It’s Easier To Get Locked Up Than You Think

Robin Rogers

Word Count 1828

On February 7th, 2020, I did not attempt suicide. That much I know. The rest is a puzzle.

It was past midnight on February 11, 2020. I sat on the floor of the “Comfort Room,” in the Acute Ward of Gracie Square Psychiatric Hospital, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The room was padded with mats in primary colors. Plastic, or maybe vinyl—like the kind used in preschools; cracked with age. Some of the cracks were partly covered in silver duct tape—dull metallic bandages that peeled off, exposing the wounds.

Against my will, two attendants from the New York Fire Department had strapped me to a gurney and taken me here. My eighty-eight-year-old father was dying a mile away, at Weill Cornell Medical Center. Blood clots riddled his body and choked off his lungs.

A nurse with long blond hair brought me a cup of lukewarm tea, not hot enough to burn myself or to use as a weapon.

“Do you want some sugar?”

She looked like kindness and beauty swirled together into an imagined angel.

“No, thank you. I’m fine.”

As I pushed my back against the red padded wall and took a sip, I felt a strange lightness in my arms, like I’d left my pocketbook somewhere. The sense of something missing stabbed at my gut. My first-born son got lost in a swell of revelers on the boardwalk at the Jersey Shore when he was six years old. My child was missing. Now, I was missing, ripped from my younger son. But no one was looking for me.

Until that week, I was normal. I had sparkly moments. I went to the Algonquin for drinks and to the King Cole Bar at the St. Regis Hotel to play “Guess which ones are hookers.” My daily life was concrete. I raised children on a college-professor’s salary. I owned an old building. I took out the garbage and killed mice. I painted the walls in my rental apartments. I did minor repairs, smearing spackle on cracked walls with my bare hands.

How did I get locked in a psychiatric ward against my will?

On February 7th, 2020, at about 7 p.m., I walked into NYU’s Langone’s Psychiatric Emergency Room. I’d come for a blood test, to reassure my sister Laura that the six milligrams of Klonopin I’d taken to sleep would not hurt me.

Laura had left my apartment at around 3:00 p.m. that day. We were fighting about our father. After a childhood of chaos, I no longer felt responsible for him. She disagreed.

After about an hour, I counted out twelve .5 milligram pills of Klonopin—6 mg.—and Googled:“Klonopin Safe Dose Maximum”

There is no known fatal dose of Klonopin for humans. Or rats.

I got a Diet Coke from the refrigerator. I swallowed the pills.

I took six milligrams of Klonopin—to sleep deeply, but not to die. I wanted to disappear like Persephone into the underworld, it is true; but not forever. I wanted to be briefly lifted out of the horrible argument, the unrelenting pressure of work, and the strains of living in a city that consumes you whole. I wanted to be free of daughterhood and motherhood.

It must have been about 30 minutes later that my sister burst into the room.

“We have to get you to the hospital!”

“It was 6 milligrams of Klonopin. Let me get some sleep. Google it. I’m fine.” I said. By then I was groggy.

“You have to get to the hospital!” She was panicked. She handed me her cell phone.

Dr. Matthew Zimmerman’s voice edged toward frantic.

“It is important that you get to the emergency room.”

“For six milligrams of Klonopin?”

I assumed he wanted to confirm that I’d taken only 6 milligrams. So I pulled on some sweatpants. They were just going to stick a needle in my arm and take some blood.

“I’m going to the emergency room,“ I told my 16-year-old son. I kissed him on his forehead, where his curly light-auburn hair fell. “I will be back in a few hours.”

I walked into the Emergency Room. The staff signed me in at the front desk, and a thick-set man drew my blood. Someone handed me a thin hospital gown and took my belongings. A resident asked why I had taken the Klonopin.

“I wanted to sleep,” I explained. “I wanted to blot it all out and sleep.”

“Blot it all out,” he noted, then whisked me into another room.

A second doctor asked me if I had attempted suicide.

“By taking 6 milligrams of Klonopin?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“No,” I snapped. “I’d have to be pretty stupid to try to kill myself with 6 milligrams of Klonopin.”

“Have you ever tried to commit suicide before?” he continued.

“No,” I said “And I didn’t try to commit suicide today either.”

It started to strike me as funny. I explained that I am a college professor who studied public health. If I wanted to kill myself, I would not have taken 6 milligrams of Klonopin. He noted “Grandiosity'' and “Delusions of High Status” on my chart. And “Mixed Mania.” I have no history of mania.

The doctor cleared his throat.

“Have you ever considered suicide?” he persisted.

I raised my shoulders and flashed my pale-blond eyebrows at him.

“It depends on what you mean. In a Hamlet ‘To-be-or-not-to-be-is-life-worth-living,’

existential kind of way? Yes, of course. Everyone has.”

