When my sister, Elinda, became a teenager, she was sent to Medical Lake, a psychiatric hospital, from 1960 to 1970. When she began there, she weighed ninety-eight pounds. Two years later, she weighed two hundred. She became diabetic.
While she was there, she received eight shock treatments. After each treatment, she would sit somewhere and wonder, Why can’t I think?
She was sexually active in the hospital and became pregnant after having sex with one of the other inmates on the concrete floor of the mailroom. She wanted to get married to this person and have a life outside of the hospital with him, but when she had the baby, a healthy boy, the hospital officials deemed her unfit to be a mother. The child was immediately taken from her before she could see it.
Reasons
There was an old woman at Medical Lake with Elinda. She was like a grandmother to everyone and would play pinochle with Elinda. She was in there for killing her husband and children. Another woman had drowned her kids. Those were reasons for being there, Elinda thought. Those women had even sent warnings and when those warnings were ignored, they did what they said they were going to do.
Another woman who spent time at the hospital while Elinda lived there was my dad’s sister, Evelyn. She was battling depression and schizophrenia. But oddly, they weren’t aware of each other.
Elinda could never come up with a clear, solid reason why she was there in the first place. No specific label or complicated acronym. “The simple way of expressing what I could have had is crazy,” she has told me. “But they wouldn’t label me crazy. I’ve got to fight my brain all the time now.”