We Are All Broken

We Are All Broken

by Wendy Hammond

Please Help by Lawrence Bridges

The White woman curled up on the wide, ornate windowsill is wearing three blue hospital gowns, one front and one back-facing for modesty, and the third wrapped around her shoulders for warmth. Her grizzled hair is uncombed, wild, and the pale skin on her legs is chapped and splotched with scabs, so I’m guessing she’s been living on the streets. I can’t stop staring at her toes. Where did she find the red toenail polish?
        This is 1985, my dear country, my USA, when you still have a St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York City’s West Village. The psych ward, my home for right now, is full of people of different ages, skin colors, cultural backgrounds, and ways we are broken. In the dayroom this morning, Jose, early thirties, his face scarred by a fire, plays checkers with two older men on a wobbly card table near the bookshelf. They speak heated Spanish and use Oreo cookies for the missing black checker pieces. Frank, his thick white hair sticking up in different directions, shuffles here and there, plucking invisible somethings off the floor. Galyna, in her old pink bathrobe, settles into an easy chair and hugs her knees to her chest. She gazes up at the ceiling, weeping. Hassan, with his huge dark eyes, wears a starched button-down shirt, sleeves folded neatly up to the elbows. Hassan is often quiet; then a torrent of Farsi bursts out. No one on the ward understands Farsi. Right now he paces in a corner repeatedly yelling, “Number eight! Number eight!” apparently the only English he knows. The words clearly mean something important to Hassan. No one tries to find out what.
        Other patients sit or lounge on torn couches and chairs strewn in no order across the worn linoleum floor. Some patients have fallen into medicated sleep, softly snoring. Some just stare, trembling. Others try to read frayed romance or mystery paperbacks they’ve taken from the bookshelf, but concentration is difficult for broken people. Brains don’t cooperate. Emotions whip through and carry off attention. When I try to read, I can’t seem to reach the end of a sentence.
        Even in 1985, my dear USA, you are pretty lousy at taking care of us broken people. Doctors see us patients no more than fifteen minutes once or twice a week. Nurses mostly barricade themselves behind bulletproof plexiglass. Staff, called technicians, appear only at particular moments: to serve meal trays, to hand out cups of pills, or when a patient grows unruly, to tackle her, pin her down, force a shot into her bare buttock.
        Just now Sharon, a Black NYU biology student, is sitting next to me, a White girl about to turn thirty, both of us on a beige vinyl couch. Three days ago Sharon was walking up Second Avenue thinking about buying a slice for dinner, thinking about the math test she needed to study for, when all of a sudden, snakes rose up from the sidewalk, slithered off buildings, dropped from trees, snakes everywhere, their teeth bared, ready to bite. She stares as she tells me about her psychotic break, her eyes fixed in that too-much-Thorazine glare. “If school finds out about this,” she says, “well, I’m worried I’ll lose my scholarship.” She shudders, trying to shake off this concern. “But Dr. Gelber says not to feel sorry for myself. And I’m really not.” Then to prove it she smiles, her grin too big, too toothy, trying too hard not to be a problem.
        Listening to Sharon, I wonder if telling us not to feel sorry for ourselves is the standard therapy for us broken people. Earlier that morning, Dr. Gelber admonished me to avoid self-pity. Dr. Brandon said the same the night I was admitted, frightened, confused, seeing “extra visuals,” trying not to lose myself in the raging emotional storms I didn’t know a name for. You mustn’t feel sorry for yourself, Dr. Brandon whispered to me behind the ER privacy curtains. He explained that all psych problems were caused by chemical imbalances, to be treated with pills. “All psych problems?” I asked.
        “Yes,” he said. “Studies show that psychotherapy is useless. If talk therapy feels good, go ahead, spend your money. But if you want results, you’ll need medication.”
        He doesn’t say because he doesn’t know yet that the studies he is talking about were done by pharmaceutical companies. That’s one way, my dear country, you have improved since 1985. You don’t tell us broken people anymore it’s only a chemical imbalance. Though you’re worse at helping us get adequate treatments. You’re worse at letting us live in a home.
        It’s 1985 and my roommate on the psych ward, Alexandra, is thirty-five years old with a brassy blonde dye job and three inches of brown roots. First thing she tells me, she’s schizophrenic and medication doesn’t help. We sit cross-legged on her bed and trade imitations of the doctors and nurses. Alexandra does the funniest Dr. Meinhardt; I do a great Nurse Carrie. She shows me her sketchbook. Her portraits, done in crayons, look alive to me, their faces full of feeling. When we’re up to it, we play skipping games up and down the L-shaped hall, and in the dayroom, we push batting back inside the rips in the furniture and use Elmer’s from the craft box, trying to glue the fabric back together. But our fun never lasts. I get lost in one of my episodes or Alexandra looks over at a wall and talks to the nice little people climbing out. Sometimes she shouts at the demon sitting next to her.         “You’re the devil!” she accuses. “Devil!”
        Alexandra has been in and out of hospitals since she was seventeen. She tried college a couple of times, she tried working, but her psychotic breaks always got her kicked out or fired. Her family gave up on her. She often lives on the streets. When her crayons are gone, she scoops dirt from the sidewalk to draw in her sketchbook. Once Alexandra fell in with a Christian group who tried an exorcism. They held her down and commanded the devils to come out of her. When she kept on jabbering with nonexistent gnomes, the Christians dropped her off on the walkway in front of a hospital emergency room.
        On Tuesday, Nurse Carrie tells Alexandra she’ll be discharged on Friday. We’ve done all we can with medication, she says, and your insurance has run out. Alexandra mostly stops speaking to me. She’s too busy talking to the people in the ceiling. Debbie, the ward’s part-time social worker, finds Alexandra an SRO: a single room with bathroom down the hall. It costs ninety bucks a month. Her monthly welfare check is only eighty bucks a month. When I ask Debbie where Alexandra will get those last ten rent dollars, and what about money for food, Debbie just shakes her head and keeps walking down the hall, her heels clicking on the linoleum floor.
        For her new life ahead, Alexandra finds a wool skirt in the donated clothes box. The skirt is too big for her, but Nurse Carrie appears with safety pins. We fold and pin the sides of the skirt so it doesn’t fall off her. Very reluctantly, I don’t want to, I give Alexandra my favorite sweater, fuzzy and aquamarine, because it matches the skirt and because there’s nothing else in the donated clothes box for her to wear.
        Friday at noon, Nurse Carrie marches Alexandra to the barred metal doors, hands her a manila envelope which includes directions to the SRO, unlocks the many locks, and pushes Alexandra through. An orderly waits on the other side, ready to escort her off the hospital premises. Throughout it all, Alexandra is yelling at the ceiling demons. She clutches her sketchbook to her chest. I can’t quite tell because I’m crying too hard, but I think Alexandra looks pretty in my aquamarine sweater. It brings out the color in her eyes.
        How long, my dear USA, does it take for Alexandra to be homeless again, talking to the little people who dart at her from under cars and busses? Winter is coming. Does Alexandra find her way to one of those shelters Mayor Koch brags about? Or does she freeze to death on Bowery and First?

