The Staff, Part 3: Perky Nurse

In an effort to write shorter posts, I'll cover the Nurses one at a time. No need to overwhelm you with text, my gentle readers. ("TLDR" is a valid concern.)

What I said earlier in the entry on the Therapists about the staff always sporting a colorful wardrobe was particularly true for the Nurses. Scrubs come in an absurd variety of colors, so a cheerful selection is not hard to come by. All the Nurses tended to wear cheerful or at least pleasing colors. ...And then there was Perky Nurse.

Perky Nurse was an explosion of color and cheer. I don't think there are even names for some of the shades of pink she would wear.

Short, spiky hair. Wild earrings. And pink scrubs.

It wasn't just the wardrobe that made me deem her "Perky Nurse." She simply was... perky. For being a Nurse in a psychiatric ward full of somber faces and snot-nosed tears, she was somehow all smiles, and they weren't even the kind of forced, vapid smiles that Therapist Verdigris had. Perky Nurse's smiles were all-natural, and intense. I could always tell when she was working a shift because I could hear her sunny-toned voice from anywhere on the unit. "Boisterous" is the word, I think. She greeted each patient boisterously, despite the fact that it was 8:00AM and no one should be "boisterous" before nine or ten o'clock.

She was a one-woman platoon against the grim and gloomy atmosphere of the ward. She would fill the void with her gaiety and habromania entirely on her own, and was darn determined to do it.

She cared for her patients like they were her children, full of maternal and absolutely unconditional love. It didn't matter if you were so comatose that you were staring right through her. She still had a smile for you and would make your bed.

That's right. She would make her patients' beds for them.

One day, when she was assigned as my Nurse for the morning shift, I returned to my room to catch her mid-fold as she made my bed. I'd seen her do this for my roommate and was baffled by the behavior. It certainly isn't a nurse's job to make the patients' beds, and the ward was grossly understaffed as it was. So I asked her: why?

"I want you all to feel cared for," she said, fluffing my bed's meager pillow. Then she looked at me with a giant smile and said, "I'm the Bed Fairy!"

I wish I was kidding. Seriously. You can't make this stuff up.

By CSA Images/Snapstock at Getty Images.

So -- thank you, Bed Fairy, for making me feel cared for during my stay. I hope you have many victories in your war against Sadness.

That much pink in a single outfit is completely unnecessary, though.


P.S. I forgot to add -- after that particular bed-making incident, Perky Nurse declared that my lone pillow was the saddest pillow she'd ever seen.

"It looks like it's been run over by a truck!" she declared, and promptly fetched me a second pillow to make up for my initial pillow's failings.

I didn't have to be jealous anymore of my roommate's ownership of a second pillow. I had my own secunda pillow, thanks to the Bed Fairy.

The Staff, Part 1: The Therapists

There were six Therapists regularly scheduled in Ward 3A: Therapist Hard Stare, Therapist Chipmunk, Therapist Verdigris, Therapist Congolais, Therapist Barbie, and Therapist Hawaiian Shirt. I think I've only mentioned the first three so far, but I've had interactions with them all.

Therapists in the ward are different from The Doctors. For every shift, you were assigned a different Nurse and Therapist, but one's Doctor stayed the same from day to day. You meet with your Doctor once every day at an unpredictable time, usually for about a half-hour, and The Doctor prescribes meds. Therapists help the Nurses, lead group sessions, and have one-on-one talks with the patients (when they're not too busy, which was more often than not). Therapists, here, are for "working through your issues." The Doctors are for meds and wheedling out permission for discharge. The Doctors are more like what you'd find in a therapist or psychologist or psychiatrist outside a hospital; in fact, most of The Doctors actually had their own private practices outside the hospital, hence the general wonky nature of their schedules. The Therapists are creatures found only in an environment like this, since their primary job is to lead group sessions, and there are only a few specific places in this world that have the torture that is group therapy.

Let me say a few words about each of The Therapists on 3A.


Therapist Hard Stare

Cropped from a Scott Cunningham

photo at Getty Images

I'll always associate Therapist Hard Stare with the need to watch Patient X, as it always seemed to be Therapist Hard Stare who was saddled with that job, mostly because he was the only Therapist tough enough to exert even an ounce of control over Patient X's antics. (He was the one who would say things like "Down, boy!")

He tended to run loud group sessions, as he brought out a noticeable argumentativeness in the patients, and he wasn't above raising his voice to try to regain control. Dealing with psych patients is sort of like dealing with children, so I'd say his "parenting" method was exerting control through displays of power. He'd try to reason with the patients, as all the Therapists would try to do, but he'd have a stronger voice as he did it.

