wonder: a feeling of surprise mingled with admiration caused by something beautiful, unexpected, unfamiliar, or inexplicable.

“Okay,” says the smiling woman, “We are going on a visit to a lake. We are going fishing and the day is blue and warm and the grass is green and everything is beautiful.”

The other five of us are locked in the room. Some of us cannot use the bathroom without supervision. We are all medicated; some of us are depressive and some of us are manic. I am not entirely sure I could find my way out of this room and back out to the streets of Portland, Oregon, even if there were no locks in the way. This little gathering is called Relaxation Class.

A mental hospital, or the mental health ward of a hospital—or for that matter, whichever gentle euphemism might be employed—is obviously a form of prison. It is a place where, legally, one can only be assigned by the powers that be for the purpose of protection from violence. Violence to oneself or to others which has been explicitly stated, implied, or inferred by others. It is a place with a locked door, locked windows. Though, in most cases, a patient cannot be held against their will for more than 48 hours. 

“Hey! I love fishing,” says Anne. “Who brought a frying pan? What about some corn meal? Are there trout?”

Visualization exercises with manics and schizophrenics are not tranquil affairs. They have no trouble visualizing. They have too many visuals. 

“I have a great recipe for frying up trout. I love trout! This is a great idea! I hope there aren't bugs.”

Anne bounces on the edge of her plastic chair, but in my mind's eye, in her mismatched Chuck Taylors, smashed teeth, and crooked glasses, she is skipping across expanses of meadow grass, frying pan and wicker creel in hand. She is dressed in stripes and a lot of purple, like a road-weary Deadhead en route to the next show. 

It is my usual habit to avoid mandatory therapy activities by feigning great fatigue. But this night, aware that the staff will soon tire of my ruse, I have decided to attend Relaxation Class after the smiling woman knocks on my door and announces the activity will begin in five minutes. 

Before commencing the meditation we bang on Suzuki chimes, describe places that make us happy, do simple breathing exercises. As we continue along into the narrative of our communal fishing trip, the depressives smile weakly, the others stare in catatonia, and Anne continues a running narration of the day that makes me wish we really are all out fishing together.

When the smiling woman asks us to describe places that make us happy, an older woman with her hands crossed in her lap says, “I am in my yard and I am putting seed in the bird feeder. And the rhododendrons are blooming. But the grass is overgrown and I need to cut it.” 

She starts crying and the smiling woman says, “You'll be home soon. And your family loves you, they'll take care of your yard.” 

“But I have to cut the grass!” 

I try to conjure some vision to spit out as the happy place exercise comes around to me. I settle on a limestone ridge along the spine of Bixby Mountain in Big Sur, overlooking the dark north side of Pico Blanco and the canyon of the Little Sur. But this image makes me sad and anxious. I am just sitting there alone and I should be able to say walking with my son's hand in mine or eating fresh corn in the backyard with my son and my wife. 

But no, I am just sitting there digging in like an oak root, while the sun traverses the Santa Lucia Range. An image of passive contentment; happy perhaps, but one with a somewhat smug sense of having the rest of the world at bay. Still, it is what I blurt out because I imagine it sounds acceptable to the smiling woman.

We never reach the lake with Anne and the smiling woman. Anne's interjections and ejaculations lead us off course and the time runs out. I don't mind; I'm not really interested in relaxation, in sitting on the shore admiring the water. It occurs to me I have a deficit of what Anne has in overabundance, a sense of wonder about every moment of the day. I'd rather follow her out into the endless brush than arrive again at my own shore.

I have many conversations with the manic woman whom I call Anne during the course of my stay in the Portland Seventh Day Adventist mental health ward. Each is marked by a wandering narrative, a preoccupation with details, and a propensity to blend one topic into another with free-form intensity. The kind of patter familiar to anyone who has used psychedelic drugs but with the crucial difference that Anne is not in control of when she will come down. An excess of wonderment at the simple details of her everyday life—the colors of the walls, the temperature of the room, the lost track of her children, each sensation fluttering through unbidden, unstoppable. 

One afternoon I watch as she starts to paint a brush stroke of bright red and before she can complete it her intentions change several times. She starts with a wave and then attempts a flower which becomes a full garden and in the end is a big red glistening blob of doodling loops. As she paints, she tells me how she came to lose custodianship of her children.

“We were in Vegas then, me and their father. My youngest was born and she was just so beautiful. We had an apartment and he had a job and I was going to get my teeth fixed. But then I started to get, you know. So I went to the judge and I told him, I said, 'I love this little girl but you're going to have to take her and give her to someone who can take care of her. Because I can't.'” There is no trace of sadness in her tale. When she is finished she says, “I think I'll try blue!” 

It is not so much that her attention wanders as that each new thought train comes barreling along and runs the others off the track. I am not one of those people who imagine personality disorders are only cultural definitions, western straight jackets to suppress the shamanic or revelatory, but I could not help but be a little curious at what it feels like to be overloaded with wonder, exasperated at each fluid unstable moment. If there is an excess of something in Anne's mind, that does not mean that something is inherently bad. Probably, the doctors who come every day to take notes on my own situation would say I have an excess of cogitation. But I would not listen if I was told thinking itself is my problem. 

These are some of the other people who come through the ward:

There is the Vietnamese woman ushered in in hushed tones who will not eat anything or leave her room until a relative comes with a container of aromatic noodle soup. I hear the staff whispering that she has tried to strangle her newborn baby. That she cannot be left alone to breastfeed the baby because she has said she will do it again. There is a solemn, glassy look in her eye, at least the few times she actually looks up from the floor.

