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"On the Inside" A Short Story
My Real Life as a psychiatric inpatient

I would like to introduce myself as a 31-year-old women who has battled mental illness all of my life. Ever since the age of 13, I knew that something was different about me. I was not interested in the things that other children did, I was always sad. I have been in therapy for most of my life, however there were four times when I had to go one step beyond therapy, and that is private psychiatric hospitalization. I would like to tell you about three of these experiences, one at the age of 13, the next at 23 and the final at 26. During my experience in one of the hospitals I also received the very controversial treatment of Electroconvulsive therapy.

The trouble began in 1984 when I turned eight. My parents had decided to separate and my father wanted to put me into therapy even though I was young. By the time I was ten in 1986 they finally divorced. I remained with the same therapist until I was around twelve. As I mentioned above, it was about this age that things started to drastically change with my personality. I began to sink into a depression, there were things in life that were just wearing me down inside. For instance, all the children at the fancy new public school which my father had forced me to attend two years earlier were taking full advantage of my weakened state. I was very shy, sad and lonely; I just was not able to make friends with these rich kids. They all loved to make fun of me and degrade me every chance that they got. During the summer of 1989, I developed a mild form of OCD. (Obsessive compulsive disorder) I thought that if I washed my hands every time a bad thought entered my head then when I started school the children wouldn't be so hard on me.

My parents and therapist of course noticed these changes so in late August of 1989 when I was thirteen I was checked into a private hospital called Lakeside against my will. Luckily, I landed on the children's ward even though I was in my teens; since I was there for depression rather than drug abuse I was spared the horrors of the teenage floor and got to stay with the 1-12 year olds.
I kicked and screamed my way through the admission process. I felt totally betrayed, shocked and angry at my parents, however when the doors closed behind me, I knew that my tantrum was futile.

My roommate was a plump little girl of nine and as I looked around I noticed that most of the kids were extremely young. I had no idea what

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