Even though it's hard for The Therapists to spend much one-on-one time with the patients because of the ward being so greatly understaffed, Therapist Hard Stare still often found some time to seek me out, as he noticed (and at least once remarked upon the fact) that I wasn't one to speak readily during group sessions. I'm just not... good at that sort of thing. Talk about how I'm feeling, I mean. Especially in front of a group.

Whenever he would talk to me outside of group sessions, he always emphasized the importance of working on communication skills -- emotional communication, which is something I've come to realize that I do need to work on. I can communicate effectively in normal situations, but ask me to talk about my feelings and I suddenly lose all my words. I appreciated that he would never use his Control Voice on me, but then again I don't think he needed to. Talking too much or arguing with him wasn't my problem. Saying anything at all, that was my problem. He would soften around me, trying to coax me into at least trying to say how I felt, but I never failed to be intimidated by the intensity of his eyes; when he looked at you, he really looked at you. Hence the moniker I've assigned to him.

He's also the Therapist who said on the Day of the Great Understaffing, "I'm not paid to do two people's jobs." See Therapist Congolais (below) for the exact opposite of that mentality.


Therapist Chipmunk

From Chip and Dale Online. Seriously.

Therapist Chipmunk once told me that she specialized in art therapy. Then why did we never have any art therpy, huh? I don't know. Whatever. Anyway, Therapist Chipmunk typically had the mid-morning shift, so she always ran Education Groups. Therefore, as a Therapist, she didn't have to lead a discussion. She just had to deliver an hour-long monologue, assisted by writing nearly everything she said on the whiteboard in the kitchen area. The day we talked about Affirmations, she even encouraged us to take notes. (I indeed took notes, but not on affirmations.) All in all, she bugged the crap out of me. Perhaps I wouldn't think of her so unkindly if she hadn't woken me up from a nap that one time I skipped her precious Education Group, but I take my sleep very seriously. Deprive me of sleep, and you are dead to me.

Why do I call her Therapist Chipmunk, you ask? ...Well. She looked like a chipmunk. Plain and simple.


Therapist Verdigris

By jennyfdowning at Getty Images

I call her "Therapist Verdigris" because, for at least three days, I was sure that her name was "Patina". Seriously. (It's not actually "Patina".) She would wear funky jewelry, chic glasses, men's shoes, and a pleasant but slightly vacant smile. The vapidness of the smile probably arises from trying to be pleasant to absolutely everyone all of the time. (And therefore she can't keep control of a group session the way Therapist Hard Stare can.) She was very nice, though. While I never had a one-on-one therapy-esque talk with her, she always said hello to me when we crossed paths and she never had to ask me what my name was. She always knew.

I'll always remember her specifically for the time when Patient X took his pants off in the TV room. When I told her about it, all she did was lose that pasted-on smile for a moment and sigh, "Again?"


Therapist Congolais

From the Wiki page about

the Democratic Republic of the Congo

Therapist Congolais (Debout Congolais!) was my favorite of all the Therapists, not because he did anything specific, but because days were made more bearable by his genuine pleasantness. That, and I loved listening to his accent. It was so soothing. Comforting. He was always so sincerely kind to every patient, even if a patient was being Difficult that day (or every day). He once spent most of a morning Community Meeting giving a speech about how the staff was there to "serve" all of us, which I thought was weird at the time. It took me a while to understand that that was honestly how he felt about his job, that he was there to serve us. He was so devoted to that sense of service that when, on the Day of the Great Understaffing, he found out that we hadn't had a Process Group that afternoon, he immediately held one the moment his shift started -- at 7:00 pm (some three-to-four hours late).

He, more than any other Therapist, made an effort to have one-on-one talks with the patients outside of group sessions. He sought me out specifically at least three times, usually to talk about self-esteem. He would give me assignments to do (making lists, writing journal entries, etc.) and honestly wanted me to give him the finished product. Patient L would give him her journal to read every time he came in, and, bless him, he'd read all of it and then talk to her about it.

Unfortunately for me and the rest of the patients, he had to leave the hospital about half-way through my stay because he was going to start working on his PhD full-time at George Mason University. We all wished him good luck, but were sorry to see him go. 


Therapist Barbie

She can only be described through this picture:

This is actually an (altered by me) advertisement for CEO Barbie,

but that's as close to psychology as Barbie has ever come in her career choices.

Seriously. She looked like a Barbie doll.

She was also kind of a bitch. Just sayin'.


Therapist Hawaiian Shirt

Cropped from a George Diebold photo at Getty Images.

