The Grippy-Sock Circuit – Final Version
Chapter 3 (predating 2026 for divorce reasons)
Here’s the thing about mental hospitals: I’ve been to them across the country. Two in Utah. One in Missouri. One in Colorado. Most recently, December ’25, Wisconsin. Curiously, never in the states I actually lived in—South Dakota, New Jersey, Michigan—but always wherever the police happened to send me after deciding I was no longer fit for “polite” society.
I am a veteran of the grippy-sock circuit. I’ve spent time in group therapy rooms filled with the broken and the discarded—the underclass that the rest of the world prefers to keep behind locked, heavy-gauge doors. Most of us were Millennials, people who signed themselves in or were signed in by others out of a desperate, clawing hope for a life raft, only to find ourselves treading water in a sea of institutional apathy.
I’ve only ever been committed involuntarily. I’m not delusional; I understand exactly how far I went. But what intake forms never capture—what charts don’t ask—is how life circumstances can grind a mind down until sleep becomes impossible.
There were nights I didn’t sleep at all. Not because of manic energy, but because I’d been betrayed by people I trusted most, and my brain simply refused to shut off. One of those betrayals still sits in my chest like shrapnel. I once lent a close friend, Dominick, thousands of dollars without hesitation. No contracts. No pressure. Just trust. When the tables turned and I needed nothing more than a couch to crash on—no money, no drama—he told me he couldn’t help because he “didn’t know how to ask his grandparents if that was okay.”
That was the moment something inside me fractured. Not cleanly. Jaggedly. Slowly.
Sleep deprivation does strange things to a moral compass. When you stop sleeping, the world begins to feel staged, artificial, like a poorly constructed set piece. Consequences blur. Edges dull. That’s when vandalism and theft started to feel victimless. Sometimes it was mailboxes. Sometimes it was packages left in unlocked cars. It wasn’t about need. It wasn’t hunger. It was the reckless thrill of crossing a line
when the world had already crossed you.
I’m not a knight in shining armor. I’m not a philosopher laundering chaos into theory. I became deranged. And people were hurt because of it. Society decided it was time to remove the glitch from the machine. Fair enough.
What struck me, though, was the difference between those of us on the floor and the high-priced gatekeepers who hold the keys.
The Saints in Scrubs
If there is one unambiguously good thing I can say about psych wards, it’s this: the nurses and techs are the only ones who haven’t lost their souls.
These are people making less than $40,000 a year, working twelve-hour shifts in a powder keg, yet somehow retaining more humanity in their pinky finger than the hospital CEO has in his entire portfolio.
Their care isn’t a billable hour; it’s embodied. They remember your name. They ask real questions. They notice when you’re spiraling before you do.
They are the front lines, the ones who actually touch the tragedy. In the American medical machine, the closer you are to the patient, the less you are paid. Status is measured by how many doors you can put between yourself and the suffering.
The Overwhelmed Sentinels
It’s easy to cast the psychiatrists as the villains of the ward—the cold, aloof gatekeepers in designer loafers. But that’s a lazy narrative. The truth is more tragic: The doctors are being crushed by the same machine that is warehousing us.
They aren’t malevolent; they are exhausted. They exist in a state of permanent triage, spending hours in windowless conference rooms, locked in pointless, circular meetings about the “high-acuity” cases—the truly psychotic, the violent, the souls so shattered they require constant, minute-by-minute liability management. While they are buried under mountains of charting and legal defense paperwork, the rest of us—the “functional” glitches—become invisible.
Because I can quote Jung, because my vocabulary is intact, I am dismissed. I am not a fire to be put out; I am a low-priority ticket in a system that only has enough water for the three-alarm blazes. The expert psychiatrists, the ones who could actually engage with the architecture of my inner self, are too busy trying to keep the facility from being sued to actually see me. Instead, they send the students.
I get the med student—the green-horn with a fresh stethoscope and a deer-in-the-headlights stare. I am a training exercise, a safe patient for the beginners because I won’t bite their ear off or scream at the walls. The actual expertise is locked away in a basement meeting, discussing a code-red patient while I am handed a script and a handshake by someone who won’t remember my name by the time they hit the parking lot.
