Can Elation Be a Bad Thing?

By Sarah Somerset

Mum keeps telling me that the exams are looming and that I only have two weeks to go before holidays start. I don’t care about the exams because all I want to do is sit outside under the pear tree, enjoy the afternoon sun and listen to music. The lyrics are mind-blowing. I like music of an older generation, such as Jamiroquoi, and beyond that, Stevie Wonder. I spend hours under the pear tree and Mum keeps pleading with me to come inside and study. Soon the exams will be over, she says, but why would I study for exams when beautiful music is talking to me in the sunshine?

I am surprised when the following day a doctor and a nurse arrive at the house to talk to me. Our dogs greet them with great excitement and they pat them. They ask me a barrage of questions about how I am feeling. They seem very worried about me, but I just find it annoying. I reluctantly agree to go with them to the Emergency Department. We hop out at the ambulance stand and they escort me past the COVID check-in to the reception. Then I have to stay in the waiting area with my sister Imogen and a lady who seems to be assigned to watch over me. We are lucky to find a seat in the crowded waiting room. Patients and their loved ones, with wearied expressions, are lining up at the reception window to give their details and await their turn. A stoic mother and her disabled young son have nowhere to sit and have to stand in the corner of the room.

Two hours later I am escorted through the glass doors to a curtained cubicle. I have to lie on the hospital bed. By now Mum has arrived and she sits on one side of me and Imogen on the other. A guard positions himself outside the curtain and sneaks a look at me every 15 minutes. I sense he is embarrassed to be guarding me, particularly when he has to accompany me to the loo.

“The system is broken,” he admits.

It’s humiliating for me to be accompanied to the loo.

“I feel like a loser,” I tell Imogen.

A doctor enters the cubicle to take a blood sample. Now the tests are over; it must be time for me to be moved on. Finally, it’s five o’clock and I have spent the afternoon in the cubicle. A doctor appears and says it’s too late for me to be assessed and I will be transferred to another hospital where I will be assessed in the morning. Just before ten pm, I am wheeled out to an ambulance. I try to get up to walk into the ambulance but they insist that I stay put. I am placed on a gurney and they strap my legs and torso firmly to the stretcher and wheel me in. It had never crossed my mind that I would run away so I find this ridiculous. Thirty minutes later we arrive at the hospital where I am shown to a room for the night, still under guard.

The next day I am shown into a room where I am introduced to a psychiatrist, a doctor and a medical student. I tell them how happy I was spending time in the sunshine in the garden, and how the lyrics were speaking to me. I protest at being taken to a hospital under guard. They tell me that I am manic and that I will be detained for seven days.

I am taken to a locked ward where there are only three other patients. We each have a room to ourselves, and share a common area in front of a nurse’s station behind glass windows. A CCTV camera surveys the room from the ceiling. It is light, airy, spacious and minimal. The ceiling to floor windows look over a courtyard lined with fake lawn, beyond which I can see blue skies and distant eucalyptus trees. Magpies and miner honeyeaters fly in and strut across the fake lawn to amuse me. I would still prefer to be under my pear tree, though.

The other patients are very distressed and I don’t feel that I belong here. The health professionals insist that I am manic and keep increasing the medication in order to slow me down. They tell me I talk too quickly, but that’s just how I am. 

Talking too quickly does not mean I need to be medicated, does it?

Over the week they keep increasing the dose of the medication, and I resist. The nurse asks me to take a tablet and I refuse. Then she threatens to inject me unless I give in. I put the tablet in my mouth but keep it under my tongue. The nurse guesses my ruse and prompts me to open my mouth to show her that I have swallowed it. I spit the tablet onto the floor. They bring me a new one and I oblige them by swallowing it.

In the locked room I can’t even pour myself a cup of tea. I have to ask the nurse to bring me one. 

Despite these deprivations and lack of freedom, I continue to be elated. Why must I be medicated to subdue my elevated mood? Why must I be forced to take medication that is starting to make me feel slow and sluggish when I would rather remain in my natural high state? After all, my elation hurts no one. 

I think there is something wrong with a society that persecutes someone by depriving them of their elation.

[Author's  Note: This was written from the point of view of a patient, with their permission, who was experiencing a manic episode. In South Australia, patients may be detained under the Mental Health Act. This piece first appeared in The Muse at McMasters University, Winter 2022.]