IT ALL started one night on a camp in Paramin. After being off weed and drink for a year, I decided this November night was the night. I found myself at the end of the night unapologetically intoxicated. Then the torture started.

The flickering of the candle lit up the darkness just enough to keep me awake until the wee hours of the morning, by which time I was lying on the concrete due to the perceived heat, sweating heavily in the freezing forest. Then it all went away, but by late January, the voices and delusions were taking over, and I told my parents I needed to be put away. A decision was made-partly mine, mostly theirs-that Mt Hope would suit me best. What would follow would be a tale I never thought I’d get the opportunity to tell.

It took my parents three hours to get me admitted.

After hour two, I would be introduced to a doctor J. While taking my information, surrounded by the circus that is the Mt Hope ER, she made her diagnosis: schizophrenia induced by a teen lifestyle of weed and alcohol.

I was taken to the psychiatric ward where all my belongings, including (much to my disappointment) my cigarettes, were stripped from my person. I was not in the right frame of mind to comprehend any other strippings, be it of dignity, pride, or the like. I was left with the clothes I had on my back, a bag with something to change into, my phone and charger.

Shorty thereafter I met Prince, a completely sane, short black man. I asked why he was on the ward. He explained to me he would rather spend time inside than out. He had just come off a stint in jail. His role in life and on the ward was spiritual psychic. It was not uncommon for him to receive calls (sometimes from overseas) to his Me-2 from helpless people asking for spiritual advice. I imagined how perplexed his paying customers would be if they knew their spiritual saviour was answering them from a hospital ward. An apt environment for a psychic, I suppose.

Prince and I became fast friends, often chatting about life and values.

Being smokers, we needed to get our fix. To this day I’m not sure how he did it, but there was always a pack of Mt D’or cigarettes hidden. We would sneak into the bathroom one at a time and drag, spraying ourselves and the air in the room with perfume to disguise our crime.

Next there was Jas, who, when he showered, would put his clothes on backwards, forcing the nurses to promptly change him. His ritual was running from one side of the ward to the other, tapping the wall with his index finger. He was a gentle soul, all of 22.

Then there was the police officer (whose name I can’t remember) who was inside because of PTSD from his days on the force in T&T. God alone knows what he saw. One early morning I awoke before the other patients to see the nurses giving him a shot of Thorazine to the right butt cheek. They were injecting in his right, due to the numerous injections to the left. He would sit anywhere cautiously.

This officer gave me a piece of advice while inside. Take it as you would take any bit of advice from a mental patient: ‘The first night of your marriage, beat your wife senselessand when she asks you why, tell her: imagine what I would do if you did something wrong.’

My experience with the female patients on the ward was good. One patient wrote me a suggestive note, gave me her number, and requested mine-which I did not provide. Still, she was the only woman to proposition me as an adult.

My final comrade was Josh, who was discharged shortly before I was. ‘Remember’, he said, ‘I don’t know you, you don’t know me, and we are not friends.’ What was meant, I think, as a final parting blow between two pals was more like a violent kick to the solar plexus. I would spend the next four days of my two-week self-imposed lock-up with that blow aching.

As the medication started to work, I began to feel better and was discharged after a review by Dr J. That was it. My time was up, and I was released back into reality. And what seemed like a long, really bad comedy, was over.

I’m all right now, thinking from time to time about what would have happened had things really gone wrong.

Penn Manson Fyzabad