Commentary on the article: Introspections: Life Sentence – Judy Ratner, B.A.

Sad, sad letter… very good for some people to read, I imagine, but really not how I intended to start my morning.

There were a few points that I really did like, though.

> You spent an awful lot of time in hospitals, both on long- and short-term units. I used to wonder why there seemed to be so little to do there. I knew that you needed to be protected from the world and yourself for a while. I always thought it could not be good for someone to live entirely inside her head 24/7 with no distraction, no chance to learn something new. I couldn’t do it. And it’s not as though you were too busy being seen by doctors in this era of managed care.

Exactly! How much harder is it to move on past the disorder, when your entire environment is centered around the disorder… with nothing else to do? You can either think about it, draw about it, write about it, or talk about it… You are surrounded by people consumed with the disorder… and no activities, very little stimulation… how frustrating.

> As the years went by, the other girls got younger and younger; you started to hear your story coming out of their mouths. The doctors who saw you on the unit were residents, and they got younger, too, until you were being treated by people with considerably less experience than you, although, theoretically, more perspective.

While sad to hear other people going through the same thing as you… it’s also frustrating to feel like you are on a different level, or at a different point, than the other people around you. There is always someone who has the epiphany “you know, it’s not about the food!” somewhere in their first inpatient stay. When you’ve been treated for 7 years, you don’t want to talk about the same kind of things.

And as for being treated by less-experienced professionals… that doesn’t necessarily correlate with age. Once you’ve been in a hospital and done it all… been on 10 different meds, had all the medical tests run… going to an outpatient psychiatrist or PCP who suggests prozac is infuriating.