Highlands




















The movies were wrong. There were no puffy padded rooms. There were no drooling maniacs in straight jackets watching your every move. There were no barred windows and hallways. There were just faces, in plain blue scrubs, twisted with emotion. Angry patients were taken to the wall and they cursed with frustration.

I was a number on a chart, nothing more. I and every other patient was treated like suicidal maniac (which some of us were). We were treated to blank rooms which smelled like lemon pledge. The photoshop-ed painting on the wall was the only bright spot in this otherwise hopeless room White walls stared back at our glazed eyes. For hours we sat in those gloomy, gloomy rooms. We were entertained by the normal and mundane such as, paper and cups. I would have never thought I would have played wall-ball with paper. But this joy was short lived as our “ball” was taken away as it was “a danger to patients”. At nights we laid awake on plastic pads and listened to screams of the formally sane. Most nights were sleepless, and they were spent with hands muffling my ears, as not to hear the screams of the schizophrenic. This treatment could drive anyone insane, but most of us were already.