Beautiful Mess [UsUk / AmeDen]

Chapter XIV

A/N: for those of you not familiar with the terms.
schizophrenia - a long-term mental disorder of a type involving a breakdown in the relation between thought, emotion, and behavior, leading to faulty perception, inappropriate actions and feelings, withdrawal from reality and personal relationships into fantasy and delusion.
psychosis - a severe mental disorder in which thoughts and emotions are so impaired that contact is lost with external reality.

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Once Matthew, Arthur and Adrienne were, on Alfred's misfortune, asked to leave, he was left at the mercy of the hospital and the psychologist he was assigned with. He found out her name was Emilia Steilsson, she was from Iceland or Norway, he wasn't paying too much attention to the country she mentioned just to make small talk with him. Immediately, she lead him towards the small room he would be staying in and helped him unpack the essentials for the night, putting a tight, white bracelet-like object around his wrist with his surname and his room number in handwriting, something that, apparently, each patient needed to have for identification.

The room he was staying in was cramped up, pretty small, but it wasn't as scary looking as he thought it would be. The walls were purely white, and there was a somewhat comfortable looking bed on the right. An empty desk stood in the top left corner, and there were two heavy, metallic chairs on each side of it. Since he wasn't one of those patients who were physically threatening to others around him, he wasn't put on special care and didn't get restraints, but in case anything happened, there were guards for each part of the hallway. That put him on edge. He didn't like to be constantly checked on and examined, it made him feel limited, but on the other hand he appreciated the care because there could have people much more aggressive than him, who were able to hurt others, and not only themselves.

The young, silver haired girl who took care of Alfred took him to an ordination where he got changed into first night clothing that the hospital gave each of them - a plain white t-shirt and grey trousers that reminded him of a less comfortable version of the sweatpants he'd usually wear. He had a blood test taken, height and weight measured, and a diagnosis which they managed to conclude by talking to him, getting into family history documents on the computer and examining his behavior, his disorganized speech and excessive blinking at times, unfocused look, dilated pupils, all of the things that followed his sudden rush of paranoia that came back to him right at the moment he was separated from the ones he loved.

He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and he didn't like the sound of that in the slightest. It was the most common type of this illness, which meant there were more resources to fight it. Yet that didn't give him much reassurance.

Apparently, he had a chance of developing it because it ran in the family - which was something he didn't know up until now - but what increased his risk was the car crash and the life threatening head injury he received.

It made sense, and he didn't know how to feel about that. He wished he could go back to normal, when he couldn't hear these sadistic voices and didn't have to bear with seeing a horror movie play out right in front of his face. But that was probably never going to happen again, unless he got heavily medicated, sedated and put to sleep. Which, obviously, didn't sound too appealing.

"I know you're really scared right now", one of the psychiatrists told him, "but things can change for the better. There are things such as group and personal therapy that can help, and a healthy dose of medication for the start."

Alfred sat on the chair across her, adjusting his glasses and fidgeting with the hem of his t-shirt, anything just so he wouldn't have to make eye contact with the doctors who were currently around him. Scared was an understatement. He was anxious to death, wanted to scream at the world, at the universe, and ask it why it had to be so goddamn unfair. What did he ever do to deserve this?