When I went to the hospital after my botched hanging in college, my stay actually extended across two psych wards within the same institution: the third floor (where I was admitted first), and the second (where they transferred me for a while before eventually releasing me). The former was for the really severe cases (the homicidals, the suicidals, the dangerously psychotic), while the latter was divided into the half for “chemical dependence” and the half for extremely sad college students. In my case, they sort of graduated me from the third to the second as an intermediary step before release once they thought I was no longer an imminent threat to myself
As you can probably infer, the limitations on yr personal freedom on the third floor were a lot more severe: it was the one with the strap down bed in the isolation chamber, no access to yr own clothes, everything locked down, no razors or worthwhile pens/pencils. On the second, the atmosphere was friendlier, they let you visit the cafeteria for meals and take supervised walks on the grounds, and there were a few more little indulgences in what you could keep and use. And ofc you saw less use of physical restraints etc
But the more I reflected on my time there, the clearer it became how much more tolerable the third floor was. One difference was pretty straightforward: while you had to attend a certain amount of group therapy there in order to graduate down a floor, they didn’t force you to attend any particular sessions, and didn’t bug you if you wanted to spend yr time in yr room reading instead. On the second, you were obliged to attend every single ludicrous session every day, on pain of being stripped on yr right to eat in the cafeteria downstairs.* (Ofc you might say, Well that’s still an improvement bc upstairs you could not eat ANY meals in the cafeteria; this response totally fails to understand how stigma and isolation practically function)
But this merely points the way to the real difference between the two. The third floor had a sort of manifest, monomaniacal teleology, and every deprivation of yr personal freedoms served to optimise for this variable: the function of the floor was to keep you from injuring yourself or others. Everything else followed, in bloodlessly paperclip maximising fashion, from this basic goal. And while I could not and cannot agree to this optimising heteronomy of the ward’s institutional will, I could at least understand it, to an extent even respect it
The aims of the second floor, by contrast, were very nebulous. This went along with the staff clearly enjoying a higher opinion of themselves, and all the condescension to go along with that. The pretence of individual respect and affirmation suffused all the minor privileges with a vague sense of indebtedness, though ofc the staff would never put it that way. They would say, instead, that respect is mutual and trust is built interpersonally, meaning that their letting me eat shitty fake eggs straight from the basement dining hall once a day entitled them to my simpering perpetual deference. Where one storey above they sensibly anticipated fear in accord with conditional threats, here they expected gratitude in response to tenuous privileges
When I explained this to my gf, she replied that a lot of my stranger political impulses could probably be described metonymically as attempts at moving from the second floor back to the third. Which is pretty perceptive tbh














