Another interesting part of my journey thirty years ago out of acute care that is worth noting is I was able to help others by simply getting better before their eyes. Not only did I recover but I had a positive impact on other patients because of the composed way in which I transformed madness into ambition without knowing it at the time. I began trying to get out of there by being comfortable with the routine and the progress of others.
There was no sense in arguing with shrinks about my own progress that I was supposedly unable to see. There was only one way for me to gauge how sick I was and it wasn’t by comparing myself to other patients’ symptoms or hearing voices and hallucinating ravishing tiny men and angry fish. The medicine had intervened on most of my psychosis at this point. Every time I looked outside the window of the Ward to the ground level I would watch the traffic, the better the flow the better I was doing. At first the traffic would seem to hiccup, the cars would be rolling along and then in unison they would reverse for a second like there was some sort of glitch in my program. It was random like hiccups, but the better I got the further apart the hiccups would happen, making the finish line seem closer each couple of days or so. The race was outside of those walls of the hospital.
I wasn’t completely sold on the idea that the other patients had to be vilified by me in order to show my progress. Instead I learned that if I showed some compassion by not being in a hurry to leave the area in which we were all confined and if I stopped, listened and learned more the patients would be more sympathetic to our plight. Meaning the fear of having little control over our immediate destiny for discharge from the hospital was minimized by strength in numbers. We could actually help each other get better by finding a common link between us, the fact that we were crazy, and that each one of us could recover if we didn’t rush things and go against the flow. We didn’t have anywhere else to go.
The ambition I had was to not go back to where I was that landed me here in the first place. I was fortunate enough to at least make that choice for myself. I chose to take the medicine, remain calm, and go with the flow. I am grateful that it worked for me at the time. It didn’t make me better than others, maybe more fortunate, but not better. I learned from the other patients. The difference is that most of their teaching was deliberate because they had more experience whereas I was just looking out for myself, to get better. That was my choice, my ability. I was taught humility in that my experience was actually manageable which in turn allowed me to show compassion for people with unforgettable experiences. There is comfort in that.
Francis Erich McElroy 