SCRIBBLE
Next up is another creative writing submission from Year 11 student Amy Watton. Her Story ‘Jamie’, is an account of a cleaner’s experiences working in a mental health facility. However, it seems that the memories the narrator shares of the experience are no as conventional as they first appear...
Jamie l “Wow, that’s cool, you have to tell us more about your a way to escape from them without using violence. How they experience, an overview for the listeners. Are there any scary had expected us to manage that I have no idea, but thankfully stories or encounters in particular that will wake everyone up I was never attacked. on this dreary Monday morning?” “The hospital I worked at had its mental health facility detached from the main building. To get to it you had to walk down the hill from the main building. The out building its in is two storeys. The upper part is for officers and the lower is the patient area. We have two sections: A and B. Section A is for the more severe cases of mental illness and Section B is for the more mild forms including people who have made suicide attempts. Every time I was sent down there, I worked in Section A.
Cold, dim corridors , the air leaden with a sense of disquietude, of allienation... The first part of the procedures for the day was getting the keys from the security guards; every door in the facility was to be remained closed and locked so there was no chance of a patient escaping. If you needed to leave, and a patient blocked the door, or they were nearby enough so they could potentially slip out with you, you had to find another way around or wait for them to move. This happened a couple of times to me but it was never much of an issue. The second thing about the procedures that made this a difficult place to work was how we cleaned the rooms. We had to take our housekeeping trolley and wedge it into the doorway to block the patients coming in whilst we worked. Whilst we were cleaning we had to keep an eye on our trolleys to make sure patients didn’t come up and mess with them. A few years before, a patient actually tried to drink the bleach off of another housekeeper’s trolley. The third procedure: it dealt with if a patient cornered you or attacked you, which was a very rare occurrence but had happened in the past. As we were not allowed to defend ourselves if such an event happened, we would have to yell for a security guard, a doctor or a nurse and if that didn’t work, we would have to try and talk the patient down ourselves or find
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‘Working’ there was terrifying and borderline unhealthy; constantly on edge and feeling like they knew…they knew why I’ was there and it was all a game, they were just mocking me. By far one of the most difficult things I’ve tried to do. All I could do was wait and hope…needed to make them go away… the voices…I needed to help Jamie. “In fact, during my first week working down there, there was a woman who refused to put her clothes on.” “Really? Jesus,” “Yeah, they had her locked in solitary confinement for three days because of it. The confinement rooms were down a small, narrow hallway with large glass doors at the end and they would take irrepressible patients in there and strap them down to these padded reclining chairs until whatever problem there was had been resolved. They had cameras in the room to monitor the patients, but due to the woman’s nudity, they kept a post-it note over the screen and would lift it up every once in a while to see how she was doing. But, the worst patient for me personally was there for the entire time I worked down there. He would talk to himself, which was the normal for the most of the patients, and usually sat in the common area. Often when I had to go near him, I was behind the chair he was sitting and he was always facing an empty chair talking to nobody in particular. Without warning he would begin to have some sort of psychotic episode…
All of a sudden he let out this strained, stilted and slightly warped laugh that grated on my ears, slowly transitioning into a soul maiming scream of “shut up! Be quiet! Go away!” He would relax, body slumping in his seat and then he would start to shake, muscles convulsing as if his body was trying to decide whether it wanted to tear apart limb from limb or curl up into a defensive ball like a cockroach. …The situation kind of freaked me out so I always hurried
