72 Hours in LA County

Melinda Maerker

Word Count 1946

The glaring overhead fluorescents are never turned off, making sleep all but impossible. We are confined to metal beds in a long row, about eighteen inches apart. Some of the other detainees are continuously moaning. And the staff, predominantly from the Cote d’Ivoire and Senegal, are speaking in their native dialects.

There’s a guard posted near the door and a camera above the doorframe. I am calculating the average time it takes for the guard to leave for his bathroom break. Ten minutes, if I’m lucky? Then I could sprint from the bed through the door, the alarm blaring, the camera documenting my escape. And then what?

No, I am not in some third-world prison. I am in the Los Angeles County Psychiatric Holding Facility.

…

It’s true. I was not well. I had fallen into my second Major Depressive episode (later diagnosed as Bipolar II Disorder) in two years, no doubt having never fully recovered from the first. Which meant I fluctuated somewhere between morbid despair and extreme agitation that was getting progressively worse. Nonetheless, I managed to keep up some pretense of “normal.” I made sure to put on clothes every morning, forced myself to take a shower and down at least some food throughout the day. In fact, there was a half-eaten salad on my desk when the police arrived.

The police. There were two of them: an imposing, slightly overweight white guy and his reticent-to-the-point-of-oblivion Latina partner. I had no idea why they were there, and for a moment, it seemed neither did they. They looked around the room, at the books on the shelves, the art on the walls, before asking me a very simple, yet ultimately damning, question: Have you been feeling sad?

I grew up to respect and obey people in uniform, and to always feel a little guilty in their presence, no matter what the implied crime, from speeding to illegal parking. And so I dutifully answered the question. “Yes,” I said, even though it was the understatement of my life up to that point.

The next thing I knew, I was in the back of a police car. Of course, I had protested. Yes, I was sad, depressed even, but I had friends who were looking after me. I was even seeing a therapist. But there was no leeway. I was going to County and that was that.

As we drove through the streets of East Los Angeles, I managed to send out a text to my closest friends. It read: The police are taking me to County. What I failed to specify was whether I was going to the hospital or jail. Instead, a holding facility turned out to be some sort of hybrid: two open-ended rooms with tightly packed rows of beds occupied mostly by men, many homeless, whose bodies lay in the distorted positions of heavy sedation. I fought a wave of revulsion as I was led to my own bed along the farthest wall, my only comforting thought being that, surely, I would get out soon.

In jail, at least in the movies, you are allowed one phone call to the outside world. At County, there are only pay phones that you cannot pay to use because you no longer have any money. The nurses will give the pay phone numbers out to callers, but then you must rely on someone hearing a phone in the general commotion of things when it happens to be ringing.

At some point, I got lucky. A seemingly schizophrenic young man on his way to pee answered the phone and called out my name. It was my friend, Briana, who told me an entire posse had formed to figure out a) how I had gotten there in the first place and b) how to get me released. My job was to find someone in charge and plead my case— which proved to be the most difficult task of all.

There were two residents on the floor: one, impossibly young, with spiky hair and tight skinny jeans, who, when he wasn’t searching for his lost cell phone, kept disappearing into a small office the size of a closet. The other, older and portlier, finally agreed to talk to me. In my calmest, sanest voice, I tried to explain that, since I was not a danger to myself or others, I should not be confined to this facility. In circular logic, he insisted that, since I was in County, I must be dangerous in some way. There was no room for error.

As the night wore on, I became more focused but less rational. I had refused the constant offer of tranquilization to make me sleep. Instead, I was plotting my escape. My first plan was to simply bolt out the carefully monitored back door. Then I decided it would be far more feasible to slip out the front door, the one closest to the cleanest bathroom and with the less imposing guard and mingle my way outside and into the deserted downtown neighborhood. It was now 3 a.m., and I did not see a problem with this whatsoever—never mind that I was wearing a gown that did not fully cover my ass, and that I had no shoes, no money, no cell phone. I imagined simply walking up to a car, pounding on the window, and telling the occupants that I needed a ride home.

And then it hit me: I had crazy lady hair. It already needed a cut, and the ponytail holder and clips had been immediately confiscated, along with everything else, the moment I arrived.

No one stops to talk to, let alone help, women with crazy lady hair. It’s the final, unforgivable detail that puts you over the top.

I was lingering near the bathroom, still contemplating this scenario, when a nurse yelled at me to get back into bed or else. And “or else,” at worst, meant being tied down to a wooden plank in a room about 12 by 14 feet. As I retreated, I noticed an African American man in there now, drugged into oblivion, his gown pulled up so that his genitals were fully exposed.

