Around the time that I was 17, I experienced (briefly) the trials of living in a psych ward. What I went into there for and what I left with exposed to me the troubles that lie beyond: the medical field’s long-standing history with uncertainty in dealing with mentally troubled patients.

As the month of May 2014 slowly drew to a close, so did the events that had trumped my emotional teenage life for several months: a rocky breakup and a spiral into one of the worst depressive episodes I had ever experienced. My depression had been building up for a very long time because it chemically runs on my father’s side of the family, manifesting itself in my genes long before I could ever even muster up a cry.

However, it did not truly come out to play and expose itself as the monster that is was for teenage me until around the time that I was 13. People would often label me as “shy,” “the girl who never talked” or simply one who kept to herself for the most part. And it was true, mostly because I was a standard introvert at heart. Beyond that, however, my interests were piqued into stranger things; more importantly, darker ones. I didn’t think much of it. I figured it was part of being a “moody teen,” as did my parents, I suppose. But a lot of things changed once life got rougher. I had no idea how to cope with the depression that hit me and consequently turned to more dangerous methods. My doctor became one of the closest people to my life as I frequented her office trying to obtain meds. For some reason I still don't quite understand, the “best” way to get these anti-depressants was through the ER.

I still remember the day when I walked into the hospital, figuring I’d be in and out pretty quickly so that way I could go home and maybe eat a little dinner. I was hungry. The weather had been incredibly beautiful that week, not that I cared at all for it -- it was more so the other way around, with me coming home from school and shutting all the blinds so that no light would come in and disrupt the numbness that I “felt.” But this time, I really did take that sun for granted, dragging myself in through the hospital doors with squinty eyes and a blank expression dominating the rest of my face. My mother and I approached the clerk working at the front desk check-in.

“We’ve been sent here to talk to a psychiatrist about anti-depressants,” my mother informed a nurse. She took one look at my wrist and, with raised eyebrows, immediately printed out a band for me and ushered me in through the swinging double doors -- flanked by security. I was now one of the many other screaming patients who were undoubtedly suicidal and also dubbed “insane.” I was a hazard not only to myself, but also to those around me.

“Watch your step, Rebecca,” I was told by a nurse who welcomed me warmly into the psychiatric ward by beckoning towards a pool of fresh blood running across the floor.

It was bright red, and spreading fast. I looked up to find the source: an older man, holding his left forearm which had been freshly split open and was now gushing copious amounts of blood. I remembered that cutting up on the forearm is one of the most effective ways to kill yourself. My heart sank to the pit of my stomach. We made eye contact for a moment.

“Come with me,” the same nurse said to me, and led me into a small changing room inside the ward. “Please change out of all your clothes except for your underwear; you can leave those on,” she told me, and handed me a hospital gown.

“Can I keep my bra on?” I asked her.

“No,” she told me.

“OK, why not?”

“Well, some patients in the past have used the straps of the bra to choke themselves to death. I’m sorry, but we just can’t let you keep that.”

Oh. OK.

Once changed, I was led out of the closet-sized changing room and onto a twin bed, an area whose privacy was provided solely by the small curtain hanging between it and the bed next-door. There I waited with my mother for almost an hour to see a nurse, who was supposed to evaluate me for the anti-depressants. The situation had been a bit strange up to this point, chock-full of events that I certainly had not expected, but I figured that from here on out things would probably be a little smoother. I could not have been more wrong.

A nurse did come over to us eventually, taking notes on why I was there, looking at my self-harm cuts and scars and paying particular attention to one that was no bigger than half an inch on the side of my wrist. This is where, I suppose, things went a bit wrong.

“Were you trying to kill yourself? Was that the intent? Did you truly want to die?”

“No, no and no,” I replied. “I was cutting to relieve pain but never to kill myself."

Unfortunately for me and what seemed like quite a few other patients around me, that just wasn’t good enough. After this nurse’s assessment was finished, she told me she would go to fetch the psychiatrist and that he should be no more than an hour. So there we waited once again. Three more hours.

During that time I grew a bit more accustomed to my environment. Now that the pool of blood had been cleaned up off the floor, a new man wearing a hospital gown and hospital slippers had taken to pacing back and forth across the 12-foot length of the floor. He paced in front of the desk of nurses who acted like security guards, watching the patients and typing away on computers. No windows were in the ward at all -- artificial fluorescent lighting was all that reflected off the cold tile floor and powder blue walls.

To the right of me, I could hear a younger woman groaning in her bed. She was extremely restless and kept asking for a nurse to come and talk with her. Finally, one of them did, and the conversation picked up immediately with the younger woman’s urgent tone.

“I need to be let out. I need you to get me out of here. Please, please, let me out," she begged the nurse.

“I’m sorry, Miss, but we just can’t do that right now,” the nurse replied.

This was not what the younger woman wanted to hear.

“Please, there’s been a miscommunication and I just need to be let out. No one’s listening to me in here." She began to get upset. “I just need to see a doctor; he’ll tell you I’m fine. Please, I need to get out!”

Now I don’t claim at all to know this young woman’s psychiatric medical history or anything even close to it, but what I do know is that her requests did not seem unreasonable. However, the more restless she became due to not being listened to, the more paranoid and on-edge the nurses seemed to be.

20 minutes later, this young woman was screaming at the top of her lungs, fighting the staff to let her out of the ward.

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but you need to calm down,” one of the nurses was saying.