There is a short man who circles the dining area for hours on end. At one point, I hear him saying to the staff, “Diazepam? No, I want more Haldol! They said I need more Haldol!”

There is a large, bird-like woman who rarely leaves her room. She finally has a bowel movement and both she and the staff are very excited about it. She comes to dinner and I giver her my ice cream cup. She examines it with evident satisfaction and thanks me several times. 

There is an older man named Hal who walks very slowly down the carpet past my room. One of the staff, a young smiling guy who talks too loud, says, “Woaahh now Hal! You're scaring me buddy. Let's get you pointed away from the walls, okay?” Hal stumbles on, his course corrected.

There is a Hawaiian guy named Howdy who is the unofficial greeter when I arrive. He is bald and muscled and laughs all the time. Several days after he is released, he is detained when he tries to break his way back onto the ward.

There is the orderly, the guy who talks too loud. After several interactions, I decide that he has become institutionalized the way inmates do; he appears evolved to a life spending his time amongst the heavily medicated and mentally incapacitated. I imagine him going home at night and instructing his wife on how to use her fork or shower without falling, in his too loud and too slow voice. When I am first brought on the ward, he gives me a very detailed talk on how to tie the drawstrings of my blue, standard issue pajama pants; this makes me want to walk around with them about my ankles so that he might have something to feel good about correcting.

About my arrival. I was escorted here by two congenial security guards in the back of a car with a grate between us. On the drive, one of them mentions he is going to the Wallowas to hunt elk. I give him a recommendation for a good café and tell him to take the cold October weather seriously.

“You're not much trouble,” he says, “we're going to let you walk through the hospital without hand restraints.” 

The first few days I am on the ward, I am not allowed to use the bathroom or shower by myself. I must first call a nurse who unlocks the door and stands outside until I am done. Not being trusted to use a toilet safely, I of course fixate on just how one might be used unsafely. I suppose I could try to drown myself in the bowl, or remove the tank cover and bash my head in with it, the way Arlo Guthrie imagines himself doing in Alice's Restaurant. I suppose I could do the same with a shower head or maybe try to slip on the wet tile and give myself a massive concussion. I could knot a bunch of towels into a rope and hang myself from a high place, but I have not confirmed whether there is a hook or bar to support my weight. 

I am not mad about not being able to use the bathroom, rather it is a matter that makes me ponder. When one finds one's bathroom locked, one naturally wonders just how he reached such a point.

On my second day in the ward, a psychiatrist whom I like immediately comes to discuss medication. He outlines various options in accordance with what he believes my diagnosis, Bipolar 2, to be. Bipolar 2, or bipolar disorder characterized by submania but not true mania, is a diagnosis on the rise at that time. A faddish diagnosis if you will, whose burgeoning popularity has something to do with the backwards logic of medication-centered mental care. Because a new generation of repurposed anti-seizure and anti-convulsive medications like Lamictal and Zyprexa are growing in popularity and the older selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors like Prozac are on the decline, many borderline depression cases are being classified as bipolar. In other words, the diagnosis is increasing to meet the popularity of the drugs marketed to treat it.

In my case, the first several times I was treated with SSRIs or anti-depressants alone, I had curious, disassociative episodes. After taking Wellbutrin (which is not actually an ssri, but works on the brain chemicals dopamine and norepinephrine) for a few days, I left my house for a walk and felt like my mind was floating away from me. As if my consciousness were a balloon that was hovering just out of reach, on the verge of floating with the wind. The result of self-reporting these incidents is that, the handsome Indian doctor with the big stainless steel watch tells me, I have located myself within the flowchart of symptoms for manic depression rather than unipolar depression. “All this really means is that you should never be treated with only SSRIs or anti-depression meds. You probably won't become manic. On the other hand, I had a patient for many years with symptoms like yours. When she was in her forties, she suddenly became quite manic." He shakes his head and says no more, which makes me worry that she became a murderess of some kind.

The doctor encourages me not to become wrapped around the axle trying to understand or endorse a diagnosis. Rather he tells me I should treat it as a tool to work with and adjust if necessary. When I tell him that I have a hard time acepting the notion that my moods are merely the puppet of an unseen storm of chemicals pulling the strings, he says, “Your brain chemicals affect your mood, and your mood affects your brain chemicals. You can look at the interaction from wherever you like. But I'll tell you this; I don't think a lot of people in your situation get better without medication. You have to know that the longer you live in a state of depression, the more it is like brain damage, impossible to completely recover from.”

The doctor's words are sensible, reassuring in some way. But they really offer me no insight into anything beyond the chemistry of mental health treatment. Just an ever revolving hourglass of moods displacing chemicals and vice versa. But that is alright; being on the ward is a kind of institutional purgatory between danger and recovery, not a place of healing itself. A place of meals on trays, fluorescent lighting, of smiling nurses with large key rings. The day after my visit with the doctor, one such person deems me worthy to use my bathroom without supervision. With a small flourish and the click of the lock, she offers me about as much freedom as I have expected to re-obtain. It is time to go home.

Several days later, as I am about to be released, Anne tells me, “I might get moved to a permanent facility! Over in Wallowa. Do you know it there? They're gonna fix my teeth too.”

I tell her I do know Wallowa. The mountains there rise steep toward the south, the kind of place where one might walk through lush sedgy grasses to a lake beneath sprays of larch trees and stalk trout. Anne, of course, would be no closer to such an afternoon for living in a locked facility at the foot of the mountains than I might be free to roam the Portland streets. Or would she be?

I like to think of her there, in a room with a window view of the snow capped mountains to look out upon. The sky is blue, the air is warm, and everything is beautiful. Her teeth are straight and white and she is as much walking through the green grass toward the lake as I am.