The The first thing I noticed about H2, aside from the ominous locked door, were these terrible, ugly blue walls. They literally set my teeth on edge, and as I was hastily wheeled onto the ward, I felt as though they were closing in and choking the spirit out of me.

A short, stocky man approached and told me that I would be put in one of the seclusion rooms until i calmed down. I tried to tell him that I was feeling better now and that it wasn't necessary to lock me up, but he insisted.

Alone in that room, clad only in a drafty hospital gown with not even a sheet on the cold, cement floor. I cried bitterly. Desperately wanting my mother to comfort me and transport me away from this horror and desolation, I wondered if anyone would call and tell her that I wouldn't be coming home for the weekend. I wasn't released from seclusion until much later on in the evening.

I cautiously walked out into the crowded dayroom where patients sat watching television, reading, talking to one another and sitting at tables with large, square objects in front of them. These were the infamous rugs, in various stages of progress, and I quickly turned my eyes away from them. I couldn't bring myself to be associated with the B. Mod routine so soon after being dumped here.

I spotted Lisa across the room, talking to another patient, and couldn't help wondering why she hadn't been transferred to G2. After all, she'd been here for over two months. I didn't talk to anyone, so I sat alone in a far corner, hugging my knees against my chest in an effort to quell the trembling that gripped my body. I was terrified of this ward and the infamous atmosphere. On top of that, those damned blue walls gave me the creeps.

The next day, I was allowed visitors, so Mom arrived, looking very sad and bewildered. I tried to explain to her that I didn't need to be on this awful ward and that I would do everything in my power to get the hell off as soon as possible. It was one thing to be safe and secure on the familiar P1, but quite another to suffer untold humiliation in this dreaded prison.

The head nurse, Mrs. Samuels, sat me down later that day in her office and explained the ward's policies to me, running down the list of the rules, regulations, as well as what was acceptable behaviour and what was not. Things that were not tolerated and punished by a loss of privileges for twenty-four hours were: Swearing, hoarding candy or gum, lying, being late for meals, missing jogging in the morning, sleeping in, and a host of others that I've since forgotten. Punishable by having to -182- go back and start the process over again were things like, hitting another patient or the staff, self-abuse, and going AWOL (running away from the hospital).

The Behaviour Modification Program was started by a two-man team from the U.S., Dr. Freeman, a psychiatrist, and Mr. Walters, a social worker. They figured that the patients with so-called "behaviour problems," which could accompany mental illness or be even "cured" by a strict program using the "reward and punishment" theory. It sounded an awful lot like a combination of Pavlov's dog and Nazi war criminals' experiments in the death camps during World War II and I will never believe that this kind of treatment does anything but promote fear and hatred, as well as foster feelings of loathing in the patients.

I began working on my rug the date after Mrs. Samuels' introductory lesson, on my twenty-fourth birthday. Instead of attending a party in my honour, receiving presents and getting toasted with pink champagne, I sat and poked inch-long pieces of wool into a canvas full of holes, stopping only for meals, bedtime, and the jogging and exercise sessions.

The staff on the ward were decidedly questionable. Dave, the man who had placed me in seclusion, was a bit of a smartass, issuing orders and commands and then sitting back to watch us all squirm. He had an undistinguishable accent and a ruddy, blistering complexion, which reminded me of a hard-drinking captain of a fishing schooner. Sally was a short, squat, matronly RNA of about forty-five, who spoke with a high, somewhat gratingly nasal voice and wasted no time in reminding me how she'd warned me on P1 that I would soon be transferred to H2. She said this with a self-satisfied smirk. Sally was certain that she had all of us figured out early on, and pronounced me a "shameful goldbricker." Phyllis was the most promising of the entire crew, with her quiet, dignified manner, despite an obvious harelip and cleft palate. I'm sure that she felt more compassionately drawn to us because of suffering alienation and endless torment as a youngster, and therefore knew only too well what it was like to be different. Gina was a young, twenty-five-year-old woman with a substantial athletic prowess and saw to it that we always engaged in our two twenty-minute per day exercise religiously. Since she was close to my age, I was somewhat drawn to her, even though she made certain that the dividing line was clearly drawn between patients and staff.

