It was twenty years ago when I entered my first psychiatric hospital, in a town called Purmerend, not far from Amsterdam. I was driven there by my boss and a colleague/dear friend, who were concerned about my health.
I was in a ‘psychosis’, in which I experienced the most amazing things. The whole world appeared as magical. I felt happy and awakened, and when sitting in front of several doctors, upon my admission, I didn’t suspect that it was an ‘illness’ and that I was about to experience total psychiatric hell for years to come. I was having religious revelations, and my constant stomach pain (probably due to unprocessed childhood trauma) was gone and for good.
Following on my insomnia for eleven days, prior to ending up in what is called ‘psychosis’, I slept for three days in the hospital, to finally awake to a camera staring at me from the ceiling. You won’t believe it but they had cameras in every patient’s room, and at first I assumed that I had ended up in some reality TV episode. There was a drawing wall in my room with a pencil, and so I got up, took the pen and wrote in large clear letters ‘I am Buddha’. It felt like that then. I was so happy. It was an incredible feeling, like as if the enlightenment had reached me finally.
Five minutes later a doctor entered my room. He looked at me and then at the wall, and then proceeded to explain that I was psychotic and needed to start my treatment, consisting of a medication called Zyprexa (olanzapine). I wasn’t sure what it meant, and I couldn’t understand why my euphoric state of mind was called a ‘psychosis’, but here it went: I was shamed into the fact that I was in a psychiatric hospital, I had to consider myself as ill, and start ‘medication’. I am not trying to romanticize the concept of ‘mental illness’, nevertheless, I often wonder: What would happen if they didn’t shame me then, let me ‘recover’ by myself, and reassure me that feeling like Buddha wasn’t an illness? And instead tried to encourage me to embrace my new state of being?
I don’t know. I was never given that chance, and at the age of twenty-seven I made my entrance into the psychiatric journey, where I have been shamed, stigmatized, told that I would suffer for the rest of my life, over-medicated, and lost.
That hospital in Purmerend was weird. They were watching our single move. But they had a swimming pool and food was good.
(this post was firs posted on X platform)
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