FINGER GUNS
*All identifying details have been changed or omitted.
Sunlight felt sterile. And it was never quiet, but somehow an odd hush spread through eerie hallways. I’d notice these things while working at a mental hospital. My car sitting idle outside, waiting for me, was a source of reprieve. On break, I’d glide my feet through grass, and bugs would be chirping and buzzing around me. Pure silence and parking lots. I’d eat Wawa in my Honda Civic. Those were lonely times. I ran around like crazy just to sit in my car and eat dinner. Everything stopped. Pavement would be illuminated by floodlights and cut off by the night. Heat clung to my body until it was dispelled by my air conditioner.
The stillness crept under my fingernails—between my thoughts. I had ample time to space out and replay hours of my day behind my grey steering wheel. Everyone who worked there joked that there was never a dull moment. They’d gossip about the children hurling fists at each other for attention, or the patient who strutted around the unit naked. To be frank, it’s hard not to say something after spending most of your day with some guy who says he’s God. But still, picture it like this: you’re at your lowest, and people are cackling. They’re pointing and whispering behind your back, ranking your lowest moments against your peers. Dylan’s K2-induced escape from home was vastly more interesting than Katherine’s suicide attempt.
I would sit and listen to stories, but hearing each one and living the rest hit me like a freighter—complete wreckage. What stuck out to me was the lack of love for people who earnestly needed it. Between a regimented system where love is reduced to protocol, and staff who were more interested in patients’ lives than their own, my heart truly ached. It’s quite difficult to care for people in places created to control them, and my memories are flooded with vignettes of times my body instinctively recoiled at the way people were treated at the hospital.
Intake
Without much research and direction, I thought it would be a good idea to send a job application to the clinic because I was a psych major. It would look good on my resume, right? And so, I haphazardly found myself working at the hospital. On my first day of orientation, it felt like some magical force was keeping me locked in place on my chair. I could barely crank my head to watch the training demos. I think it hit me when we did a roleplay exercise of restraining someone, and I asked for help because it was so intense. My face burned, not from exhaustion but from fear. From grief. I cried out. They applauded me for it.
Corporate stuck me in the same training a year later, and a new hire talked about a former employee who was caught soliciting nudes from teenagers on the unit. She showed me his mugshot, and my blood turned frigid. I worked with him the year before. All the kids loved him, crowding around as he played music or games with them. Isn’t that the way it always goes? The trainers observed our conversation from afar. Their eyes looked like daggers while the new hire spouted about the case. She didn’t show up for training the next day.
Shortly before casting me out onto the units, one of the higher-ups talked about “de-escalating” a patient and how hard it was. They said the patient had exploded into a fit of fists and rage. They sedated her against her will, as they did so often. My colleague summed up the experience by saying, “At least she wasn’t yelling anymore,” and the trainees nodded and mmhmm-ed. I sat there crushed. I couldn’t imagine what it’s like being so angry at the world, at yourself. I understand that severe mental illness calls for a new type of baseline; if the bar is that patients no longer wail out and plead with the stale air of a hospital unit, and are instead silenced with a needle, the bar is on the floor.
Assessment
After a few months, I thought I’d have some type of footing, but how are you supposed to prepare for a job like this? I’d unlock the front door, and as I locked it behind me, adrenaline ate away at my legs.
Sometimes patients liked to self-harm in front of me. One was a PhD candidate studying clinical psychology. Some said she treated the clinic like a hotel, coming when she didn’t want to live at home with her parents. They all agreed that she was a master manipulator who always tried to get what she wanted.
She would dig at her arms constantly. First, she’d rub them raw with her knuckles until her skin turned red. Then she’d claw at her forearms with her nails, a learned behavior from her stint in the hospital when they had stopped giving her pens, pencils, and utensils. Her arms were constantly covered in bandages. Everyone hated her and growled to each other whenever she asked for something. What's there to want when you’re trapped in a place like that? They gossiped and theorized that she was part of some university experiment studying mental hospitals. A paid actress. They were dead serious. They said that she didn’t like people, but she liked talking to me for some reason. That made me feel weird.