Eric had a distinctive mean streak and from the beginning took perverse pleasure in lording discipline and harsh restraint over us. He was the first staff member to leap into an altercation between two or more patients and would manhandle some of us extremely roughly. He had sharp, piercing features and a burly, hairy frame, which lent a curiously bestial look to the man. I disliked him from the outset.

However, the worst male PNA by far had to be the ruddy, white-haired Gerald S., who not only shared Eric's sadistic streak, but took great delight in taunting and jeering at us. if he took a particular dislike to someone, as he often did, old Gerald would dig and chip away at his or her already wavery confidence until the poor soul was reduced to tears. It was painfully obvious to me that this ward of the hospital attracted, for the most part, a specific personality type: Those who got a charge and an adrenaline rush, from exacting control, as well as punishing anyone who didn't immediately buckle under their authority. Even the kinder staff members were not immune to this behaviour altogether, although it would be unfair to claim that all were completely vicious and cruel.

Still, as I am recounting the story of my time spent as a virtual prisoner of H2, I get the old, familiar sense of dread and all of that sixteen-year-old despair and hopelessness rushes back like a gigantic tidal wave. Perhaps I can forgive to a degree, but I shall never be able to forget.

The rest of the nurses, RNA's and PNA's melted into a large unsettling juggernaut, one to be avoided, or out-run, whenever possible. These people held all of the power and they revelled in it. One had to be a particular type of person to work on the Behaviour Modification Unit, one that could effectively strip off the vestiges of conscience. The staff that hung in there, many for years, did so with grand aplomb. Occasionally there would appear a "new kid on the block," a greenhorned staff member who would grow appalled at the way the patients were treated, especially in the neighbourhood of verbal and psychological abuse. They'd be privy to people getting beaten up for talking back, forced to live for days on liquid nutrition because their rugs weren't being hooked fast enough, and shoved into seclusion, often for the crime of being emotionally and mentally ill. Finally, after several weeks, the green-complexioned staff members would sicken at the sights, grow despondent about being one of the "bad guys" and then would subsequently disappear, never to be seen again. It got to the point where we could spot a "staffer with a conscience," and we'd twinge with regret, knowing that he or she wouldn't be around for very long. And they never were.

I met a curious assortment of fellow patients there, such as Stanley whose gregarious forwardness and wickedly ribald sense of humour were absolutely overwhelming. He rushed about the ward like a young man overdosing on Speed and craving a release for his explosive energy. Thin and blond, with wide, blue eyes that seemed perpetually startled by sudden headlights, Stanley paced frenetically up and down, waving his spindly arms and alternately laughing maniacally and sputtering words like an ailing engine. There were no lapses of silence, no sitting, resting or quiet intervals in which the poor fellow could catch a breath; just endless, noisy movement.

Not only that, but he was evidently quite attracted to me from the outset and began an intensive period of ardent pursuit, something which didn't exactly bowl me over with pleasure or joy. Add to this Stanley's annoying habit of employing little pet names like "darling" and "doll" and you have a most disquieting picture of a very sick and misguided twenty-four-year-old.

Rita was only fourteen, a tough-talking, feisty girl who would have been very attractive if not for her constant sullenness and that suspicious cast in her light blue eyes. Rita had spent most of her young life being shipped from one foster home to another, and evidently, none were even marginally acceptable. She had been physically and sexually abused, as well as used as a household maid, chief cook and bottle washer. like most of the teenagers I would encounter on H2, Rita was not mentally ill, only reacting to harshly unfair treatment by people who really should have known better. Anyone would have a behaviour problem under those conditions and here she was locked up in a hospital being punished.

