How I was accidentally sectioned into a psych ward during the coronavirus lockdown – ABC News

The two worst things that happened to me during the March COVID lockdown were:

In all honesty, it was the eyebrow thing that caused me the most grief. But given that everyone suffered some sort of corona-related DIY body hair disaster (hello, pandemic bangs), I'll focus on the accidental institutionalisation.

I've always been certifiably crazy (I know that's a politically incorrect term but I feel strongly about having the right to use it about myself). Some of my earliest memories as a child involved existential dread and serious contemplation of ... well ... not being alive, to put it bluntly.

Mental illness stalks several members of my family so at least some of my madness is probably genetic. But multiple episodes of abuse from the past has also hardwired my central nervous system into near constant fight, flight or freeze mode.

People who've suffered trauma know the deal. We'll be gaily going about our business in 2020 and suddenly we teleport back in time and it feels like The Terrible Things are happening all over again live.

Unsurprisingly, there have been many times in my life when I've barely held it together.

One of those occasions was my late teens when, after dropping out of high-school and running away from home, I barely survived a year of eating disorders, cutting and industrial-grade risk taking.

Then there was the time I was a new mother with a six-month-old baby who'd yet to sleep more than a few hours in a row. I woke one Sunday morning quite convinced she would be better off without me.

Checking myself into the postnatal depression (PND) unit of a nearby psychiatric hospital worked like a charm.

It wasn't because the treatment I received was particularly useful for an anti-social weirdo like myself. (While most of the staff were delightful, one especially Nurse Ratchet-y individual who talked to me as if I was my daughter's age had a habit of wandering into my room after lights out, shining a fishing torch into my face and shouting "HAVE YOU DONE YOUR MENTALLY CALMING, GETTING-READY-TO-SLEEP RELAXATION EXERCISES?" as I was trying to do my mentally calming, getting-ready-to-sleep relaxation exercises.)

What actually helped was the realisation that I was developing way more insight into the way my brain worked (and didn't work) than many paid professionals.

Indeed, my designated psychiatrist in the PND ward urged me to leave only five nights into my six-week stay because he decided that in my case institutionalisation was contraindicated for sanity. That said, I'd still re-admit myself in a hot minute if I thought I needed it.

These days, I'm extremely skilled at living as the DSM-5 personified.

When I get those "time to die" thoughts, I tune into the sliver of myself that still speaks sense. Instead of panicking about the blackness and bleakness of my thinking or buying into their "logic", I use them as diagnostic. "Wow," is what I think to myself. "Check out the blackness and bleakness of THOSE thoughts. Time to outsource for some assistance."

This is how things went down during my COVID crisis. For months, it had been just me and my teenaged daughter living under what felt like house arrest. I am immunocompromised as a result of having had cancer, which meant we had to remain hermetically sealed from the world way longer than everyone else.

I kept up an excellent impersonation of a sane-ish lady until the weekend my daughter went to stay at her dad's for a few weeks.

In the absence of any exogenous reasons to give meaningful shapes to the days, I spiralled. It's difficult to find the words to describe the visceral and malignant misery I felt though David Foster Wallace has a good stab at it in Infinite Jest:

"The so-called 'psychotically depressed' person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of quote 'hopelessness' or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debits do not square ...The person [whose] invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise ... Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window ... The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors ... You'd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling."

Foster, tragically, didn't make it. In 2008, he committed what the German philosopher Immanuel Kant called "self-murder".

I, on the other hand, have become a complete cockroach when it comes to doing the Bee Gee's thing of stayin' alive. When I started feeling that terror way beyond falling earlier this year, for instance, I did as I have done for many decades now and sought help.

I started by ringing my preferred crisis line and as per usual given my mega weirdness ended up in an oddly meta conversation with the anonymous counsellor.

The ABC gains unprecedented access to join social worker Anne-Marie Skegg and psychiatric nurse Chris Ward on the job, as they respond to acute mental health emergencies.

"I feel like you're reading from a script," I said.

"What I'm hearing you say is that you feel like I'm reading from a script," he replied.

"Now I feel like you're doing Active Listening with a capital 'A' and a capital 'L'," I said.

"What I'm hearing you say is that you feel like I'm doing active listening with a"

Long silence.

"Oh," he said finally. "I see what you mean."

And then as has happened so frequently in our house this year the line dropped out.

At the time, I didn't think much of it. I was feeling slightly better and figured the actively listening phone dude would call me back if he was concerned. I did, however, take the additional precaution of ringing my closest friend and asking her to come watch over me for a while.

Five minutes after she arrived, there was a firm knock on the front door.

On the NSW North Coast everyone knows each other. And everyone seems to know someone. Someone who has lost a loved one to suicide; someone who has become acquainted with the black dog.

Standing on my front porch were three burly police officers and two paramedics. Police vehicles and an ambulance blocked the street and neighbours were gathering in small, complex formations.

"You made a phone call earlier today," the largest of the police officers said by way of introduction.

