Take today, for instance. I haven’t left the apartment in a good 72 hours. This latest bout of antisocial behavior was prompted by my most recent foray into the outside world, a trip to the deli in which I ended up crumpled on the floor. In an effort to get there and get the fuck back home with a minimum of human contact, I raced to the corner in my platform flip-flops and fell into a pregnant woman on a cell phone who stopped right in the doorway. As if that wasn’t bad enough, I twisted my ankle and stumbled to my right, managing to knock down a three-year-old who stood lolling right beside her with no parental supervision whatsoever.

She turned on me, whirled to yell at me, her face flashing fury as she gave the blow-by-blow to the person on the other end of the line “GodDAMN,” she shouted. “Fucking bitch just tripped me. Fucking cunt wasn’t looking where she was motherfucking going.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I didn’t mean to.” A crowd of Dominican teenagers turned away from the counter to stare. I was still sitting on the floor.

“And she knocked down a baby, too,” continued the woman.

“I’m sorry, I said, “I’m honestly trying to apologize to you.” I managed to at least stand up, to attempt to salvage something of my dignity, to brush off my ass, but the day was ruined. Fuck that, the week was ruined. I had decided to leave the house but because I was sub-human and hated by God and everybody, I had been punished, and everybody around me could see that I was just a dog, and I didn’t deserve to purchase things in stores like actual people

The episode ended with me paying for my cat litter in tears, contemplating slashing my throat with razor blades and running out into the streets rending my garments in awful penance for existing, finally setting myself on fire and hurling myself off the Williamsburg Bridge.

In case anyone was wondering, this would be a fine example of the bipolar brain off drugs, as opposed to, oh, say, on Depakote, when I could have called the woman an insipid breeding cow and moved on. I would like to pause for a moment to ask that if you are sitting in the room with a bipolar person at this moment, you pause to peg them in the head with their lithium and tell them you did it out of love, as a gentle reminder. Now back to our story.

So I go to see Lynn, the setting Brooklyn sun blinding me after three days in my apartment. Her office is connected to her apartment, and I am met by her two yapping, flatulent schnauzers, who always sit in on our sessions whether I want them to or not. Today they annoy me more than usual. I try to ignore them, lying there on their little doggie couch gnawing on mangled rawhide chews, as I tell her I’ve run out of drugs and that I’m too scared to call Dr. Hamer because I missed my last appointment. She is, to say the least, not amused.

“Look, Stacy,” she says, “at some point you have to take responsibility for getting your medication when you need it.”

“I know,” I whimper. “I know, but he’s mad at me and I can’t deal with going all the way to the Upper West Side to be lectured about keeping my appointments. I just can’t. It’s not worth it.”

“Worth it? What did you think was going to happen if you quit taking your drugs?” she asks. “You’re a smart woman. You’ve been on and off medication for almost ten years now. You know what happens when you stop.”

There is, of course, no arguing with that. I huddle between her farting dogs, hugging my knees to my chest, trying to fathom actually getting on the subway and riding into Manhattan and switching trains and bumping into people and such. There is no way I can accomplish that. Three days ago, maybe. A week ago, sure. But not today. Today I am too far gone, in heavy withdrawal from the SSRIs. The woozy Celexa-head has taken over, and I am a helpless infant, dizzy and nauseous and sad.

Lynn sighs. “Okay, look. You can go to the emergency room at Kings County Hospital and get your prescriptions written there. It’s not the most pleasant place. You’ll see a lot of indigent people, especially at night. You’ll wait a long time. But it’s a fifteen-minute drive, and you can go there right now and get your meds.”

I nod. I’ll do anything at this point, even though taking any action, no matter how small, seems overwhelming.

Lynn gives me directions and tells me to get in my car immediately and go straight there; on second thought, she’s going to walk me down the stairs and watch me drive off. When we get to the bottom, she touches my arm.

“You know that as soon as you take your drugs it’s going to be better,” she says. “Just go get them and call me tomorrow to let me know how you’re doing.”

I nod. When I do, my head buzzes.

I follow the map Lynn has drawn for me and drive to the hospital with one hand over my ear to steady my head. I weave in and out of numerous alleys and detours, my normally bad driving and atrocious sense of direction made even worse by the pinballs bouncing around in my skull. When I finally find Kings County Hospital, I see that it is a drab, functional, sixties-style building — gray, like they all are. There’s a broken chain-link fence around the parking lot with razor wire dangling off of it. I trudge inside, trying to stoke the urban guerilla inside me. Yay, I tell myself, I’m using public health care.

It doesn’t work.

There is actually a sign on the side of the building for the psychiatric emergency room. Beyond that are three sets of doors and a metal detector. I take a deep breath and go in.

I am met by a bored-looking guard. He asks for my purse and I give him my overloaded messenger bag. He takes out everything; all the crumpled ATM receipts and candy wrappers and the three heavy books, which he flips through before setting them aside. Then he finds my nail clippers.

“Can’t have these,” he says. Not “let me hold these for you until you come out,” or “safety regulations require me to hang onto your nail clippers while you’re in the hospital.” Just “can’t have these.”

