saw each other naked, but you quickly learned not to care. You had to hand-wash your own clothes and hang it out to air-dry. During the rainy seasons, the clothing rack had to be moved indoors, and they didn’t dry so well.
Southeast Asia is a hot place. There was no air conditioning in this hospital. The place I was in was one big courtyard, with three buildings on the sides. I slept in a large room with over a dozen other people. There weren’t even proper beds. It was a metal slab with metal panels, and you placed a straw mat over it. My friend had gotten me a large cushion so I didn’t have to lay on the hard surface.
The staff there would tie you to a metal bed if you misbehaved, got into fights, or tried to commit suicide. And they just left you lying there for a whole day. A few people got tied up for nearly a week. The nurses would let you out once a day to go take a shit. If you needed to urinate, you’re left to piss on yourself. They would even leave a tub/bucket underneath the metal bed to collect urine. After someone is released, they would hose down the metal bed with water, but it was still unsanitary. And downright inhumane.
Believe it or not, my dad said this was the biggest and nicest mental hospital in the South.
I once asked a girl there if she ever contemplated suicide, and she told me, “Even an ant wants to live, so why wouldn’t I?” I no longer remember her face or name, but her words would forever remain in the back of my mind.
The saddest thing I can admit is that my happiest birthday party was at that hospital. (Although my dad had to bribe the doctor with a lot of money to get me a birthday cake). It was the happiest I’ve been in a long time. Because there I had a lot of friends.
I make a lot of friends whenever I go to the mental hospital. And I’ve been institutionalized seven times in my life. However, those friendships did not last because life naturally draws us apart. But that’s the only thing I really want in this life. Good friends that will stick by you through hardship.
After leaving that place, I experienced slight PTSD whenever I had to lay down on a surface with someone standing near my head. I was getting a facial one day, and the experience was agonizing. Looking up into a bright light, with a woman touching my face, my toes and hands were clenched as I would brace for the incoming electric shock. Then pain and darkness.
I don’t actually remember much of my personal experience, but I would forever remember how it happened to other people. How their body would repeatedly convulse from the electroconvulsive therapy. It was downright scary to see.
Occasionally, I would reflect on my experiences, and I feel that all our sufferings build character and substance – not to say that suffering is a good thing! But when I was younger, I was hauty. I felt infallible. Now after all of my failures, I have been humbled. I now understand what compassion is. And seeing my dad visit me at the hospital every week, I finally understood what love was.
(Work in Progress)
submitted by /u/Erisanne
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