The Staff, Part 2: My Doctor

 From Getty Images. Photo by Val Loh.

What do I see? 

I see a bat.

Why? 

Because my Doctor is a goddamn vampire, that's why.

I'm pretty sure that My Doctor at Ward 3A was a vampire.

Besides a general air of creepiness and a piercing stare that unnerved me, I never saw him during the day.

But wait, Patient H, you might say. What if he just has a private practice during the day, like a normal psychiatrist, and just does his hospital work during the evenings?

"Well," I say to you, gentle reader, "That rationale isn't nearly as interesting. So let's go with the vampire thing."

While a patient's Nurse and Therapist varies from shift to shift, a patient's Doctor is an invariable factor. You only see your Doctor once a day, so shifts aren't an issue. You have one Doctor for your whole stay. Because of that, I can only speak knowledgeably about one Doctor -- mine, because he was all that I was able to observe.

The Doctors of the ward are creatures of mystery and autonomy. They waltz in whenever they want, completely violating the rest of the staff's attempts at maintaining a reliable schedule, and pull their patients aside one by one to suck their blood to talk privately in one of the tiny offices.

Tiny offices that never had any tissues. Ever.

That makes no sense to me. A psychiatrist requires only three items to practice their craft. They require a pen, something to write on, and tissues. While crying is an upsetting act in and of itself, I was always frustrated by my own tears, on top of all the other emotions experienced, because there was nothing with which to staunch the tears and other facial leakage. My Doctor would usually reach out to shake my hand after every session, but once I had to beg off because of -- as I actually said to him -- "snotty hands." That was embarrassing. (He did apologize for the lack of tissues, though. At least he seemed to realize that it was an unacceptable absence of necessities.)

Creatures of mystery, autonomy, and power. It doesn't matter what great progress you've made with any of your Therapists or Nurses. It's your Doctor that holds the key to your release or continued confinement. Only when The Doctor sees you as fit to leave do you get to leave. Therefore it's important to make a sane impression whenever your Doctor pulls you aside to chat. (Making a sane impression -- it's like making a good impression, just more urgently important.) I always made sure I was clean, decently dressed, politely alert, and calm. It didn't matter if I'd been crying only minutes before. If the Doctor showed up, I was all polite smiles and reasonable responses. Yep, there'd be no screaming tantrums or hysterical sobs from me! You might get that from other patients, but not little ol' me.

I am a Reasonable, Cooperative, Polite, and Generally All-Around Well-Behaved Patient, I tried to say in everything I did. I shouldn't be here. Don't you think I shouldn't be here? I should go home now.

Of course I tried to behave in a similar fashion for all the Nurses and Therapists, but it was more important with The Doctor. There were more consequences than just social niceties with The Doctor. You be nice to the Nurses and Therapists because you should be nice to everyone on principle. (And if anyone deserves a little pleasantness, it's them.) You be nice to The Doctor because there's an agenda.

But, as you might know, vampires have a heightened sensitivity to these things.

I'd been hoping to go home before the weekend. It was Friday and I was so ready to be discharged. (I had a birthday coming up the following week. I didn't want to spend my birthday in a loony bin.) I waited all day for my Doctor to show up so I could do my song and dance of reasonableness for him. I waited. And waited. And waited. I asked various Therapists when he might come in. They shrugged. I asked various Nurses when he might come in. They just rolled their eyes. I waited and waited in an ever-increasing fervor of need to show how goddamn sane I was (which probably wasn't very sane, now that I think about it). The Nurses and Therapists were all on my side by now. They were rooting for me, the good patient. I just had to convince The Doctor, and I was practically bursting with my need to do so.

He didn't show up until after 7:00 pm. Because he's a vampire.

Or because he has a private practice during the day. Whichever. I'm still voting for vampire theory.

"You look well," he finally said after he moseyed on in, careless of the anxiety I'd felt in waiting for him all day. Then added, "But, of course, you could be acting."

Damn sneaky vampires.

(What makes it particularly funny is that I was a theatre major in college. Acting? Who, me?)

But I wasn't acting! I really am a reasonable, cooperative, polite, and generally all-around well-behaved person. Even in real life, when I'm a person rather than a patient. It wasn't acting. It was... emphasis.

Needless to say, I didn't get out of the hospital before the weekend.

Because of the vampire.

From the Petrified Collection at Getty Images.

Do you see the vampire in this picture?

No, of course you don't.

Because vampires can become invisible. Duh.

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.