A WEEK ON A WARD

In his debut memoir, Douglas recalls his life-altering week as a patient in a psychiatric ward.

“Some 50 years ago, I was introduced to the worlds of psychedelics and psychic phenomenon,” Douglas writes. “It did not end well.” As a young man, he thought of himself as a “bright bundle of promise.” By his mid-20s he had obtained a master’s degree in education and was working as a senior systems analyst, but he was unhappy with his life and embarked on a journey into what he terms “magic” using psychedelic drugs, yoga, and mind control. He eventually found himself on a downward spiral that led him to drive himself to a hospital, where he was given a shot of Thorazine, and woke up in a closed psychiatric ward feeling “weak and scattered.” Begun within six months of his release and rewritten during the next couple of years, this memoir offers a day-by-day account of his hospital stay, carefully detailing his thoughts, from the notion “I’ll never get better. I’ll never leave the ward” to the paranoid fantasy that he “would be changed to a female.” Douglas admits that he wrote much of the account while “still delusional and still hallucinating” but had an “inner need” to finish it. He describes his hallucinations in vivid detail, including one in which he attempted to escape the ward and felt that he was viewing his pursuit from above: “As if from a great distance, I watched several doll-like figures running back and forth, crisscrossing from one side of the corridor to the other. My world went sideways. It was as though I were watching all of this running and activity from a great height, perhaps as much as 4 or 5 stories up.” Such accounts can become repetitive, and phrases such as “on the other hand” recur with nagging frequency. The book also would have benefited from better framing of his experiences. Douglas says his week on the ward “would drastically affect the rest of my life,” but it’s never quite clear how, and he says little about how he perceives his hospital stay 50 years later. Absent that kind of reflection, this book may interest those with similar experiences, but for others it will prove uncomfortable reading.

A detailed first-person account of one man’s mental illness that leaves big questions unanswered.