The Importance of Professionalism in Psychiatry

In March 2018, a month after the first hospitalization, my therapist, my sister, and a friend convinced me to admit myself to the psychiatric ward of a hospital on the upre side. I arrived with a stuffed overnight bag, shaky and afraid of nearly everything. In the spare intake room, a black girl, a high schooler, was brought in for fighting. I saw in her wild eyes and hair the girls who bullied me when I was a chubby kid in Brooklyn. That night, I sat with the other patients in plastic chairs and washed down my meds with ginger ale and graham crackers,. which I'd gotten from another patient in a trade for PB&J