I am so close to losing it that I want to lunge at him and strangle him for being a rude callous bastard, but I remind myself that that might not be in my best interest. Still, in my unmedicated state, those three words are all it takes to rocket me from depression to Incredible Hulk-level anger. Here is a man who sees people in pain every day, people whose brains are exploding, and he doesn’t give a fuck about extending anything like basic human courtesy. Just shuffle the crazies on through and take away their possessions while you’re at it. Smug fucking bastard.

“Fine,” I say, imagining my T-shirt bursting open so I can smack the shit out of him with my daunting green pecs.

He waves me through the metal detector. I do not beep. He never looks up at me. Even later, when I am hungry and ask to walk back through the metal detector to the vending machine ten feet away, he gives me only a cursory glance as he tells me nope, can’t leave the loony bin until the doctor says.

The waiting room is surprisingly empty. The only other people there are a young black couple, probably still teenagers. The boy sits with his legs wide apart, elbows on his knees, hands clasped together, staring at the floor. Beside him, wrapped in a baby’s blanket, the girl eats 25-cent nacho cheese tortilla chips. She wears house slippers. Her eyes are almost closed.

I watch them, pretending to read the first book I pull out of my bag, which happens to be The Good Vibrations Guide to the G-Spot. There is something wrong with this girl’s eyes. Her long eyelashes curl tight against her lids, and she peers out from beneath them with her chin slightly lifted. I realize that she has to have her head at this angle to see. She cannot open her eyes all the way.

We pass the hours together without speaking. Every now and then the boy reaches over and strokes the girl’s shoulder beneath the blanket. He cuddles her like a treasured puppy, whispering to her and occasionally making her smile. She finishes her chips and he wipes the thin layer of orange dust from her mouth. The fluorescent lights flicker.

When the doctor comes out to get them, he doesn’t see how beautiful they are. I stare at the dirty tile floor while he stares at the girl. He puts his hand on her chin and demands of her boyfriend, “What’s wrong with her eyes?”

I want to kill him. I want to scream and cry and stomp my feet and shout, “WHY AREN’T YOU TALKING TO HER? Just because she can’t see doesn’t mean she can’t hear and talk and think and feel. It doesn’t give you the right to put your hands on her face without asking.” But I remain as mute as she and scuff my shoe hard, leaving black marks on the floor.

“They’re always like that,” says her boyfriend. “It’s a birth defect.”

“Ptosis,” says the doctor gruffly. The boy does not respond.

“So she’s having hallucinations?”

“Yes sir,” says the boy calmly, just as he might if asked if she had a cold. I imagine that he is used to his angel’s visions, that she hovers over their bed and sings to him at night, seeing things through her hazy fringe of lashes. She tells him stories of what floats by. He learns from her of mermaids in the trees.

“Is she taking her meds?”

“Yes sir,” says the boy, producing a bottle of pills from his pocket. “But I don’t think she’s taking enough anymore.”

The doctor nods.

And they sweep her away, her blanket wings flowing, and she leaves an orange pixie dust trail behind her.

I do not see her again but I know that she leaves with prescriptions, as do I, three hours later. I walk out exhausted and starving but thankful, cramming a Snickers in my mouth as I rub my recovered nail clippers like prayer beads.

And so it was that I spent a night in Bellevue.

I will attempt to give you the Reader’s Digest Condensed Version of the events that brought me there, will refrain from going off on one of my favorite rants and excoriating the American health insurance system, or lack thereof. Suffice it to say that I hadn’t taken my Depakote, the mood stabilizer that keeps me from thinking I’m a winged pink extraterrestrial capable of leaping from the Williamsburg Bridge (which is, in a cruel twist of New York City sublet fate, just outside my front door), for a good ten days. Why? Because, after two years of pretending we were still married in order that I might remain covered by my ex-husband’s shitty HMO, the powers that be discovered our deception, and unceremoniously cut me off. This left me working as a body piercer, struggling to crank out a book proposal, and resorting to sordid and illegal acts (the subject of another story altogether) in an unsuccessful effort to pay $450/month for the drugs that make me fat and sleepy.

You can pretty much see where this is headed, but in the name of gory details, I’ll continue.

One day, shortly after scraping together that month’s installment of my exorbitant rent, I found myself with no more Depakote and three dollars to my name. Fast-forward a few more days of equivalent financial despair, and after a bout of sleeplessness comparable to a David Blaine stunt, I found myself in the back of an ambulance, my skin covered in obscenity-laden Sharpie-marker poetry, being told by a well-meaning paramedic that I was a very pretty girl and I should really just try to smile a little bit more. Although this should have been my first big clue that I was a one-way passenger on the Anne Sexton express, I was at the time too whacked out on the Trazodone procured from a heroin-addict friend to notice.

They wheeled me into Bellevue at 11:17 pm. After sitting next to a man gagging on a piece of steak for about ten minutes (and being treated to a running commentary on the exact location of said piece of lodged meat from the three bored triage nurses), I was taken through a series of progressively grimmer and more finger-smudged double doors to the psychiatric emergency room. There I was besieged by a guy who told me his name was “X” and demanded I give him my sweatshirt.

