When I wasn't engaged in this mindless activity, I was shuttled off to seclusion with the tied hands and hockey helmet, rolling about on the floor and feeling as though my insides were crawling with electrically charged insects. I remembered how my mother had told me how her cat had swallowed a lot of wool, years before, and had gone mad from the pain. That's how I felt with these awful spells.

Moans and yells emitted from my gut, spilling out into the silence of the night and keeping the other patients awake.

"Shut up, damn you and let us get some sleep!!" they would holler at me.

But I couldn't shut up, or stop my body from rocking from side to side. I rarely slept and was never able to relax. I grew envious of the other patients who could sit for hours without moving and writhing about and could converse among themselves with ease and relative non-chalance.

I celebrated my twenty-fifth birthday pulling apart a giant rug with my teeth. As the sun began to set on the L.P.H., I came running out in the dayroom in the nude, having spun into a chaotic frenzy while getting undressed for bed and landed squarely into the lap of a very surprised Fred.

Nurses rushed about in an effort to cover me up as I wriggled and jerked around in clear view of everyone in the dayroom. That was probably the single most demoralizing event of my H2 career, for I was certainly not an exhibitionist by nature.

Those spells were so overwhelming and severe that they transcended any sense of morality and modesty. People's mouths waggled about this spectacle for weeks and I became the ward laughing stock.

Fred, however, with his quiet gentleness, took it all in stride and felt compassion and sympathy for my plight and I dearly loved him for that.

Along with my rug hooking and de-hooking duties, I was given a series of chores to accomplish each day in an effort to modify my behaviour. Some of these included mopping the dayroom floor in the evening, making all the patients' beds, scrubbing the baseboards all around the dayroom's walls, pouring the HS drinks, and changing Mildred's urine-soaked sheets twice a day.

Mildred was this rather frightening, outrageously profane, chewed-up old creature, who looked as if she could have been the creation of pulp-horror guru Stephen King. She was small, with spiky grey hair, thick glasses, and a tongue that was several sizes too big for her mouth. She used four-letter words I'd never heard before, and had a habit of throwing Readers Digest magazines at people, spitting at them, and threatening to kill anyone who looked sideways at her. It was rumoured that she had killed her husband years before and had been determined not guilty by reason of insanity. She was one of the "regressed patients;" that is, one of four women on H2 who were so ill that they were basically locked in their own demented prisons and could not really communicate with anyone.

Darlene, was another one of them, a skinny pretzel who twisted herself into various contortions, and like Mildred, swore continually. She had no teeth, and because of this her nose touched her chin, and the story with her was that she had gone insane when she caught her husband in bed with another woman.

Pris was a Native woman who never spoke at all and wouldn't look anyone in the eye, and Judith sat in a geriatric chair all day, chewing mindlessly on her tongue. These patients were deliberately placed on H2 to show us what could happen if we didn't get out acts together. I felt sorry for all of them, even Mildred, who turned out to be my roommate for most of my time there.

She, like Judith, was locked in a geriatric chair all day, and tied into her bed at night. She always wet the bed, including the two hours during the day she spent there in the afternoon. she had to be restrained all the time because she was extremely violent and could actually physically attack people.

One night, she got out of her restraints and moved over to my bed, whereupon she put her bony fingers around my throat and proceeded to strangle me.

I awoke with a start and tried to call out to the nurses in their station across the hall for assistance. there were two of them in there chatting away and totally ignorant of what was transpiring in our bedroom. finally, one of them clued in, but not before old Mildred nearly choked the daylights out of me.

Mildred despised me and would utter in guttural, hate-laced tones, "Your mother's a whore, your father's a whoremaster, and you're the little bastard." She certainly wouldn't make finalist in the "Loving grandmother of the year" contest.

During my few, lucid times, I was very much aware of the music that came out during that time. I remember enjoying Dire Straits' "Sultans of Swing," Gerry Rafferty's "Baker Street," ELO's "Don't Bring Me Down" and "Sara Smile" by Hall and Oates. There was still a fair bit of disco crap hanging around to make my life miserable, but I managed to filter it out.

I used to spend a lot of time sitting beside the stereo by the pool table, just letting the songs sink into my brain and hoping that they would jolt me back to life and some measure of happiness. I would have been even worse if it weren't for that familiar connection.

Six months had passed since I had had any visitors, and it had been four since I had been at either Activity Group or O.T., The B. Mod. O.T. had been preferable to the one on P1. It was run by Selene and Duncan.

Selene was a pleasant thirty-eight-year-old British woman and had once been a neighbour of Grandma and Grandpa Colerick. I had babysat for her two young sons back in 1969, and had clear, positive memories about the experience. Janet was an ardent, enthusiastic fan of the The Boomtown Rats and even went to see them in concert in 1978, and I liked her enthusiastic verve and vigour.

Long-haired, bearded Duncan was just as cool, with a relaxed, easygoing manner, and I really missed them when I was held prisoner on the ward for so long. I desperately wanted to return to O.T., where I knew I'd be treated with respect and care.

So I spent my days with rugs, chores, Mildred and being constantly harassed by staff and patients alike. The longer I was separated from my family, the more I felt as though I was drifting into some frightening black hole from which i would never emerge.

One afternoon, as I sat picking bits of wool out of my teeth, I was struck with a horrifying thought: Perhaps I had really succeeded in my suicide attempt in November of 1978, and I was now in some dreadful Purgatory, reserved for lost souls who have taken their own lives. My penance was this never ending torment I had been experiencing since then, orchestrated by Satan in preparation for my eternal damnation in Hell.

