Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin by Norah Vincent

couldn’t hear him or was too absorbed in my notebook to respond. But he was insistent enough to call attention to himself every time.
    “You got any candy, Norma?”
    Invariably the staff would see him standing there and tell him to leave me alone. Then, of course, after visiting hours he’d step it up, he and several of the others who’d sniffed me out as the soft touch. They’d prowl around so obviously in anticipation of a fix that it wasn’t hard to figure out who was the source. Very quickly I got caught and taken to task. I had my roof privileges suspended for two days, but they let me off without suspending my visiting privileges as well.
    One of my three roomies was a ciggie hound too, though more tactful than the others. I called her Tracy Chapman because of her comely face and short signature dreads. She was the only one of the three of them who didn’t talk to herself most of the day and night, and with whom you could carry on a fairly normal conversation. She’d told me she’d been committed or “called in” to the authorities by her foster children, whom she claimed had done it to punish her for denying them extra funds to buy clothes and high-tech toys.
    It sounded plausible enough. Calling in fake abuse wasn’t unheard of, and at first blush she didn’t seem nuts enough to need to be in the hospital.
    Ellen was my second roommate. She was a short, sixty-five-year-old black woman who had been in the hospital for five months. She said she’d gained sixty-five pounds in that time, which seemed very likely, since she never left our room except for meals, which she ate with gusto. She hadn’t even realized that it had gotten cold outside, having come in July and having sat in this regulated air for so long.
    She could barely walk, her ankles were so swollen with edema. She wore a white rag tied around her head, a sweatshirt, sweatpants, and a pair of Acti-Treds on her feet. She sat all day and night in a plastic chair by the bathroom door. She never used her bed because she had some problem with mucous, or reflux—I wasn’t sure which. She just said that the devil was in her stomach, and when she lay down he came up and she couldn’t breathe.
    When she wasn’t sleeping she was staring at the walls, or at me doing my yoga or writing in my notebook. She saw everything I did unless I did it in the bathroom. After a while she started to feel like my conscience. Every time I looked up I’d see her staring at me in that blank unflinching way that went right into me, and then through me and past me.
    When I still thought pleasantries applied, I’d smile nervously and say, “Hey.”
    She didn’t respond, which was awkward at first, but came to feel natural and easy, even pleasant over time. It was actually a relief to stop making small talk. That was one of the things I liked best about hanging around my ward mates. Social conventions didn’t apply. It was one of the privileges of being “disturbed.” It was probably one of the diagnostic criteria. But God, it was nice. I really liked being able to just end a conversation and walk away, or say nothing to fill the silence.
    At night, Ellen wrapped herself in a sheet and put it over her head, so that sitting there in the dark with the lights of the city coming through the window and picking out the whiteness of her form, she looked like a dead body, as if propped up by the staff for some sick joke. At first, I didn’t understand why she did it. My third roommate, Sweet Girl, did it too, though she did it for much of the day as well. As time went on, and I came to understand that privacy was one of the other major deprivations of that place, and one of those other things that most of us take for granted in the outside world, I realized that they did it because it was the closest they would ever come to having a room of their own, to reclaiming the structural integrity of their minds as separate places that belonged only to them.
    Of course, in public