"That is correct," I replied, launching matter-of-factly into a blow-by-blow account of the entire crisis conversation in a typically neuro-atypical manner.

I explained about the call drop-out. I explained I was feeling a lot better. I pointed out my friend. But the vibe was rapidly unravelling.

The three facemask-free officers insisted that I unlock the front door and show them every medication in the house. I said I was concerned about COVID.

"If you don't open the door immediately, we'll have you sectioned," the biggest one said.

Whether you want to know more about how depression actually manifests, different treatment approaches or go deep on specific experiences, from the light-hearted and humorous to the confronting and challenging, we've got the book for you.

My friend got antsy. "You're making things so much worse for her," she said, pulling out her phone to start filming.

The volume of everyone's voices rose rapidly. By the time I unlocked the front door, the police had changed tack.

"If you don't get in the ambulance immediately and get professionally assessed in hospital, we'll have you sectioned," was their new line.

At which point, I decided the sanest move was simply to succumb to asylum-isation.

During the ride to hospital, I apologised to the cute paramedics saying I really was OK and felt bad for wasting their time when so many other folk must be in greater need of their help.

"You're not wasting our time," one of these two women said. "A lot of the times we attend these sorts of calls, we don't find a person, we find a body."

For every death by suicide, as many as 30 others attempt to end their life. Australia has a suicide problem it seems we can all agree on that but when it comes to solutions, the verdict isn't so clear.

I felt an overwhelming sense of gratitude. Not because I personally needed police and paramedic protection right in that moment, but because I live in a place where mental health is taken so seriously entire, emergency squads arrive at the domiciles of civilians regarded as psychiatrically imperilled.

Once we reached the hospital, the police decided for reasons I still can't fathom to section me anyway. The woman at the front desk of the psych ward took all my stuff and patted me down.

She then sent me in to talk to the (exceedingly delightful) triage nurse who agreed the whole sectioning exercise was bizarre, though he did gently explain that the crisis line I'd called had a duty of care to contact emergency services if its phone folk believed that life was in immediate danger.

His view was that I should simply be permitted to go home but because of the circumstances of my admission I had to be assessed by a psychiatrist first.

For three hours I waited in a room lit only with a reptilian green bulb or fluorescent tube. It did not soothe me so much as space-shuttle the whole scene into peak surrealism. During this increasingly weird wait, a call from my 13-year-old daughter came through via my smart watch.

I did my very best impression of a normal person (though this always makes me feel like I'm wearing drag) and hoped she wouldn't use the tracking app we both have on our phones and notice I was not at home but trapped in what was becoming an increasingly boring B-grade psych ward movie (though, just FYI, I did fill her in on the latter later).

Finding the right psychologist is a bit like app dating. You hope it'll be a good match, but sometimes you're left disappointed.

Finally, the psychiatric registrar (also delightful) arrived, sat cross-legged on the floor in front of me, chatted for a while, and said, "you're free to go".

I walked out feeling decidedly chipper. I'm a maestro in a crisis and having to wrangle my fiercely protective friend and the three pushy police officers had been fantastically distracting. Plus, I've a total sucker for urban thrill-seeking.

"So, this is what it's like to be sectioned in a psych ward," I'd kept thinking to myself. "Now that's something to tick off the bucket list!"

Then, inevitably, the adrenalin wore off. The slow, painstaking details of psychiatric rebuilds aren't nearly as exciting as a crisis: gradual experiments with new meds, a period of more frequent therapy, endless mindfulness meditation, annoying exercise, dosed bursts of sunlight.

It's a yawn-fest but, for me at least, it works.

I find the annual "mental health chat" with my GP incredibly uncomfortable, but there are ways to make it less of a drag, Graham Panther writes.

What also works is telling people. When other humans ask how I am, I answer honestly.

"Experiencing a bit of suicidal ideation, now that you ask."

"Amused that the cops who sectioned me on the weekend chastised me for not changing out of my pyjamas before boarding the ambulance."

"Entirely mortified by the Groucho Marx eyebrows."

I blurt these things out partly because one of my multiple diagnoses is autism spectrum disorder and as the comedian Hannah Gadsby puts it about her own autism:

"[T]hat's how we roll. Pretty much, it's like, 'I have a piece of information you seem to be missing. You may or may not be ready to hear this information, but I'll tell you, because knowledge is power, ignorance is a cage and feelings can be dealt with. I bid you good day'."

The other reason I talk is that silence around mental health is toxic sometimes fatally so.

David Foster Wallace is my favourite writer ever but his burning building analogy is flawed. It's true that choosing to stay alive with an unquiet mind can burn so badly it feels excruciating, unbearable even. But, unlike the flames of a real inferno, it's possible to sit this type of scorching out and eventually walk away mostly unscathed.

In that other place, however, there are no takebacks.

Emma Jane is a freelance writer and an associate professor in the School of the Arts and Media at UNSW.

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How I was accidentally sectioned into a psych ward during the coronavirus lockdown - ABC News