That must be it; there could be no other explanation for my suffering. I deserved it, and of course I couldn't see my family and friends, for they were still alive on earth. I felt sick, and then whatever minuscule shred of hope I'd clung to until that moment just disintegrated. I was the Undead, and could never expect to be released from these demonic forces for all Eternity.

From that day onward, I gave up, and let the staff abuse the hell out of me, the other patients torment me and I willingly submitted to the pain.

Geraldine became my sole ally, as she, too, was endlessly hassled on H2, and understood my devastation. We sat together in misery while around us people came and went, got better, went off to G2 and were replaced by more poor souls who hadn't yet been damaged by the B. Mod. Machine.

People imprisoned in the Nazi death camps during World War II experienced similar psychological patterns when they knew that they were doomed. They stopped fantasizing about being released, and let their captors have their sadistic ways with them. Numb to the travesties going on around them, the prisoners adapted, in a way, to their situation, clinging to what little they still had to keep them rooted in some semblance of sanity. They spent hours ruminating about food and eating as they were starved, and they played little mind games with themselves to distract them from the abysmal living conditions and the screams of other victims being killed and tortured.

Now I'm not claiming that the staff on H2 were that vicious, but in some ways, their abuse was just as insidious as Hitler's henchmen's. They used fear and dominance, as well as reward and punishment and even though we weren't slaughtered or gassed in ovens, we were robbed of our autonomy and sense of self.

I began to regress during my months in seclusion, and with the many rugs I hooked and took apart. My world had shrunk to the realm of the dayroom, the observation bedroom and seclusion, with no other stimulation or diversion, except to do chores that should have been done by the nurses and the other patients.

I wonder if those people had any idea of how cruel and dehumanizing their treatment of us was, and that it would leave permanent scars on all of our psyches. They couldn't possibly have believed that they were doing the right thing, or what was in our best interest. Behaviour Modification did not work, and what was worse, it was detrimental. I don't hate them anymore for what they did, but I will never get over the anger I feel for putting me through so much suffering for something that was not my fault.

I've discovered since that time that what I experienced with the "staring spells" was a severe reaction to the antipsychotic drugs I was given. I'm extremely sensitive to any kind of medication and drugs like Haldol, Modicate, and Nozinan are very powerful and potent.

I suppose that in the late 1970's, the psychiatric profession did not realize that patients should never be given these drugs without one called Cogentin for side effects. I wasn't given anything like that for the year and an half I was on H2. Dr. Harrington should, however, have realized that my traumatic symptoms could possibly be medication-related before hastily dismissing them as "acting out" for attention.

The other patients were having some difficulties of their own. Roberta had been transferred to G2 early in January and was released two months later. Then one day, late in March, she returned to H2 and was at least twenty pounds thinner. She paced up and down the outside railing of the dayroom, arms folded tightly across her chest, and slightly bent over at the waist. The overall effect was one of a half-starved sparrow, similar to the image I'd projected in Rhode Island nearly nine years before.

Roberta had told me how anorexic she'd become in 1977, when, at age seventeen, she'd gone from one hundred thirty pounds to mere eighty. I could see that the poor girl was headed for another session.

Beverly had become involved with a burned-out drug addict named Jason, who was at least twelve years her senior and couldn't utter one coherent sentence if his life depended on it. She was crazy about him, even though the guy wasn't even aware of Beverly's presence most of the time.

Sandi went AWOL one night, made it home and slashed her forearm quite severely, making five gaping cuts that needed immediate stitching. She did it so that she wouldn't have to return to H2, and after discussing her case with her father, the staff let her leave. I don't know the full story, but, given Sandi's terrible home life, she was most likely sent off to a foster home. I never saw her again.

Stanley was still high as a kite, pacing continuously and rambling loudly in endless, run-on sentences, that were punctuated with a great deal of maniacal laughter. He still had a mad crush on me and never missed an opportunity to feed me one of his classic, come-on lines, such as: "Hey, doll, let's you and me go down to the sub-basement and have some fun." Needless to say, I never got around to taking him up on it.

Shane made it to G2 but then got mixed up with some bad dope and returned to H2, mad as hell. He was terribly disillusioned with everyone and everything, especially my outbursts of the past several months. He'd say, "You used to be so cool with your foxy clothes and hair. Then you got real weird on me".

Poor Shane, he just couldn't cope in a world that wasn't totally predictable and unchanging. It made me wonder what he saw in drugs, which are anything but unpredictable.

One Wednesday morning, during that meeting with the patients and the doctors, social workers and staff, I was asked why I didn't try harder to stop my episodes before they got really out of hand. "Once you get going, you really can't stop, and we know that. But we feel that you are able to exert a certain amount of control over yourself at the outset. You shouldn't let yourself get all worked up, because then it's too late to regain your composure."

This was spoken to me by Sheila, one of the younger nurses. I wondered how she could come to that conclusion. Sheila seemed so damned sure of herself, as they all did, including Harrington and Mr. Walters.

They sat there like a close-minded jury, convinced that their assessment of me was the right one and that my sentence would be another year of rug hooking, unhooking, chores and belittling comments. I didn't know where they got their evidence, since none of them were able to crawl into my head and read my mind. It was all conjecture, pure and simple, based on the flimsy theory that all of us on H2 were simply naughty, despicable behaviour problems that needed to be whipped into shape.

I left the meeting with my usual feeling of heaviness, a disappointment mixed with a substantial amount of bitter frustration.

I grasped onto little pleasures like drinking a cup of coffee at supper and savouring the caffeine. This was before I knew that all the coffee and the tea in the L.P.H. was decaffeinated. I greatly anticipated going to bed at night, for it signalled the end of another bad day on the ward. I still had no visitors and no privileges.