Life Inside: Newsweek Article


When she was committed to a psychiatric hospital as a teenager, doctors called Mindy Lewis “hopeless" and "psychotic"


My Turn: Those Who Hold the Keys Are Listening
At the hospital I was committed to as a teenager, I confronted doctors I once considered the ‘enemy’

By Mindy Lewis NEWSWEEK

Oct. 6 issue — I stand at the podium looking out at the audience: more than a hundred psychiatrists, psychiatric residents, supervisors, psychologists and other members of the hospital staff. It is a momentous day for me. I am the guest speaker at psychiatric grand rounds, part of the residency-training program at the hospital where I lived from the age of 15 to 18. I was invited to talk about what it was like to be hospitalized as an adolescent.

JOINING ME onstage is Dr. Michael Stone. I vaguely remember Dr. Stone from when I was a patient and he was a young psychiatrist. He later became the director of the adolescent and young-adult service and an eminent professor of psychiatry. We are meeting for the first time in 35 years. His greeting, “For Auld Lang Syne,” is both ironic and surprisingly affectionate. I never knew, until today, that before medical school Dr. Stone was a scholar of Greek and Latin. To me he was just the enemy, like all the others.
I tell my story: I was a self-conscious adolescent caught up in the ’60s drug culture, truant from high school and at war with my mother. Recently remarried and bewildered by the change in her formerly sunny daughter, my mother took the advice of psychiatrists and remanded me to state custody for long-term treatment. But being in the hospital only raised the stakes—within months I changed from a rebellious teenager to a desperate girl who drank poison and cut herself with razor blades, and was described in my hospital records as “hopeless,” “psychotic,” “autistic.”
Now, speaking softly into the microphone, I recall the other kids on the ward. Marjee, a 13-year-old beauty from Oklahoma—my best friend. Nick, brilliant, handsome, enigmatic, obsessed with death—my first lover. With little else to do, we devoted ourselves to “inappropriate behavior” with the creative irreverence of budding young nihilists. Sluggish from Thorazine and clad in hospital pajamas, we were determined to find our own identities, even if we destroyed ourselves in the process.
Here, on this stage, I straddle time, fully mindful of the connection between “me” back then and the grown woman I am today: an artist, a writer, but most of all a survivor. I speak not only for that frightened 15-year-old who thought her life was over, but also for Marjee and Nick and so many others who took their lives, unable to get past the damage of those haunted years. I was one of the lucky ones. After being discharged at 18, I rebuilt my life without the help of psychiatry. But always, I felt marked by my experience.
“All’s well that ends well,” Dr. Stone intones as he takes the podium. He talks about how the system has changed. In the old days, he says, prolonged hospitalization was considered therapeutic. But I’ve heard from other doctors that there was also a hidden agenda: extended stays made it easier to train residents by allowing them to work with patients over time. Today, with managed care, there is no more long-term hospitalization. Instead, people are medicated and released. There are new drugs and new diagnoses. When I was hospitalized, almost all the patients, myself included, were diagnosed as schizophrenic. By current standards, only one in six would be.
Dr. Stone shares stories of former patients. He talks about those who, like me, were kept far too long, others for whom the hospital was a shelter that saved them from unspeakable abuse. The “creatives,” he adds, did the best in the long run, going on to lead more or less happy, productive lives. He expresses some nostalgia for the days when doctors could get to know their patients well enough to follow up with them years later.
The audience is invited to speak. One of my former psychiatrists stands and proclaims that as a young resident, he had been as much a prisoner of an ethos as I was, and has spent the rest of his professional life making up for it. Another psychiatrist even raises the possibility of offering reparations to those patients unintentionally wronged. (I suggest possibly inviting other former patients to share their perspectives.)
At lunch, the discussion continues. The residents, shy at first, join in. One young doctor recounts his efforts to reach an adolescent who would not speak in session but who later opened up on outings for pizza and Ping-Pong. Like the other residents, he is eager to hear my point of view. It’s a moment I’ve waited a lifetime for. Those who hold the keys are finally listening.
Sitting at the head of the table with Dr. Stone, I am overcome by a surreal ecstasy at the unlikelihood and privilege of this, my prodigal return. But I also know that this day will pass, and many of my questions will go unanswered. All I can do is tell my story and, in so doing, make reparations to myself.