It’s the 1990s, my dear country, and my own mental illness—a still undiagnosed PTSD—is beginning to heal. As I’m making my way toward some kind of mental stability, as I’m moving toward some semblance of a normal life, I search for my psych ward friends in the faces of people I see on the street. That young woman in the crosswalk in the pretty floral dress. She stops suddenly and confused, disoriented, and turns back. Is that Sharon seeing snakes? The old White man sitting on cardboard by the F train stairwell, begging. He looks just like Frank. The forty-something woman picking soda cans from the trash bin on the corner. She’s wearing nothing but a tattered robe. Galyna? Because I don’t know what else to do, I hand dollars to street people who stretch out their hands, then worry I don’t have enough for my rent, then feel guilty because at least I have a home to rent. I keep wondering why we, my dear USA, don’t really help our broken ones.
        Some answers come, my country, because I write and perform a one-woman play. I call it Wendy in the Wacko Ward, but it isn’t about me. It’s about characters based on my psych ward friends, and I mean it to be both funny and full of pathos. In the play, Cindy repeats positive affirmations from a self-help book, hoping positive affirmations will stop a psychotic break. George, following his doctor’s advice, tries very hard not to feel sorry for himself. I develop the play by performing it in tiny basement theatres on the Lower East Side, rewriting after every show, and I work my way up to Soho Rep, a slightly larger theatre on the Lower West Side. Then I’m hired to perform it in Salt Lake City, on the University of Utah campus, at a convention of the APA. The American Psychiatric Association. They actually fly me to Utah. They actually pay me a fee.
        There is no rehearsal, no stage, no theatre lights. They schedule me at nine after an evening panel discussion in a conference room under florescent lights. Rows of folding chairs face a podium and blackboard. A card table against the back wall displays coffee urns and plates of stale looking pastries. I set up for my performance—my props, my stool—and many doctors in the room leave, especially the older men. I don’t blame them. It’s been a long conference day. Why would psychiatrists choose to see my little play rather than drink, or sleep? About forty remain, mostly White men, late twenties to late thirties, a few women.
        As I perform, there is dead silence. No laughter at all. I think they hate it, they’re hostile, which throws me until I imagine Alexandra sitting in the audience. She’s totally into it. She nods her head at certain moments, says, “That’s real.” Her laughter sounds like music, like cascading notes on a flute. I know Alexandra. She’d laugh at this. She’d get it.
        No one claps at the end of the performance; there’s just a tense silence. The moderator pulls a chair next to my stool and announces we’ll have a discussion now. “Anyone want to start with a question, or a comment?” Again, dead silence. It’s painful.
        Finally a man with disheveled brown hair raises his hand. “I don’t feel anything for my patients,” he declares. “I want to feel the same kind of empathy for my patients as I feel for your characters.”
        I’m stunned. He doesn’t feel for his patients? I have trouble believing my ears.
        Others in the room must wonder if they heard right, too, because the air thickens, grows more uncomfortable. The doctors sitting next to the brown-haired man shift in their chairs as if to get away from him.
The brown-haired man’s neck and cheeks redden—from shame? from embarrassment?—but he doesn’t take back what he just said. He doesn’t explain. He looks around the room waiting for our reaction.
        “Can anyone relate to that?” the moderator says. “To what Dr. Noack just said?”
        Another male voice calls out: “I do. I wish I could feel for my patients, too.”
        A dark-eyed woman in the back calls out. “I don’t have time to feel. I’m a resident and have to see a new patient every fifteen minutes.”
        A dam bursts and doctors speak one after another. “There’s never enough time.” “They tell me, write a prescription and get on to the next one.” “There’s so many patients, so many problems.” “A constant onslaught of desperation.” “We don’t have the resources.” “We’re expected to solve all their problems in fifteen-minute slots?” “Month after month of this, it turns you to stone.”
        I listen, amazed. How did my little play trigger all this? I listen, pissed off. Where’s their human compassion? I listen, and I admire them. How brave they are to confess.
        A few of the doctors tear up as they speak. Some stand, making sure they are heard. They talk on top of each other yet keep nodding too, hearing everything. They pour their hearts out about the lack of sleep, the thirty-six-hour shifts, the unending workload. Some dreamed of becoming a doctor when they were children but didn’t know it would be like this. Others were pressured to become doctors, their parents pushing them to study long hours every day, never enough time to play, or to make deep friendships, or to figure out what life they really wanted. Some describe anxiety they don’t know how to calm. Others are depressed but dare not tell anyone. Most want psychotherapy but don’t have the time for it. Besides, if anyone finds out, there goes their reputations, their careers.
        They’ve forgotten about me. They’re not thinking of my performance. Neither am I. I’m witnessing their brokenness.
        My dear country, how can you take care of your mentally ill when your caretakers are broken, too?