Sandi, fifteen, was a wisp of a girl, with feathery, yellow hair and a face that appeared carved from delicate porcelain. Like Rita, her home life was deplorable, but she preferred it to the rigours of B. Mod. The two girls hung out together, frequently incurring punishment for going AWOL and watching as their childhoods slipped quickly down a rust-encrusted drain. I felt very sorry for them and the others who got transferred from the LPH's adolescent units to a place hideously inappropriate for patients that age.

Roberta was a quiet nineteen-year-old who had an affinity for punk rock, a mass of blonde curls and eyes like a light summer sky. she was slightly overweight, speaking wistfully of her days as an anorexic in 1977, and liked me until all my craziness spun hopelessly out of control. I wouldn't get to know Roberta well until 1990, when we lived in the same group home, but in 1979, she slowly began to harbour a great deal of resentment toward me. Fred was a middle-aged man with a penchant for the young women, myself included, but there was a lot more to it than this awkward gesture toward lechery.

Fred was severely troubled, feeling responsible for his young son, Jeremy's hearing impairment, and slashed away at imagined demons in his tortured mind. I found myself growing close to this gentle, soft-spoken man, and knew that his bids for female attention were cries for comfort and affection. I was to have a very strange and provocative encounter with him later on that year.

Among this first batch of people that I shared my living space with on H2 were Shane, a hip, savvy, twenty-two-year-old who bragged superfluously of his wanton drug use and took great delight in discussing my experiences with Ritalin. This was one of his pet substances, and he believed that there was no greater aspiration in life than to do as much of the stimulant as was humanly possible without destroying your nervous system. Shane liked to live life on the proverbial "razor's edge" and I must confess to being somewhat enamoured of his cool confidence and brash, roguish grin.

He had dark, somewhat unorthodox good looks, a curious combination of young Tyrone Power and prematurely dissipated Robert Mitchum.

Shane fancied a cheery, air-brushed snippet of a girl named Rhonda, who had this idealized, over-simplified view of life, including the inherent belief that the B. Mod. Unit was this exalted "good" place, whose primary purpose was to "help and guide poor, uninspired souls through the rigours of life." Where she got this idea is beyond me, but good old Rhonda, steeped in the philosophy of hippiedom and this bewildering "love everyone and share your needles with a friend" even wrote a "thank you" note to the staff when she left.

Beverly was another of the adolescents, a sexually precocious fourteen-year-old with jet black hair, ebony eyes and a "come hither" pout. At first, I found her to be both too outrageous and obnoxious for words, but as the months progressed, I began to realize that her seemingly out-of-control hormones were simply a substitute for parental love and nurturing. I remember one afternoon catching the tiny, slender Beverly crying bitterly in the music room as she listened to Sister Sledge's "We Are Family."

I found out later that her neglectful father had refused to visit her on her birthday, one more example of a long list of snubs from the man.

I met Geraldine soon after arriving on H2. She was a thirty- eight-year-old mother of two teenage boys, slightly overweight with large, expressive eyes that exuded a sombre vagueness. Her pale face was splashed with freckles, and wore her straight black hair cut very short. Geraldine cried a lot and worried about her family. The staff, thinking her to be too heavy, put her on the infamous eight hundred-calorie diet, and whenever Geraldine would cheat, someone would ride her relentlessly. The poor woman would get so famished at times that she'd sneak uneaten food from other patients' trays and Dave, among others, would taunt, rebuke and chide her mercilessly until she removed the forbidden morsels from her mouth and put them back.

I felt sorry for her, for Geraldine was forced to take on the role of the ward scapegoat. I became her ally and passed her my food under the table.

Geri waved her pretty blonde trappings like an alluring banner, affecting the personality of a sexy airhead. She was aware of the male attention she elicited and revelled in the spotlight emitting from the male patients and staff members' shining eyes. I found her vacuous tittering annoying, her voracious acid-gobbling pathetic, but couldn't help be grudgingly admiring of her unabashed honesty. It was as if she looked into the mirror one day and said, "Well, Geri, you've got a face, a body, not much else. Make the most of it, deal with it, and if drugs take some of life's sting away for awhile, go for it."

