"The nurses seem to think that you did it for attention," he said quietly. Then he added, "Do you wish to enlighten us?"

I didn't know how to respond to this. obviously, everyone had made up their minds that my episode was merely a put-on, so anything I said to the contrary would either be ignored or refuted. I stared at the floor and muttered slowly, "Mr. Walters, I don't understand what's going on. I couldn't stop it from happening. it was like I was being controlled by something. I can't explain it. I...."

"Jane, we don't want to see anymore of this kind of behaviour. First you scratch up your arm and get a minus. Then you act out in the dayroom and have to be placed in seclusion, where you hit your head against the walls. We believe you can control these outbursts, and strongly advise you to do so."

Then Dr. Harrington piped up, "You're going to do another rug and go through the program again. And this time we expect all of this negative behaviour to cease."

I left the room feeling frustrated and extremely unhappy. I could only hope that it would never happen again and that I could simply go through another three weeks on H2 and get over to G2 where I'd be safe from all this. This was not to be, however.

Several days after my encounter with Harrington, Mr. Walters and the nursing staff, another episode occurred, this time in the dining room at suppertime. I had just sat down with my tray and was deciding whether or not to eat any of it. I'd been feeling rather fat lately, figuring that one hundred eight pounds was far too heavy and that a twenty-pound loss would be beneficial, as well as offer me much needed security.

Reaching for my coffee cup, I suddenly felt a surge of electrical hysteria rattling and searing every nerve ending in my system. I fell sideways off the chair and onto the tiled floor at several patients' feet. My eyes had jerked sideways as well and strained to maintain some kind of peripheral vision and i began to utter loud, guttural moans as my left arm and leg pummelled my chair in a quick and persistent rhythm.

I couldn't stop this activity, anymore than it would have been possible to cease breathing and before long, I felt a number of hands closing over my upper arms and ankles. "Okay, let's go to seclusion. You obviously can't behave appropriately here. Stop thrashing around like a wild animal!"

I couldn't determine who was speaking, or how many staff members had been summoned to forcibly remove me from the dining room, but it didn't take very long before I was hustled through the dayroom and down the darkened, depressing corridor to that awful seclusion room.

What followed there was another session of frenetic running about, strangled yells and repetitive head-banging. An hour or so later, I crumbled to the floor, exhausted and terror-stricken. This became an established pattern.

I'd awaken in the morning feeling rational, sound and calm and by mid-afternoon, the sessions would hit with the forces of a megaton nuclear bomb and shatter the daylights out of my world.

I was allowed no visitors from that point on and all hope of earning privileges was revoked. These spells occurred up to six times a day and always necessitated being placed in seclusion.

Dr. Harrington took me off Stelazine and Imap and gave me a heavy dose of Haldol, another potent antipsychotic drug. This made matters even worse.

For now, along with the other symptoms, I endured the intense discomfort and trauma of my head being forced backward so that I was staring blankly at the ceiling. Often my eyes would roll backward instead of sideways, and instead of realizing that these could be side effects from the Haldol, I was chided and yelled at for "putting on an act".

I remember walking down the outside railing in the dayroom and feeling as though invisible hands were clutching at my head and jerking it far back. It was extremely painful and just then Dave approached and said with a disgusted leer, "That's about all we're gonna stand from you, young lady. You must really love that seclusion room. Come on, that's where you're headed."

I was inconsolable, as the staff stripped my clothes off and shoved me into that sickeningly familiar solitary box.

"I can't help it! You've got to believe me! Please don't put me in here! Can I talk to Dr. Harrington?"

"Oh, we're supposed to cater to you now? Let you see the doctor on your command? I don't think so. Maybe you should spend a few days in here, until you decide to stop all this crap." Dave took great pleasure in wielding his power and swaggering clout like some Napoleonic dictator. I despised him.

I was learning to hate everyone on B. Mod. for refusing to listen to me and labelling me a fake instead of doing something to release me from this hideous prison I was fettered within.

I spent Christmas Day in seclusion and my family was denied visitation rights. Mom, Dad, Jim and our grandparents had a miserable holiday as they were agonizingly aware of my absence, and they weren't even allowed to give me my presents.