That night I somehow managed to get about two hours of sleep while people in various stages of torment, stupor, fear and indignation arrived and left. One of them was my immediate neighbor, who had been released only to be brought back twenty-four hours later.

He felt horrible about this. When he left, he had been given enough money for a bus ticket back to San Diego, where he told me he was camped out, unemployed, on the floor of a friend’s house, after having moved to California to be closer to his mother, who then died. But what did he do instead? He bought several bottles of alcohol, drank them, and got into a fist fight with someone who had obviously won.

“What I really need is a treatment program,” he said. “But they’re all filled up.”

“I’m sorry,” I replied.

“So what are you in here for?”

“I was sad.”

“Really?” he said, “Man, that’s fucked up.”

They did allow visitors at County, up to two at a time for ten minutes. Over the next three days, many friends came to see me. They brought fruit, chocolate, tea, which I was sometimes allowed to keep and sometimes not, depending on the whims of the nursing staff. But it was the frequency of these visits, however brief, that kept me from going completely over the edge. What we still did not know was how I had gotten there in the first place.

Sliding into illness was also frightening and confounding to those around me. Friends made suggestions, but no one really knew what to do. One friend, however, the well meaning, yet self-righteous kind (we’ll call her Bonnie) had the answer; she told me that she had been in therapy for ten years, and therefore, I should immediately return to a similar pursuit.

And so I made an appointment with a Dr. Goldman (as we’ll call her), a psychologist with a PhD who had once taught at UCLA. I would sit in her office, dutifully attempting to recount my childhood issues, while simultaneously wanting to hide under the desk or run out of the room. As friends later recounted, I spoke rapidly, but without affect. And yet, Dr. Goldman failed to notice that I was ill. Not just neurotic, but severely, chemically off. Instead, she decided that my real issue was time management. Perhaps she felt that if I could monitor the time I could monitor my own illness? In any case, she began insisting that I time my own sessions, which I failed to do, until one day, she lost her temper and told me that, if I couldn’t keep track of the time, she would have to throw me out of her office. Something snapped after that. I was convinced that I was beyond help; even worse, I was a social burden.

Almost all people on the downside of Bipolar II Disorder are suicidal; it’s the main hallmark of the illness. But there’s a difference between ideation and standing on the edge of a bridge. I knew the difference, but I also knew I’d reached another level of despair. I confessed this to several friends, including Bonnie, and it turned out that Bonnie was the one who called Dr. Goldman who, in turn, called the police, even though I hadn’t seen her for almost a week.

“Why the hell did you do that?” asked Barbara, a friend who, channeling her former career as a litigator, had managed to get Dr. Goldman to disclose the confidential information for which laws have been passed to protect the privacy of patients. “I didn’t know what the police would do,” she said by way of a response.

So that’s what it took to be confined to a County psychiatric holding facility: a friend with an unassailable belief in talk therapy and a clueless therapist.

By day three, with hardly any sleep or nourishment, I was in a near-zombie state of delirium. Which is when a new, overly sincere resident said he was willing to consider the possibility of letting me go. But first, I needed to assure him that I would be released into the company of someone responsible and that at least three people would vouch for my sanity. In person. My friend Claudia, who had been visiting for the allotted ten minutes, called three more people who were willing to drive across town in rush-hour traffic. Only then we lost the resident. His shift was apparently over, and so were my hopes of getting out that day.

That’s when it happened. An actual attending physician appeared on the floor. He had a kind, though resigned, face and the authority of experience without pretense. “Excuse me,” I said, “one of the residents told me that I could leave if I got three more people to vouch for me.”

“What?” the doctor said. “Someone told you that?” Then he shook his head. “Let me look at your chart.”

He glanced at my chart. “Yeah, you can go.”

And it was as simple as that.

I went up to the nurse’s station, where they gave me a plastic bag with all my belongings. “Make sure everything’s in there,” one of them said. They were all very friendly.

Before leaving, I circled back around to say goodbye to my former bed mate. “Take care out there,” he said. “And try not to be sad anymore.” “You, too,” I said, nodding as I headed for the exit.

Melinda has primarily worked across visual media—from advertising to narrative film and documentaries, including an upcoming series on LGBTQ families. Melinda is a graduate of Barnard College at Columbia University and the recipient of a James Michener Fellowship in Screenwriting. And while she grew up in the Southwest and spent several years living in New York City and France, she now resides in Los Angeles with her artist partner and three (mostly) adorable rescue dogs.