Two locked doors with a five-foot space between them where you had to stand while the nurse relocked the first door and unlocked the second.
Just inside, three phone booths. Then a couple of single rooms and the living room and eat-in kitchen. This arrangement ensured a good first impression for visitors.
Once you turned the corner past the living room, though, things changed.
A long, long hallway: too long. Seven or eight double rooms on one side, the nursing station centered on the other, flanked by the conference room and hydrotherapy tub room. Lunatics to the left, staff to the right. The toilets and shower rooms were also to the right, as though the staff claimed oversight of our most private acts.
A blackboard with our twenty-odd names in green chalk and spaces after each where we, in white chalk, entered our destination, departure time, and time of return whenever we left the ward. The blackboard hung directly across from the nursing station. When someone was restricted to the ward, the head nurse wrote RESTRICTED in green chalk beside the name. We got advance warning of an admission when a new name appeared on the list—sometimes as much as a day before the person of that name appeared on the hall. The discharged and the dead stayed on the list for a while in silent memoriam.
At the end of the terrible hall, the terrible TV room. We liked it. At least, we preferred it to the living room. It was messy, noisy, smoky, and, most important, it was on the left, lunatic side of things. As far as we were concerned, the living room belonged to the staff. We often agitated to move our weekly Hall Meeting from the living room to the TV room; it never happened.
After the TV room, another turn in the hall. Two more singles, one double, a toilet, and seclusion.
The seclusion room was the size of the average suburban bathroom. Its only window was the chicken-wire-enforced one in the door that allowed people to look in and see what you were up to. You couldn’t get up to much in there. The only thing in it was a bare mattress on the green linoleum floor. The walls were chipped, as though somebody had been at them with fingernails or teeth. The seclusion room was supposed to be soundproof. It wasn’t.
You could pop into the seclusion room, shut the door, and yell for a while. When you were done you could open the door and leave. Yelling in the TV room or the hall was “acting out” and was not a good idea. But yelling in the seclusion room was fine.
You could also “request” to be locked into the seclusion room. Not many people made that request. You had to “request” to get out too. A nurse would look through the chicken wire and decide if you were ready to come out. Somewhat like looking at a cake through the glass of the oven door.
The seclusion-room etiquette was, If you weren’t locked in, anybody could join you. A nurse could interrupt your yelling to try to find out why you were yelling, or some other crazy person could come in and start yelling too. Hence the “request” business. Freedom was the price of privacy.
The real purpose of the seclusion room, though, was to quarantine people who’d gone bananas. As a group we maintained a certain level of noisiness and misery. Anyone who sustained a higher level for more than a few hours was put in seclusion. Otherwise, the staff reasoned, we would all turn up the volume on our nuttiness, and the staff would lose control. There were no objective criteria for deciding to put someone into seclusion. It was relative, like the grading curve in high school.
Seclusion worked. After a day or a night in there with nothing to do, most people calmed down. If they didn’t, they went to maximum security.
Our double-locked doors, our steel-mesh window screens, our kitchen stocked with plastic knives and locked unless a nurse was with us, our bathroom doors that didn’t lock: All this was medium security. Maximum security was another world.