I only met Therapist Hawaiian Shirt once, and that was at my very first Process Group, but I am assured that, yes, he does wear Hawaiian shirts every day. The particular shirt I saw was a black background with large orange tropical flowers on it. When asked why he wore Hawaiian shirts, he replied that Therapists were required to wear collared shirts, and these were the most comfortable collared shirts he could find. Fair enough.

(I eventually noticed that all the staff, both Therapists and Nurses, would always dress in bright, cheerful colors, so a Hawaiian shirt was not all that far-fetched. I'm not sure if that dress code is supposed to cheer up the patients or what, but that much visual stimulation was a little too much to take at eight o'clock in the morning.)

He was very Freudian in his approach to group therapy, always encouraging patients to seek what happened in their childhood that might have led them to their current mental state. "Everything comes from something," he would say. I'd thought that particular outlook went out of style with Freud, but he was proof to the contrary. It wasn't exactly a way to ease me into the world of group therapy, being forced to delve into the untapped pains of my childhood in front of a group of strangers, but he made me feel as if the delving were actually productive. It made me cry, after all. And two other female patients cried with me out of sympathy. He nodded a lot, urging me on, then told me afterward that I was already finding some real issues to work on, so good for me! (Maybe that sentence calls for a "?" instead of a "!"...)

I never had another Process Meeting that intense. Some tears in others, yes, but not with that amount of emotional anguish. I'm not sure how he got me to talk that much in the first place. Something about the way he guided you with questions, bringing the thoughts out piece by piece. It was effective at any rate.


So that's it. The A-Team. Trained mental health professionals, there to "serve" us.

That's all. Goodnight.

Patient Phones

 Image courtesy of Corbis

The phone system in the particular ward in which I stayed was... pretty much atrocious. It wasn't so bad to make calls, but getting calls was practically a matter of luck.

There were three phones available to patients on the unit. There used to be four, but one hasn't been working for weeks and god forbid someone fix something. All the working phones were nestled in one corner of the unit, each spaced far enough away from its neighbors to give an illusion of privacy.

To make a call out, just pick up the receiver, dial 9, and then dial the number you're trying to call. I'm not sure why it's 9 that directs outgoing calls, but it's always "dial 9," isn't it? Always. Calls are supposed to be restricted to less than 10 minutes in duration, and that rule was abided by; I never saw someone make a long phone call, despite it being our only means of communication with the outside world. No one ever seemed to want to talk to anyone on the outside for too long. I'm not really sure why.

Receiving a call was the problem. The numbers of those phones (even the broken one) are given out to patients' families upon admittance, and when one of the numbers is called, the corresponding phone rings. As one would expect.

BUT

...there's no one assigned to picking up the phone. It's left to the patients. If you're near the phones and you hear one ring, it's your responsibility to pick it up. So of course you can imagine how much that happens, right? People sitting in that corner, sometimes not even doing anything, will just sit there as the phones ring and ring into oblivion. The first few days of my stay, that was how things were. My parents were at their wit's end, because calling any of the phones wasn't getting an answer, and the nurses who picked up the nurses' station number were just generally unhelpful. It's not their job to play operator. It's the patients' -- apparently.

As a patient picking up the phone, you have to respect the other patients' privacy. You say "Hello?" and maybe a "For whom are you calling?" and a "Who may I ask is calling?" but absolutely nothing else. There's no "Hello, you've reached psychiatric Ward 3A, how can I direct your call?" As if where they're calling could possibly be a mystery. Just "Hello?" and then you go fetch whomever the call is for. (That part is why no one likes picking up the phones.) It can be quite a task, finding the person. They could be somewhere in the common area around the nurses' station, or in the kitchen, or in the TV room, or in their own room. And it's forbidden to go in anyone else's room. You just have to stand in the doorway and call inside. I once had to fetch Patient B for a phone call, and he's basically comatose. I had to repeat myself three times to get him to understand that he had a phone call. By the time I got him to the phone, the caller had hung up. C'est la vie.

I used to imagine what it'd be like to have an automated system for a psych ward's patient phones.

"Hello, you've reached Ward 3A -- the loony bin! 
Please listen carefully and make a selection.
For incoherent ramblings, please press 1.
For an emotionally-charged argument, please press 2.
For paranoid delusions, please make your death threat after the beep..."

And so on.

They could have a number assignment for all the general symptoms. That could be reduced to nine numbers, right? Anxiety, Depression, Suicidal Thoughts/Attempts, Anger Management Issues, Substance Abuse, Psychosis, Forgot To Take Their Meds, Schizophrenia, and Bipolar Disorder. That's all the biggies, anyway. Everything else is just a subcategory.

Image courtesy of Corbis.