The Paperwork Purgatory
Then there are the social workers—the harried middlemen of the soul-trade. If the doctors are the burnt-out sentinels and the nurses are the saints, the social workers are the bureaucratic wardens of Purgatory.
They didn’t start this way. Nobody enters social work dreaming of a windowless office and a $42,000 salary. They began with a spark—a sincere desire to reach into wreckage and pull someone free. But the Machine has a way of grinding sparks into fine grey ash.
They are the human shock absorbers, navigating the frayed egos of psychiatrists who are one bad shift away from snapping themselves, while facing patients who are one bad sentence away from a meltdown. They translate articulate ramblings into ICD-10 codes just to keep the lights on. They signed up to save lives; they ended up documenting the drowning.
The Crime of Seeing Too Much
My last encounter was with a psychologist—let’s call him Dr. Teepar. He didn’t look at me with malice; he looked at me with the vacant stare of a man who had nothing left to give. I asked him if he was familiar with the anima and animus, basic Jungian concepts. He didn’t look up. He didn’t scoff because he was evil; he scoffed because he was intellectually bankrupt from a decade of staring at symptom checklists.
“Of course I don’t know that,” he said. To him, I wasn’t a psyche to be explored; I was a data point to be stabilized and offloaded so he could get back to the Everest of insurance paperwork waiting on his desk.
Modern psychiatry rewards compliance and punishes depth. The system doesn’t want transformation; it wants a “return to baseline.” It wants the glitch to stop making noise so the machine can keep humming.
We warehouse the sensitive and reward the numb, and in the process, we burn out the very people we trained to help us.
In Utah, one high-priced doctor—white beard, wise-sage aesthetic, budget Freud delivery—told me I sounded like the Unabomber because I dared to rant about the spiritual rot gnawing at our tech-obsessed society. The irony is brutal: the better adjusted you are to a hollow, profit-driven world, the more successful you become. If you can ignore suffering while charging $2,000 a day for a bed, you get a corner office.
The Cigarette Break Communion
The real truth of the grippy-sock circuit isn’t found in fluorescent-lit group rooms. It happens outside, during the three daily cigarette breaks. These ten-minute windows are the only times the hierarchy dissolves into a fellowship of the forgotten.
While the psychiatrists huddle in thermostat-pampered offices, thumbing through journals on pharmacological wizardry and wondering how they ended up so far from the “healing” they imagined, we stand in the cold, shivering like abandoned penguins. It was during the final break of the day—that desperate scramble for one last hit of nicotine—that Geoffrey shared the Gospel of the Discarded.
Geoffrey told us about a seventeen-year-old kid he’d known in prison who developed a feral obsession with ramen noodles, eating them dry out of a toilet bowl. We laughed—the sick, perversely humorous laugh of people who have seen the bottom.
The boy eventually hanged himself. When guards found his body, protocol required them to handcuff his dead hands behind his back before they would even touch him.
Handcuffing the Ghost
That image—a dead boy in handcuffs—is the American underclass experience distilled. It is a system terrified of the humanity it cannot quantify. The doctors, the guards, and the inmates are all trapped in the same metallic heart. The professionals hide behind credentials because empathy is too heavy a load to carry for ten hours a day without breaking.
The Saints of the Smoking Pen
That’s where the nurses revealed who they truly were. In a Green Bay winter where the wind chill hit -15 degrees, they stood outside the locked doors with us.
They didn’t write behavioral notes. When Geoffrey finished speaking, they agreed—quietly, honestly—that we live in a callous state.
There is a profound difference between treating a patient and caring for a human being. The system “treats” us with a flick of a prescription pad and a student’s interview. The nurses care for us. In the frozen darkness of Wisconsin, their compassion was the only thing that didn’t feel like it was designed to break us.
About the Author
Wesley Ismay is a 39-year-old writer with a background in high-stakes online poker, where he spent nearly two decades navigating probability, pressure, and the psychology of risk at elite levels of competition. Though successful at the tables, he became increasingly estranged from the culture of chips and minds, ultimately turning away in pursuit of the written word. His work explores mental illness, institutional power, and life on the underside of American systems. He would like to have a literary agent someday and be published somewhere.