Karen and her folks travelled all the way from Belle River and the staff wouldn't even let them see me for half an hour. Her mother left religious pamphlets for me, which one of the nurses tore up.

My life was spiralling into the sewer, and after Sally shoved my Christmas dinner into my confined quarters, I was in such an out-of-control state of hysteria that my face fell squarely into the instant mashed potatoes. Merry Christmas to me.

Early in the New Year, Harrington the Warden took me off Haldol and decided to give Nozinan a try. It was similar to Chlorpromazine, but with fewer side effects. He started me on fifty milligrams a day and worked up to two hundred and for a couple of weeks, my symptoms decreased markedly.

I felt more like my old self again and revelled in the joy of being able to sit still for hours at a time with out the staring spells ripping into my equilibrium. The other patients had developed a strong animosity toward me over the past months. They felt that I was acting out on purpose, probably because the staff told them so and they lashed out with a great deal of verbal abuse.

Lisa said that she was extremely disappointed in me, thinking that I had been a good head on P1, but now I was quite despicable. She refused to talk to me and would shoot disparaging looks my way when I entered the room. I tried fervently to explain that I couldn't help myself, but she merely scoffed and moved to the furthest corner of the dayroom.

Rita, Sandi and Beverly laughed at me, calling me "the freak" as they surreptitiously avoided me.

Harriet, one of the other teenage patients of East Indian descent who had tried to kill herself by swallowing methyl alcohol, grew quite hostile, and like Lisa, wouldn't talk to me at all after awhile. "You know what you're doing alright", was the last sentence she uttered to me. I was despondent beyond belief, for all my buddies were metamorphosizing into enemies.

Probably my most vocal adversary was Roberta. She approached me late one evening, after the women from the Lutheran church had visited, singing songs with us and offering refreshments afterward. They came on the first Tuesday of the month and we all welcomed them heartily, as they treated us like regular people and overlooked our psychiatric infirmities. This time they were forced to see H2 for what it was: A bona fide loony bin.

After twelve days of feeling and acting very rationally and normally, I flipped out again with a vengeance and had to be escorted from the dayroom, flailing, screaming and pounding my head on the floor.

"How could you carry on like that in front of those Lutheran ladies?" Roberta asked angrily, hissing the words as she spoke them. "I hate the way you're acting. It's fucking embarrassing and sickening. You just do it for attention. There's not a damn thing wrong with you and you know it. There are really sick people here, and you make a mockery of all them. I'm ashamed to be on the same ward as you. I think you're full of shit and you know what else? You're never, never going to get out of here."

There were no words to describe how terrible I felt. I was totally, completely, chillingly alone. My family was off in the nebulous netherworlds of the outside, the staff couldn't, or wouldn't help me and now my fellow inmates hated my guts.

One morning I sat in the bathtub, feeling anxious and ill- at-ease and thought that life was never going to get any better. I've somehow been condemned to this nightmarish existence for the rest of my life. I was not yet twenty-five and life, as I had once experienced it, had ceased to exist. I slid further down in the tub until the waterline was even with my nose. I could just slide under the water now and end the torment. Life was worse than any hell I might encounter following the sin of suicide. "Lord help me," I murmured. "forgive me for copping out like this."

But before my head was submerged, Sally came bustling into the bathroom and yanked it out of the water, grasping my long hair and crying out in exasperated tones, "Alright. I guess you can't even take a bath unsupervised, can you?" That guaranteed me another session in seclusion, where the wild flailing and shouting returned in full force.

I ran about in frantic circles, bashing the back of my head against the wall until the pain was so excruciating that I passed out.

A great pocket of fluid formed around the outside of my skull, and I was hipped off to Victoria Hospital for X-rays to determine whether or not I suffered any head trauma. While I was there, I entertained thoughts of escaping, of running home to the safety and solace of my family and far away from the unspeakable horrors of H. But of course that was only a silly pipedream, because Carol went with me and refused to leave my side until a van returned us to the L.P.H.