Another was a teenager, 17, just two years younger than me at the time. They placed him with the adults because he was too violent for the teen unit. He was linebacker large, with arms that looked like they could hulk around my head and squish it easily. I was on 1:1 with him for a long time, which meant I had to watch him at all hours of the day, standing no more than six feet away. Around noon one day, he said, “I wanna change the channel. Can you let me into the TV room?” I unlocked the door and sat with him while he watched Family Guy. We were alone. He was sitting next to me, blocking the door. I watched him dig a pencil into his arm. He was staring at me while he did it. You’d get lots of people who looked through you there. Lots of empty stares. But this kid was beaming his gaze right at me, peering at my insides. I knew if I tried to stop him, he’d come at me with the pencil covered in his blood. It wouldn’t have been the first time he attacked someone. I ended up making a break for the nurse, and thank God they were free.
Decompensation
I was tossed around there. Wherever they needed me, I went. I’d hear, “Oh Peter, they like you on STAT. I’ll send you over there,” or, “They love you on Adult II, you’ll be there tonight.” In a place that was already so lonely, I had no core unit. I was transient. They call people like that floaters, and that’s what it felt like. The patients had each other, my coworkers were cold or burnt out, the doctors didn’t have time to look at their watches, and corporate steered far away from us all.
I hated when they floated me to the children’s unit. I’ll never forget the kids. The ones who’d raise hell on the floor at all hours. I’d check the patients’ charts, and they’d say something like, “Lit house on fire, ran away from home, parents divorced, Zoloft 50mg.” Then I’d look up and see them at the medication window with eyes that still shimmered. The window was lowered near the floor on the children’s unit so that small, delicate arms could reach over the counter to grab their meds.
Discharge
There were some good people on my team, though. James was the most normal guy and worked on the most normal unit. He hit his vape in between shifts and played basketball with the patients. He talked my ear off about crypto. An older man on his unit showed us a magic trick, and I still fool people with it today. Jesse was there for me on my first day. She showed me the ropes and stood up for me when I couldn’t stand up for myself. She was stern but kind. The scent of peppermint essential oil always radiated from her mask. She liked to apply it before every shift.
Of course, there were bad ones, too. I remember during my second year, there was a new hire around my age. We would take the kids to the gym to play basketball and run around. The new guy would genuinely try to break the patients’ ankles. He’d cross them up and say, “Watch this!” while driving for a layup. I remember thinking that he wouldn’t last another week there, and I was right. Nothing particularly terrible about him besides that; he was just pretty bad at the job.
My one coworker, T—he was awful. All the staff and patients loved him. He was a floater like me. Level-headed, kind, reliable, well-spoken, fun to be around. He had long dreadlocks and crystals bound with rope around his neck. He was older and always had some kind of wisdom, oftentimes unsolicited but still solid, for coworkers and patients. I was a big fan, at first. He even complimented my music taste, and that meant so much. We ran into each other a lot on the Drug and Alcohol unit, infamously known for hard shifts and supposedly needy patients.
One day he saw me busting my ass there. I was always running off with a million tasks on my mind. He stopped me with a coffee pot in one hand and bed sheets in the other and said, “Peter, why are you trying so hard? These people won’t see life outside of these walls, and if they do, they’ll be dead, high, or end up back in here. The system is fucked up and I stopped trying a long time ago. Chill out and save your sanity. There’s no point. No matter how hard you try, it won’t matter.”
I don’t know. I wanted to cry in that hallway. I felt it on my face and in my hands, on my tongue and behind my eyes. I would watch T joke and smile with the patients, and then walk into the break room and put a finger gun up to his head. He’d point to his temple, pull the trigger, and stick his tongue out. Doesn’t he know that people there did that for real?
I met a guy with bandages on his lips and eye. He was easy to talk to, and aside from the wraps around his head, he seemed like he didn’t belong there. When I asked what happened, he said, “Oh…I shot myself in the face.”
Bang.
I still dream about the hallways sometimes.
Photo by Peter Hope.
PETER HOPE:
https://www.instagram.com/pete__core/
“FINGER GUNS” was edited by Kat Mulligan and Charlie Zacks.