“Why?” I asked, frantically tapping out Icicle Works’ “Whisper to a Scream” on the linoleum with my foot. I’d been watching the new wave channel nonstop for three days, and I had three different songs running through my head on rotation.

“Because you could strangle somebody,” said X. “Or somebody could strangle you.”

“I have no plans to strangle anybody or be strangled,” I said, but he persisted, and when he also reached for the scarf tying back my hair, I took both off and threw them at him.

Nothing mobilizes everygoddamnbody at Bellevue like throwing something at Staff. Three orderlies came at me out of nowhere, snapping on purple Nitrile gloves in record time. “Okay,” X said, his eyes asparkle like the Marquis de Sade in scrubs, “you’re getting medicated.”

In a flash of rapid-fire negotiation, I promised to take Ativan by mouth if they would just get someone to give me some fucking Depakote as well. A paper cup with one white pill was shoved into my hand, I was given a cup of water, and I was told that the Depakote was negotiable based on my behavior.

And therein lies my fundamental problem with psych wards: depression is seen as a condition for which one should be punished, swiftly and severely. I have never been in inpatient treatment where bedside manner was a concern. It’s more like a hierarchy of replicant sadists, with the (inevitably white-haired male) doctor trailed by a waterfall of nurses, then med students, then orderlies. As one descends each tier of the mental health inferno, brutality is more and more inextricably compounded by ignorance, until one ends up as I did, being wheeled roughly down the hall on a stretcher by an attendant in Fubu, who declared to another (purple nails, labret piercing), “She shoulda gotten a fuckin’ needle in the ass.”

I spent the next four hours on that stretcher, in that hallway. Beside me a woman who bore a more-than-passing resemblance to Chloris Leachman snored and whimpered in her sleep. In front of me a Chinese girl with disheveled pigtails folded and unfolded a page from a magazine, sobbing and cursing in Mandarin. I watched her cry for a good long time before an attendant came to see what was the matter. He sat on a stool at the foot of her bed, studied her with his hand on his knee and his elbow in the air, and at long last offered up his professional opinion and pronounced her a Crybaby. A moment later he was joined by a nurse who lay a folded sheet on the stretcher (pillows, I would later learn, are not permitted in the loony bin at Bellevue), pushed her down, and made a quacking-duck motion with her hand.

“Do you know what this means?” asked the nurse. “Boo-hoo. Boo-hoo. Troublemaker.”

“Please,” I asked, “could you stop talking to her like that?”

“She don’t understand,” said the orderly.

“She don’t speak English,” added the nurse.

At some point in the night, though I hadn’t yet been given my drugs, I was given a private room. I had a serious headache from the insomnia and crying and Depakote withdrawal. The pressure inside my skull had built to a crescendo punctuated by the persistent, slaphappy rhythm of XTC’s “Mayor of Simpleton,” and I proceeded to barf all over the floor. Repeatedly. The only thing I’d managed to eat or drink all day was a bottle of cranberry juice, and as I was projectile-vomiting a red stream comparable to the elevator scene in The Shining, the aforementioned white-haired leader of psychiatric nephilim stopped by and stood in my doorway.

Now, let me pause a moment here to put this situation in context. This man had a half-dozen underlings and a brand-new manila folder to tell him what was wrong with me. I had, by this point, been in the hospital almost seven hours. They had talked to me, poked and prodded me, taken my blood and urine. There were, at his fingertips, approximately seven million ways this man could have found out what my deal was. But there in the hallowed halls of John Berryman’s home away from home, he looked down at me, shook his head, and said, “Drug addict.”

The following morning, when I had stopped puking (we are now at fourteen hours without Depakote and counting), I decided to approach this man about his therapeutic method. I was put off for two more hours, at which point I caught him in the hallway, was told to wait for him in the patient lounge, and sat watching incredulously as he got his bag and jacket and walked out the door and disappeared.

That day, I watched as the Staff ate their take-out pancakes (patients were given individual boxes of Cheerios and slices of Wonder Bread in individually-sealed packets.) I listened to their ongoing critique of The Day After (“That scene with the guy? And the little boy? Where the guy tells the little boy they’re all gonna die? I woulda kicked him in the nuts,”) and pondered the state of mental health care in America today. It took me seventeen hours to finally get my Depakote, and when, on discharge, the social worker handed me a weekend’s worth of pills, she made sure I knew that “99.9% of doctors would NEVER do this for you. You’re really getting treated like royalty.” At that point, I had been called an addict, been stripped of my clothing and assigned a pair of pajama pants that wouldn’t remain snapped, and made aware with no small eyeroll that my request for a Styrofoam cup of water was a major inconvenience.

Were the snippy, heavily glottal-stopped exclamations of annoyance I heard flung about so freely in Bellevue specific to New York, where those who talk to themselves are a dime a dozen? Is so-called psychiatric care so far removed from the Hippocratic oath that we approach it with the same no-nonsense, move-‘em-in-move-‘em-out mentality that governs the rest of our interactions on this island? For basic geographical reasons, I can’t compare Bellevue to some sanitarium in Wisconsin, but I have my suspicions.