“I won't calm down! You people won’t listen to me! Just let me out! Just let me out!” I could hear her struggling and nurses fighting to get her onto the bed. Then, the sedative.

“No, don’t give me that, don’t give me that…” Too late.

Besides this young woman fighting to get her voice across, there were others too who were deeply troubled. A woman across the ward from my small curtained area was being held in a straitjacket. More screaming erupted from a small, enclosed room diagonally from me. And the man in the slippers did not stop pacing.

Eventually, I was approached by another nurse, accompanied by a doctor. This time, I was informed, she was a crisis nurse who would assess me to see what kind of crisis I was experiencing and then provide the necessary help. All this resulted in me telling her the same exact story I had told the previous nurse, and then being told that I was seriously dangerous and needed to be contained in inpatient hospitalization (in this ward) for a minimum of 15 days before I could be moved to another hospital 40 miles away for more inpatient treatment there. What?

I was confused at first. “Do you not understand why I’m in here? I just need medicine. I was sent here by my pediatrician. Please just let me see a psychiatrist,” I told them.

This they either did not understand, or did not want to listen to. The more I tried to understand what was going on and why they would not listen to me, the more frustrated I became. The breaking point came when I realized that, legally, my own parents weren’t allowed to take me home because I had been classified as a “danger to society.” Why? Because there was a half-inch scratch on the side of my wrist.

From there, any fight I put up would only get me in the same situation as the young woman next to my bed: sedated and unable to speak for myself. Thus I was moved into a closed private room, with plain white walls, no windows and nothing but a bed with rounded-off corners in the center of the room. I sat on the end of the bed and glared forward through the window of the door separating my room and the rest of the ward. Dead center on the wall above the nurse’s desk was a ticking clock. And that is what I watched as hour by hour went by and I was continuously dehumanized bit by bit.

Through the night, nurses came in to check my vitals at least once an hour. I was fed dinner, and told that I was lucky enough to be given a spoon to eat the chicken with because patients have filed them into knives before and used those to kill themselves as well.

At this point I had been in the hospital for an entire day and had yet to even witness a psychiatrist walk by. I kept myself busy by wandering in and out of my room to talk to the “security nurses” at the desk, asking them for saltines, or staying in my room and thinking myself into near-insanity. Eventually I was allowed to have a book with me, thank god, but no more than one at a time. Nothing else was allowed, either. No phone. No pens or pencils. No journals. Therefore I spent most of the night cuddling my Harry Potter book, or trying to read myself to sleep.

Other patients in the hospital kept themselves busy in other ways. The same man continued to pace the floor all night long. He’d sit down to rest every now and then, but for the most part he was on his feet. From 10 p.m. until 5 a.m. (I still don’t know how he kept at it for this long, but he did), one of the other male patients went up to the sink right outside my room, filled a cup with ice, dumped it in the sink, filled it up again and dumped it out repeatedly until he got too bored and started glaring at me through the window of my door. He’d stare for a while, a blank expression sitting like cement on his face, and then eventually turn away to resume his noisy ice habits once again.

Hope made an appearance by 6 a.m. The original shift of nurses (including my stubborn crisis nurse) went home, and the morning shift took over. These new people were immediately more cheery, kind and understanding -- and their greatest gift? A psychiatrist. Yes, a psychiatrist finally blessed my room with his presence, like Santa Claus on Christmas morning. As soon as he stepped into my room at sometime around 11 a.m., I got my game face on. It was time to get myself the hell out of here.

“Hi Rebecca, how are you?” he asked me.

“I’m fine. How are you?” I responded. It’s important to show that you care, too, and haven’t been completely ridden of your ego to sink into the pit of the id.

“I’m alright. So what are we here to talk about today?” That was my buzzer to say that the round had started. I started to explain my story, much more persuasively and completely lacking any possible apathy that could’ve manifested itself in the first version I told the original nurse. Unlike almost every other person I had encountered that far into my stay in the ward, this man actually listened to me. With one leg up across his left knee, he maintained eye contact and just listened. It was beautiful, really.

We took a break when I was done so he could go into a separate room and talk to my parents alone. When they got out, my mom rushed in and told me to collect my belongings -- I was going home.

“She’s just angry, really,” the psychiatrist had told my parents. “She’s experiencing something of a maturational crisis and she doesn’t know where to put that pain. She’s been physically restrained from lashing out so she’s inflicting it in on herself. But she isn’t suicidal. She doesn’t need to be here.”

Well, he was right. But the thing is, no one should be in there! Yes, absolutely there were other patients in there who were very mentally troubled. But putting them in a small, locked ward with no windows and constant artificial lighting, a ward filled with others who are slowly growing more insane themselves, is not a good idea of “treatment.” Because as soon as I was let out of there, with the feeling of having a little of my own free will, I could breathe again. I could appreciate the sunlight again. Things were beautiful again. I certainly wasn’t happy. But I knew that anything was better than the environment that ward had provided me with.

Ultimately, the lesson learned here and which needs to be spread is that the need for psychiatrists and true, kind help for the mentally ill is strong. People should not have to go through the extra trouble and trauma of the trials of a psych ward just to get the help they need or even see a psychiatrist. They should not have to be lied to or kept at bay, treated like they are not human or sedated during their stay. The use of force in these situations counteracts what patients truly need, which is help and in some cases reform. Kindness is key. Spread it.