There was no serious damage inflicted by the persistent banging, other than perhaps a few hairline fractures that would heal with time.

However, to ensure that no more injuries were sustained, by hands were tied behind my back and a hockey helmet strapped onto my head during my sessions in seclusion. It was very difficult and uncomfortable to sleep this way, but I had no choice. Because of the restraints, all my meals had to be fed to me by a staff member.

Due to the incessant activity, I burned a great deal of calories and was losing weight rapidly. I didn't care, though, and eating wasn't exactly a top priority, so it became the mission of the staff to try and force food into me. i couldn't understand why they were so concerned with my physical well- being, while not giving a damn about my emotional state, so I wasn't terribly co-operative. This attitude was not exactly in my best interests, for it simply gave them more evidence to support their theory that I was playing a lot of games with them.

I did manage to get over to G2 once, though, but it was a short-lived moment of victory. For three weeks I managed to function surprisingly well, early in February of 1980. I still had episodes of my eyes veering off to the side, but the maniacal activity and head-banging subsided when Harrington reduced the dose of Nozinan from two hundred milligrams to one hundred.

He didn't see any relationship between the reduction in medication and my more relaxed demeanour, but I was beginning to wonder if there was a connection. I was extremely elated to finally be released from the hellish H2, and set comparatively free on the more lenient, humane G2. We had off-ward privileges, visitors, as many cigarettes as we could smoke, and, best of all, weekend passes.

After a week on this ward, it was possible to get a day pass on Saturday. I'd be able to go home to Mom's apartment and be with her all day, without staff and other patients milling about. That would be heaven in itself.

The walls of G2 were a cheery, bright yellow, instead of the sombre blue of H2, and there were plants and pictures scattered about, giving the place a homy feel. The head nurse was Laura, a slim, pretty woman with long, straight brown hair and an easy smile.

The other nurses were outgoing, helpful and not at all encased in the dictatorial shell of the other ward's staff like Sally, Stephen, Eric and Dave. I was not involved in O.T. anymore, but had been sent to the Activity Group while on H2, a place for patients who couldn't function at the O.T. level.

Terri was a twenty-nine-year-old patient who looked about twelve and was mentally challenged.

Lane had most of his brain cells fried by street drugs and was little more than a gibbering kumquat.

One day I was hooking a rug off all crazy things ( as if I hadn't done enough of those things already) in the Activity Group. I suddenly felt my eyes sliding sideways in that chillingly familiar pattern. I thought the nightmares of the past were over, and was trying desperately to focus them forward again.

Before I realized what was happening, the rug hook was hanging from my left eyelid. It had somehow gotten caught on the inside of the delicate skin. The Activity Group staff member went frantically berserk when she saw the ugly sight and immediately called G2 for assistance. Within minutes, two nurses arrived with a wheelchair and I was hastily moved to Health Services, where the attending physician removed the hook after sweating it out for awhile. The concensus was that I had done this deliberately and therefore would be returned to H2. Thus ended my five days of relative happiness on G2.

None of them ever stopped to think that nobody, not even someone like myself with a history of self- abusive behaviour, would stick a sharp, dangerous object into his or her eye with the possibility of blindness. I cannot imagine anyone putting their sight in that kind of peril.

Dr. Sussman upped my Nozinan back to two hundred milligrams and the terrible symptoms increased once more in intensity. Luckily, I'd gotten a chance to see my mother on the day I arrived on G2, so at least I knew that my folks hadn't given up on me.

But now the horrendous chasm had opened up again and swallowed me, and I was gone from them for what was to many months. Life settled into a series of sixteen-day rug-hooking programs in an effort to get me through the H2 regimen and get back to G2. Now it wasn't just a matter of hooking the rugs, however, but unhooking them as well.

They had doubled in size, with twice the number of squares, and the pieces of wool had to be picked out of the canvas by hand and then re-hooked when the huge mess was completed. After a few days of grabbing bits of wool out, my fingers were raw and bleeding. It became necessary to pull them out with my teeth, which produced an aching in my two thousand dollars worth of orthodontia that was very uncomfortable.