He urgently wrote something down. There was no flash of recognition in his eyes. I clarified: “If you mean in an ‘I want to die’ way? No.”

A nurse made me lie on a gurney in a brightly lit hallway, face up; the lights were blinding.

Waves of people crashed around me. Doctors, nurses, orderlies, and patients. Instantaneously, my life was not my life.

“I am my sons’ only parent!” I told the nurse, who walked away.

“This is important,” I told the doctor.

My sons lost their father to mental illness. Would they think that they have lost me, too?

“No, babies, no. I’m not ill. Six milligrams of Klonopin. That is all. I’ll be home soon.”

But it wasn’t true. No policemen were looking for me. I disappeared in plain sight.

After twenty-four hours, I said, “I want to go home.”

“No,” a man replied. “You are being involuntarily held.”

Was he a doctor?

“If I get up and walk out, will you physically stop me?”

“Yes.”

And there in the hallway, on a gurney, I stayed for hour after hour, until the hours turned to days.

“How long are you going to keep me?” I asked the social worker, Mr. Emmett.

“Up to 60 days” he said.

“I have to go to work!I have to take care of my sons!”

I am sure that by then I was shrieking at the doctors in NYU’s Psychiatric Emergency Room.

Neither my sister nor I had slept in days. We slipped back into the fight about our father. And my brave, loyal sister, who tolerates anything but criticism of him, walked out on me.

I threw an empty paper cup onto the floor as my friend Steve was walking in.

“No family support,” someone noted on my chart.

“Do not release.”

“Manic?”

“You were mad,” Steve later told me, “but you were never crazy.”

“You are going to Gracie Square Psychiatric Hospital. You can go voluntarily, or we can send you involuntarily. Make things easier on yourself and do what we tell you,” Mr Emmitt said.

“If it is voluntary, can’t I choose not to go?”

“No. If you won’t go voluntarily, we will send you involuntarily.”

Before my computer and phone were taken away, I let the college know that I was in the hospital and didn't know when I would return. My classes would not be met. My friend who works for the teachers’ union dictated my explanation. “Probably about a week,” I typed unsteadily. “Medical complications.”

I looked up at her gratefully.

“How do I explain this?”

“You don’t,” she said wisely.

The medics strapped me to a gurney, like a sarcophagus being delivered. It was a funny thought, and I laughed to myself. I imagined notes being taken: “Laughs at inappropriate circumstances. Delusional?”

But no one took notes. I was cargo.

I got lucky. The nurse who brought me tea in the “comfort room” filed paperwork later that night to get me released in 72 hours. In the morning, the doctor shrugged and said, “We don’t have anything to hold her.”

Three days later, they gave me my belongings in a paper bag.

The six milligrams of Klonopin? Why did I take it? A desire to be free for just a minute, ironically.

How had it gone so wrong? Going over hospital records, I found that my overwhelmed sister, still shaken by the suicide of her daughter's boyfriend, had exaggerated the situation in order to force Dr. Zimmerman to care for while she took care of our father. The doctors, nurse, and social worker were primed to think that I had made a suicide attempt. They then saw a middle-aged woman in a hospital gown and dismissed me and my unwavering statements that I had not and would not attempt suicide.

“She is not a threat to anyone,” my therapist had said. The men overruled her. I was in denial and possibly manic, they argued. The bureaucracy took over, until a nurse recognized that I was in possession of my sanity. Just overwhelmed. Just grieving, Just tired. Just angry.

I was held for eight days.

“Think of it as a car that just missed you,” my pastor told me.

But it didn’t miss me. It hit me, and my life cracked apart, revealing its fault lines as it split.

I lost my position as Director of Honors in the Social Sciences at the college. My son shaved his head and his grades dropped from A’s to D’s. My beloved sister and I stopped speaking. The voice of a patient at the hospital echoed in my brain. “Pretty, I am going to rape you and give you AIDS,” he would hiss at me in the hallway. I didn’t sleep through the night for months.

I will never again be held against my will. Because, you see, if I hadn’t given the emergency room my signature, they never could have held me at all. I was trying to be “good,” in a mental health system that doesn’t understand Shakespeare or metaphor. Or menopause. Or eldercare. I could have lost everything, because I forgot that I am a single, middle-aged woman—a sarcophagus containing the ashes of a girl who had once bewitched them. Don’t ever be good in a system designed to contain the spirits of women who have grandiose notions that they own and author their lives—even past youth, and without male protection. Or who simply get tired and want to sleep away an afternoon.

Robin is a professor of sociology at Queens College, City University of New York, and a collector of true stories. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and did her post-doctoral work at Yale University. She is the author of a book on the politics of welfare reform and numerous articles, including an op-ed in the Washington Post on the dangers of billionaire philanthropy. Her current research is on the women of generation X: what happened to the first group of girls told they could have it all?