Back in 2016 when I checked myself into Langley Porter Psych Ward (accidentally, on MLK day,) I told myself it must be part of the new gig, that maybe I was “sent” there to inspect the operations, from the “end-user’s” point of view. After all, I am an “user-experience-researcher” and this end-user’s-experience, one of visiting an inpatient hospital, for emergency “mental” help, along with help getting some solid sleep and advice about an incredibly heavy menstrual period (which, in hindsight, could have been the fibroids….sorry, that’s a sidebar) would certainly be of interest to the Directors of this Langley teaching hospital. In my mind, because of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and the Mark Zuckerberg $75 million donation to SF General, certainly there must be a tie-in to the current-hackathon-and-frenzied-problem-solving-creative-design-user-centric-thinking going on at my new gig.
I’ll never know if my experience was used for the greater good at that teaching hospital, and I have to be okay with that. I mean, I certainly didn’t publish a treatise on my experience.* I got what I needed, ultimately, but not before being 5150’d* for a full week. I had to comply with some pretty arbitrary waiting times in order to be released. My dad had flown out from Florida to help figure out why I was acting so weird (online, at least … and IRL if I’m being honest) and so in the grand scheme of things, despite being misdiagnosed with BiPolar disorder, I am thankful that I got this little glimpse of hell.
Why, you ask? Because it forced me to change my wretched, Capitalistic, workaholic ways. I suppose it was my proverbial rock bottom.
Often I still have memories of trying to take mental and written notes of how I was being treated, how clean the bathrooms were, how decent/organic/healthy the food was. Because, of course, I was “on the job” like a UX researcher, on the inside….like Charlie’s Fourth Angel, yep!
I admit, I was delusional.
Me, about myself, back then.
But that didn’t stop me from being critical, of everything. Their healthcare record system, visible on all the rolling computer carts that the doctors and orderlies and students treated like robotic extensions of their bodies – constantly attached to these things in one way or another – that system was called Epic. This term seemed meaningful to me on so many levels: the cafeteria on campus at the new gig was also called Epic! Epic is a term in agile software development, Epic is a California surfer term, Epic was the journey of the Illiad and the Odyssey, Homer’s Epic adventure. I could go on, but I won’t. I was seeing too much. I couldn’t sleep. I did need help, but I was too proud to actually ask for it. Nor did I know where to get it, or what kind I needed.
Since then I’ve proven to myself that:
A. I am not bipolar,
B. There is a rich life outside of work, I’d been hiding from it
C. Talk Therapy benefits EVERY BODY
D. Criticism is a way of protecting my real, gentle, inner-self.
So, I’ve also learned that I will always love, and WIN at that game, I spy, with my little eye….
That is, if you can really win at such things.
(*Yet)
(5150’d=5150 is the number of the section of the Welfare and Institutions Code, which allows a person with a mental illness to be involuntarily detained for a 72-hour psychiatric hospitalization. A person on a 5150 can be held in the psychiatric hospital against their will for up to 72 hours: source )