Lỗi - Error 404 - ENGLISH TRANSLATION - Plaaastic

Part 27

There are two types of psychiatric hospitalizations for depression in Singapore: vonluntary hospitalization and forced hospitalization. The first type is when you feel like you're not well and need professional help, and the second type is when people around you can feel that you're a threat to them or to yourself, so they take their friend into a car ignoring all the cries, beggings, and explanations and throw you in.

The main difference between these two types is the time that you have to stay there, if you volunteer to go in they might simply check your disease and you can go home right away but when you are forced to go there you will be kept at least for one week or forever.

The nature of this is wrong, i think that if you already went into the hospital and said you wanted to die and feel like you need help then you really need help in some way. Nobody without doing any crime wants to go to the jail, nobody normal would want to be locked in a room with those who are capable of harming themselves and society. Maybe they don't have to be admitted into a hospital, maybe they don't need prescripted drug in that moment, but their problem must be a big one for them to push themselves to that path. And if it's not resolved then it will become bigger, until one not faraway day it will still happen.

However, those calls for help are sometimes ignored simply because a graduate of the psychology department of some abc school said „you're not crazy enough for us to care". Or, even worse reasons will be pulled out: „My hospital is full" (this happens more often than you think), „You have no criminal record" (being crazy the first time is free), or „i was afraid that you couldn't afford it if you had to stay for a long time so i left you out".

First time being hospitalized in mental hospital i was forced to. Looking back it's funny because being admitted into a mental hospital should be a big thing in your life but truthfully i don't even remember a reason why i was sent there. I just remember it being a starting point, a starting point to everything bad in my life and myself (but it still didn't get to the part of being ripe so i was still actively contributing to society). And still, my first changes were too visible, it made everyone around me confused, it was like the time when you grow up and your parents will say: „Oh, my dear baby girl what are you turning into, don't grow up too fast!" Shortly, when it's at the early stage, getting rid of it early everyone thought it would be cured. Consequently, fast and light, i was granted a psychiatric certificate once.

I had to stay in a hospital for almost ten days because of depression, self-harm, bulimia, anxiety, delusive with psychosis tendencies. I struggled, of course, but i also lived in there with curiostity, i wanted to know if people here were like me, and if i were to met me, how would i react.

It was pretty similar to going on vacation, new place, new people, with different habits and unfamiliar voices. I shared room with a girl same age as me, every night she would use flash-light then open my eyes and study carefully if i'm a human or alien. Everytime the same, everytime studying carefully like the first time, making me roll my eyes to the left to the right, one, two, blink right, two, three, blink left. The results were always negative. I asked her about the reason for this but she never answered. If at the time she would really call me alien then maybe i would become lighter, she have found my excuse, the excuse to use for why am i different - but i still waited, and the answer never came, still hanging somewhere like my spaceship.

Second time being hospitalized was after a very bad time of eating disorder. It's like a never stopping wheel - i get better, i get worse, i'm at my worst, i get better, i get even better, and then we will go on the wheel once again. Wheel of chocolate, waffles, pepsi - vomit everything - turn back again. I try to do too many things at once, and then interrupt that work by vomiting a lot. I vomited at least five times a day, depression throwing in the oil by going crazy on eating and re-lit the fire for depression to go on. I was ok until one day i was completely not ok, slepping i suddenly got a stomach ache at five in the morning. My first thought was that i was hungry, because i was too familiar with my hungry cramps from my body that i hugged tightly to sleep. 

But that pain was spreading all through my body, my heart was beating so fast like i was running, my legs covered with cold sweat. I woke up my boyfriend and he helped me to go down the street to find a taxi to go to a hospital.

In just a few minutes, i fell to my knees and my mouth was filled with strange voices, my screams, so loud that the surprise from it drownd out the pain in few seconds. I rolled on the floor of the old dormitory and my boyfriend had to let go of me to look for a taxi.Between my screams i heard my boyfriend pleas:

-Please sir, she is in such a pain and she needs to go to the hospital right now.

-Call an ambulance, my shift is over i need to change it over or call another taxi.

Singapore, the land where it's hot all year around, people cold all year around. Like that two, three taxis all refused, on the contrary reason, it's morning, the hospital is at the opposite of my house; even though i was curled up on the floor and my boyfriend's voice cracked with every minute.

At the time parents were going to work, taking their children hands to school, their steps only a few hands away from me, they walked past casually i could even felt the floor vibrate under my stomach. No one rolled their eyes, no one paused for a second, let alone tried to help.Later after i was discharged from the hospital i would find out that my neighbours did not roll their eyes but called the police because i disrupted silence in neigbourhood.

I told this story whenever someone asked me why i left Singapore - the place too good to expanse your work- and choosing Viet Nam. I simply couldn't live in a place so dead like that anymore.

And that day when i went to the hospital i was lost already because of the pain i almost knew nothing at the time. Like that for a whole day, all the doctors did all kind of tests that were doable on me but still couldn't find anything wrong. There was no reason for the pain, the doctors thought that i was just kidding them and i thougth that the doctors were kidding me, the results were i might have some mental related problem, the result that made me end up in a mental hospital.

The second time that i went there was completely different than the first time, i was forced to take heavy sedatives, so only half is counted. Laying in bed all day, when someone took me to somewhere i just went. So that was a good attitude rating, even voluntarily hospitalized i was released within three days. It's ridiculous. I was a loudspeaker speaking at full volume when suddenly the button was turned down, the radio still on but no one knew but as long as the people around it didn't complain everything is fine. Truthfully the second time that i was hospitalized there is nothing worth to say, not because nothing happened but because nothing mattered to me anymore.