She suffered from hallucinations, which I figured were a symptom of all the mind-exploding substances she ingested, and was put on a hefty dose of Stelazine anyway. There were many other characters coming and going during that year and eight months on H2, and i remember most of them. They became my only human contacts, since I was basically cut off from my family and friends, and even though most of then eventually turned on me, I really needed them.

After a few weeks of relative calm, my life became suitable fodder for a first-class psychological melodrama of epic proportions. I had nearly completed my three-week program and was soon to move on to the more relaxed and liberal setting of G2. Then one morning, I felt a powerful urge to injure myself, feeling that during the past nineteen days or so I'd grown fond of the strict discipline and the security of this repetitive routine on the ward. It seemed hard to believe that in that short time I'd get institutionalized, but i had a strange sense of identity and purpose with the ritualistic atmosphere, the six cigarettes a day which were doled out to us and the nightly sojourn to the canteen for pool games. It was a way of determining that I was a part of something stable and longstanding. Even if it wasn't the university world or the society of residence, it proved a bit of a substitute.

I hadn't been on the ward long enough to see the sinister and really negative side to it yet. What I did see, I liked for its feeling of community and routine. Now the time was approaching to be transferred to another unknown habitat and I huddled in a whimpering little ball. I made the decision to stop this frightening inevitability from occurring. Taking a bobbypin that I'd gotten from a patient in the canteen the previous evening, I scraped the tips back and forth across the brick wall in the washroom until they became sharpened to fine points. Then, I rolled up my left sleeve and dug my makeshift weapon up and down my forearm until it left long, bloody tracks on it.

The sight of the superficial damage caused me to smile inwardly. "This'll get me in deep shit," I thought, secretly repulsed by what I was doing, but at the same time feeling justified and oddly noble about it.

Later, after my arm was completely raw and unsightly, I rolled the sleeve back down, flushed the bobbypin down the toilet and walked back into the dayroom. Patients sat about waiting for O.T. to be announced, some slumping in their chairs morosely while others chatted in clusters. I sat with Joe, who had recently arrived and wasn't cheerfully anticipating the rug hooking procedure.

Just then, Mrs. Samuels called me into the nurses' conference room to take my blood pressure again. It had been checked the previous morning and had registered rather high, at twenty-five over ninety-nine. Of course, when my shirt was rolled up, my handiwork was uncovered. "That's a minus, Jane," she said solemnly, examining the bloodied gouges and getting up to call in one of the RNA's. "No privileges, no visitors for at least two weeks."

Suddenly, I felt nauseated and weak, realizing that there was no way out of the consequences of my hasty, foolish actions. Another damned rug to bend over for hours a day, no cigarettes, trips to the canteen, and worst of all, no visits from my mom. I realized that this hadn't been such a great idea after all.

I was stripped and searched thoroughly, all my clothes were locked up, and I was told that this kind of self-abusive behaviour would not be tolerated. Sally, true to form, sneered and said tartly, "Well, this is certainly no surprise. Don't you ever give up?" I resigned myself to the rug hooking and to watching the other patients going off the ward to O.T., the canteen and into the pool room with their visitors.

But with all the unpleasantness came the satisfaction of knowing that I'd be spending at least another month on H2.

By the time my second rug was finished, this time using recycled wool, I was very lonely for my mom. I craved a bit of freedom, along with a few token privileges and those wonderful six cigarettes a day. All around me, uneasy interpersonal relationships were developing, then dissolving, as the teenagers formed into adolescent cliques, only to symbolically tear at one another's throats several days later.

Angela appeared one day on the ward after being transferred from P1 by Dr. Braun, and befriended Geri. I felt sorry that Angela had been abandoned by the same doctor who'd done the same thing to me five weeks earlier. She smiled sadly and said with a shrug, "Who cares anyway?" Then, one day, before my "sentence" was up and I was getting prepared for relative freedom on H2 again, something terrible happened.

I was sitting in the dayroom watching television, when my eyes were suddenly pulled off to the side and I felt as though every nerve in my body was being tied into tight little knots. I don't know how else to describe it, other than as an extreme overwhelming agitation that exploded into choking, frenetic activity.