It’s 2022, dear USA, and now there are ten times as many mentally ill in prisons as there are in hospitals. If you’re mentally ill on the street, you can get arrested for trespassing, or stealing a candy bar, or causing a nuisance. If you’re mentally ill while being Black or Brown, you can get shot by a police officer who doesn’t understand, who makes quick and racist judgments. Who, of course, is broken himself. Which, of course, can’t be an excuse.
        My dear USA, it’s 2022, and I’m still thinking about broken people, still handing out dollars, still worrying about what more I can do. The pandemic is ending, and New York City streets have become crowded again. Mentally ill broken ones have been pushed out of temporary pandemic housing and are living again on street corners, under scaffolding, in the hallways of Port Authority. Some lie across subway seats sleeping, some sit on sidewalks begging, some mutter to themselves or shout at people who aren’t there. They wrap themselves in found, tattered blankets, trying to keep out the chilly late winter nights. For lack of showers and toilets, their skin blooms with rashes and angry diseases. Many stink. Other broken people—the ones with good jobs, good homes and clean clothes—scurry by the mentally ill broken ones without looking. They sidle away from the stench and clear out of foul-smelling subway cars. I clear out too, but first I step toward a woman who looks familiar, her gray hair caked with dirt, the plastic bags surrounding her feet full of garbage treasures, and I peer into her face. Is this one Alexandra? Is that a sketchbook in her plastic bag? All these years later, is it possible my friend is still alive?
        She isn’t Alexandra. I hand her all the cash in my wallet, two twenties and some change, which isn’t a lot, isn’t enough, but this tiny bit of help helps me be a tiny bit less broken. I make my way out of the subway station at Eighth Street and Sixth near where St. Vincent’s Hospital used to be. My dear country, my USA, many of you on the street are well-dressed and wearing masks, yet even with your faces half covered, I can still see signs of your brokenness in your hurried gaits, in your furrowed brows, in the look of longing in your eyes to be seen, to be cared for, to be loved.