Seven days in the teenage psychiatric unit

by Erika Nichols-Frazer

TW: Anorexia, depression, numerous mentions of suicide

The first night there was the scariest. I’d never felt so alone, so terrified of the unknown. After being thoroughly physically and mentally examined by a series of doctors, stripped to a hospital gown, freezing at seventy-eight pounds, I was brought to my new room. It was something between a cheap motel room and the dorms at Norwich University, where I’d spent a week the last two summers at a hockey camp—sparse, neat, outdated. The twin bed was firm, the thin sheets stiff. Nothing on the two desks. Outside the window was the parking lot, lit up eerily, as though something lurked in the dark parts. The glow of the fluorescent lights of the hallway leaked in under the door. There was no mirror in the bathroom, only a shiny piece of metal, edges rounded, no corners, bolted to the wall above the sink. I tested the shower; no hot water. For months as my body withered, became weak, I’d been constantly cold. No blood circulation in my pronounced veins.

My roommate, Tammy, was already in bed by the time I got there. She turned to face the door and squinted at the light. She was chubby, frizzy hair artificial orange. The orderly left me and my bag, which he’d carried since I was so frail. A nurse had dug through it and confiscated my razor (my legs were covered in fluffy lanugo and needed to be shaved often) and my loofah, which had a small string the nurse said somebody could use to hang themselves. They even took my books, my closest friends.

Tammy was a talker. It didn’t take her long to tell me how she’d tried to kill herself, swallowed a bottle of aspirin, the taste of the charcoal that paramedics forced her to swallow. I didn’t ask why, knowing well there might not be a clear reason. It wasn’t logical, this impulse, I knew. She demonstrated for me a sexy dance she’d made up to “Baby Got Back.” She asked why I didn’t eat. I didn’t know how to talk to her. I didn’t have words for what hurt.

I couldn’t sleep. This wasn’t new; for months, since I’d virtually stopped eating completely, I’d barely slept. I was usually up half the night pacing, shivering, up at five to go for a run in the dark before school. My eyes looked gaunt, I see now in photos, sunken. My skin like ash, bones brittle, prone to bruising. Here, the light under the door and parking lot lights kept our room illuminated. I didn’t know how Tammy slept, but soon she was snoring.

I turned on Everclear on my Discman and listened to the CD at least twice through while I was so anxious I was shaking. All I could focus on was, They left me here.

I’d spent nights away from home—at sleepovers, camp—but I’d never felt so homesick, so alone. My parents had abandoned me here, two and a half hours from home, just showed up at school with a duffle bag and led me to the car. Now they were gone and I was here. No end in sight.

I was thirteen in the fall of eighth grade and I was, as was clear to everyone, anorexic. My depression hung off my shoulder blades and hip bones, which were sharp as a blade. My friend Ali told me she was there, if I wanted to talk, but I didn’t know how to yet. I’d been taught to swallow my feelings, deal with them on my own.

My parents demanded to know what was wrong with me, why I was doing this to them. I was giving my dad ulcers, he told me. He couldn’t possibly know how guilty I felt, how I teetered on the edge of wanting to live, and that hurting my family might just push me over that edge. I didn’t want to be a burden on anyone.

My little brother spied on me, reporting to our parents when I threw out food or lied about eating. I felt like I couldn’t trust anyone, like the whole world was against me, judging me. I wanted to be perfect, to prove to myself that I was worthy of the love my family gave in abundance. They gave me what I needed and much more, but they didn’t know how to talk to me, how to listen. They wanted an answer for why I was so sullen and angry at times, so hyper at others. They didn’t understand why I got so sad. Why sometimes I’d lie just to see if I could. My Bipolar diagnosis was years away. There were no words to describe my pain.

I was a lost thirteen-year-old with no one I felt I could talk to, despite several offers. The people who loved me, for some reason I couldn’t figure out, wanted to help but didn’t know how. And I didn’t know how to ask for help or how to receive it. I was used to just dealing with it (or not) on my own. I didn’t know why I was so different, so far away from everyone else. I didn’t yet understand dissociation, the way I sometimes felt like I wasn’t even there. I didn’t think I deserved food. By eating as little as possible, I was trying to prove I could not need, I could be not greedy like so many others suffered, I could exist.

After a while of lying in my uncomfortable bed, unable to calm my frantic thoughts, I got up to walk the halls. It was around 3:00 a.m. and the only person in sight was an orderly in scrubs at the desk. “Get back in bed,” he scolded. Walking was prohibited. Nurses would follow me down the halls, counting my steps with a ticker. I wasn’t allowed to participate in the daily outdoor walks to conserve calories. I was stuck in the stale hospital air and harsh lights.

The days were structured; group stretch before breakfast, individual therapy in the mornings, art therapy, then group after lunch, where I learned everyone else on the ward had tried to kill themselves. Anorexia was a slow method of suicide, one of the therapists told me. I was disappearing, a living ghost.

Mealtimes were the worst. A nurse would sit with me and make sure I ate every calorie on my plate, smearing the butter on my bread—I hadn’t allowed myself butter in months. I would sit at the kitchen table long after the other patients had relocated to the TV area to watch reality shows or Lifetime movies. Each bite was painful, emotionally and physically, as I hadn’t eaten more than 100 calories or so a day in months. The nutrition plan the doctors had devised had me eating 3,000+ calories a day to regain the weight I’d lost. I gained four pounds in a week, which was devastating to me at the time.

I was allowed to have two friends on my call list so I talked to my best friends, Ali and Kelsey, most afternoons during free time. They filled me in on school and our hockey team, which had sent me a card urging me to get better soon. I felt like I was on another planet from those normal activities. I didn’t know how to tell them about this lonely place. I was too tired trying to unpack every negative feeling towards myself for the doctors. I didn’t have words for how I felt as though I were drifting away from myself.

Though I was only in the hospital for a week, having quickly learned exactly what I needed to say to the doctors to be released, it felt like years. It changed me. When I repeatedly asked how long I’d have to stay I was told again and again that that was up to me. My mission was to get out of there, to go home to the family who had sent me away. No one seemed to understand my pain. I was supposed to be in recovery following my release, supposed to comply with the meal plan the nutritionist had made for me, limit excessive cardio exercise. I didn’t do any of those things. Within weeks, I was restricting food again and trying to hide it from my parents, trying to never go back to a place like that again. If anything, the hospital slowed my healing process as it put fear in me of opening up, being determined ‘crazy,’ and landing back in the state hospital or somewhere even further away from home. I heard the whispers in the hall about the girl who’d been to a psych ward. My distrust of those close to me heightened as I worried I’d be abandoned again, left alone in a sterile and terrifying place, never to return to myself and the life I knew. It took years of work to learn how to care for myself, how to love all the parts of myself, to feed myself again.

Seven days in the teenage psychiatric unit

Erika Nichols-Frazer

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