I lurched forward in my chair and fell, writhing and twisting onto the floor. It was the uncontrollable twitching of someone having a grand mal seizure, but I was fully conscious. My face smacked hard on the floor, but I didn't flinch, as I was so caught up in being too full of spastic energy and having no proper way to release it. I became aware of short, gasping moans coming from my mouth, and just then I noticed several bodies hovering over me and calling out, "What are you doing? Get up, for God's sake and start acting like a human being!"

Someone grabbed my arm while another yelled out for assistance. "Let's get her into seclusion. She can't be acting out like this in front of the other patients." I felt terrible, wanting so desperately to stop all the movement and the noise but unable to. Something's possessing me from the inside, I thought in horror, as I began to drool out of the side of my mouth.

A nervous giggling began sweeping across the dayroom, amid comments like "She's acting so weird! Like a maniac or something. Get her the hell out of here." Eric and Stephen, another PNA, hoisted me roughly off the floor and twisted my arms behind my back. then I was dragged, struggling violently and screaming over and over, "Help me -188- please! Please somebody make this stop!"

"We'll help you alright, into seclusion for a day or two until you can learn to behave yourself." While I flailed my arms like a demented windmill, a nurse stripped my clothes off and tied a hospital gown on tightly. I was then shoved into that dismal, square isolation room where the heavy metal door clanged shut with ominous finality.

Then Sally stood at the tiny window in the door and watched as I ran around the room in circles, muttering incoherently and beginning to hit my head against the walls. My heart felt as though it would project itself out of my chest, or else explode in a spray of crimson before bouncing onto the cold floor. My eyes were still forced in that unnatural position, off to the side, and they ached tremendously. All the adrenaline in my glands seemed to have swelled and overflowed into every pore, causing systems overload and producing enough nervous energy to power a twin-engine jet into hyperspace.

Finally, after what seemed an eternity, the nightmare ended and I collapsed on the floor, while Sally continued looking on and shaking her head slowly. "What is happening to me?" I gasped inwardly, pressing my cheekbone into the cement and allowing my heartbeat to return to its normal rhythm. Something insidious and unspeakable had taken hold of me and was not going to loosen its awful grip for the next year and a half. The stage had been set for my psychological undoing and the floodgates were opened wide for unchecked abuse by the staff of the Behaviour Modification "Extermination of Dignity" camp.

My psychiatrist on the ward was Dr. Harrington, and Mr. Walters was my social worker. The team met with Mrs. Samuels and the ward staff every Wednesday morning to discuss their patients and decide if and when one of us would move to G2. Along with that, medication levels were talked about, as well as privilege levels, and only on this occasion were any new ones added for any of us.

After we were talked about, each of us was taken into the conference where we'd be besieged with a series of questions, starting with how we were feeling and moving on to more specific details. Harrington was a large, balding man who reminded me of General Patton. He was from South Africa and spoke with a strong British accent, and actually wasn't a bad sort, just somewhat ignorant about what a bad system behaviour modification really was. I'm sure that he truly believed that Dr. Freeman and Mr. Walters had stumbled upon a beneficial concept by bringing the theories of B.F. Skinner into the psychiatric hospital arena and was simply unable to grasp the eventual erosion of the patients' sense of hope and autonomy.

The first Wednesday conference I took part in, following my incident with those "staring spells," consisted of Mr. Walters grilling me about my so-called reasons for "acting out" in such a disturbing manner. Mr. Walters was a short, fair-haired man of forty-three, with wire-rimmed glasses and a pronounced limp. I'm not sure whether he had suffered with polio as a child or had a prosthetic leg, but he seemed to have great difficulty moving around and carried a cane at all times. He spoke in a high, raspy voice, not unlike John Fiedler, the actor who played one of Bob Newhart's patients on his television series about a laconical psychologist.

He fixed me with a hard, steady gaze, as if he figured that he'd miss something if he even looked away for a brief moment.