The Need for a New Definition
“Don’t worry,” the psych ward tech told me after snapping a photo for my file. “We won’t post it on Facebook.”
I was so far gone at that point that I actually forced a trembling smile at his tasteless joke. But the face in that photo — a copy of which was taped to my bedroom door for the duration of my five-day stay at Oceans Behavioral Hospital in Broussard, Louisiana — and the one staring back at me in the bathroom mirror was horrifying. It was mine, I knew that, but I barely recognized it. The eyes behind the Selima Optique glasses were frantic, the hair dull and coarse, the lips drained of color.
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No Easy Fix
For three and a half months, every weekday morning was identical. A nurse practitioner would escort me from the locked psychiatric unit to a small room on the neurological unit, where I was seated in a large, dentist-style chair and a few electrodes were attached to my temples. A technician positioned a large metal coil against the upper left portion of my skull, and then the tapping began.
Imagine a small woodpecker tapping against your skull rapidly for four seconds, pausing for 30 seconds and then resuming its persistent tapping for another four seconds. Imagine this pattern repeating for 45 minutes.
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