Bit by bit she regained the distance by which the doctors measured responsibility: Alone to Her Doctor's Office (100 ft. x 1 hr. sane); Alone on Front Grounds (200 ft. x 3 hrs. sane); and at last she applied to go to B ward, where the foot-hour rule would be given the whole inward sweep of books and pencils and sketch pads.

Once you've been committed to a mental institution you're considered a second-rate citizen from then on and retroactive.

My only hope was to be polite.

I calmed myself down and decided to just wait for whatever happened.

The struggle is to retain some semblance of dignity.

The routines of the ward added to the general sense of monotony. Shifts came and went. Meals were delivered and taken away. Everything occurred according to schedules. Medications were passed out at regular intervals. When the medications were ready, patients queued up in obedient lines to receive little plastic cups filled with multi-hued pills.

In our drug dazes, the object of existence was simply to pass time.

... drugs were used indiscriminately in mental institutions because they made management of asylums much easier: care is often institutionally efficient while less individually concerned. It is difficult to separate behaviors that have a neurological basis from symptoms and side effects induced by medications used to treat these disorders.

But you do live after the hospital.

After the hospitalization you feel marked.

... merely signing a voluntary commitment paper is like confessing to be incompetent to make any future decisions for oneself.

Anyone can find himself suddenly in a mental hospital with more ease than one likes to imagine ...

... patients seldom run amuck at mealtime.

... your behavior record, that unique and precarious ladder to freedom.

The dread Locked Door.

Rule: Solitary activity is dangerous, alienating-therefore, reading or writing are undesirable; any group activity is rehabilitating.

... I was already able to perceive that only by strictly normal behavior could I ever hope to get out of this place ... or prevent my situation from becoming still more unpleasant.

As to the electro-convulsive-therapy treatments, I like Kesey's tight comment: The thing is, no one ever wants another one.

... the role people labeled crazy are forced to play once the psychiatric system has a firm hold on them is really that of acquiescent prisoner.

I took my medicine, but I never outgrew my hatred.