One day I woke up and thought I was Jesus Christ. I knew it like I knew my own name. The voices in my head were so convincing. They told me I was going to Paris to lead the world.
Later, when I was “escorted” to an “observation” cell, the examining doctor insisted I tell him the drugs I had used. My hallucinations and my descriptions thereof were so vivid, so life-like, that the professionals couldn’t believe I hadn’t taken an illicit substance. One of the mental health workers even suggested that my food was laced.
Sitting in a padded cell with a faded blue smock and nothing else to fill my quarters except a sink, toilet, and six-inch mattress lying on the floor, I grappled with what had precipitated my trip here. (Previously, I had been in honor block, a spot which had required two years of behaving as a model inmate whilst my name climbed the waiting list.) I wondered silently what was wrong with me. With my brain. I tried to make sense of the voices I had heard and what they instructed me to do, and who they told me I was. My visual hallucinations had shown me people’s expressions configured in odd ways with their voices not in sync with their moving lips. (Like an old Godzilla movie.) The thought that chilled me, haunted me in that godforsaken, dirty observation cell was the distinct possibility that I had suffered a schizophrenic episode.
When I suggested schizophrenia to the doctor, he didn’t miss a beat. No. No chance. To have the first episode at age 33 was just too far along in the game. We agreed that my psychotic episode, because there was no denying that’s what it was, was “stress-induced.”
A year and a half later, I reside in a different facility, but, nonetheless, find myself, yet again, in an observation cell. The unrelenting overhead lights, the non-stop 15-minute rounds of the officers on duty, the senseless screaming from other denizens of the “tanks”, and my fuzzy reflection in the mirror asking myself how had I ended up back in one of these rooms? I had been in-and-out of observation cells for the past five or six weeks, and I had been trying to come up with a ” logical” explanation for the voices I was hearing. (This time I thought aliens were contacting me.) “They” kept telling me I needed medication, but the voices were firm. No medication. (In one of my especially acute delusional episodes, I called one of the medical nurses an ” apothecary” because I really thought she was trying to poison me.) After repeated refusals to take psych. medication, one day my observation cell clicked open. Maybe my time to rule the world had finally come. But no. My cage was being opened for a different reason.
In the summer of 2018, I was transported to the emergency psychiatric hospital in Marcy, known as “Central”. I spent seven weeks there and came away with the diagnosis of schizophrenia. The two doctors who had reviewed my records, and who interviewed me, were unanimous in their decision.
To this day, I have a hard time truly believing I’m schizophrenic. If they could point to a number, like they can when you have diabetes, or, say, hypertension, then I wouldn’t be as incredulous.
One thing I am deeply grateful for is the stability I now enjoy. I have not been in an observation cell in nearly six (6) years, and even if the referent to the word ” schizophrenia” proves to be murky, there’s no denying the benefits of medication. I believe less in the names, and more in the results.
And now, after I have been in mental-health programs for the previous six years, I am told, mere months before my board appearance, that I will be moving to General Population. My take: If it’s not broke, don’t fix it. I resent having to move. But, I could easily fill another 800-word essay explaining what I think the Department of Corrections policies’ leave to be desired. I mean, as a mentally ill inmate, with a good disciplinary record, and months to go before his board, why am I going to gen. pop. in a Max-A prison filled with violent lifers?
That question and others will have to wait until my next essay on “Prison Reform.” For now, I can only navigate the concrete jungle of prison the best I can.
Connor Izard-11B1097
Attica C.F., PO Box 149, Attica, NY 14011 or write me at JPay.com
September, 2024
