Where the Caged Bird Longs for Song

The intake bracelet is cheap plastic and it never sits still. I have been to seven different ones in five different states: two in the deserts of Utah, one in tornado country known colloquially as Missouri, another an hour south of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado Springs, and most recently within two weeks of each other, December 2025 to January 2026, the frozen tundra of Green Bay, Wisconsin and Marquette, Michigan. These were always wherever the police happened to send me after deciding I was no longer fit for polite society.

After being brought into a beige room, always beige, I am forced to sign a series of “voluntary” forms where if I don’t, I sit there. I have been brought there in handcuffs, deemed mentally unfit to care for myself and expected to read over every detail like a lawyer before entrusting myself to their care.

I am a veteran of the grippy sock circuit. I have spent time in group therapy rooms filled with sometimes profound people, some with lines across their arms, and mostly just the depressed. I gravitate toward those like me, manic depressives. We are at our highs here. We storm the halls, argue on command with a wry smile on our cheeks, and everyone knows we are a problem. Everyone except us. This is the underclass the rest of the world prefers to keep behind locked, heavy gauge doors. Most of us were young enough to still look like we could function without SSI, 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 have only ever been committed involuntarily. I understand exactly how far I went, and it was over the line. But what intake forms never capture, what charts do not ask, is how life circumstances can grind a mind down until sleep becomes impossible. There were nights I did not sleep at all. Not because of manic energy, but because I had 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, just trust in a friend that’ll make do someday. After years of close communication and an insane lifestyle that involved living out of my car and grinding work hours that would break most people, sometimes forty hours straight, sometimes one hundred twenty hour weeks, I finally asked him for a place to crash. I was exhausted and spent. I needed nothing more than a couch. No was all he implied. He told me he could not help because he did not know how to ask his grandparents if it was okay.

That was the moment something inside me fractured. I drove away from his grandparents’ house in Wilkes Barre, tears streaming down my face, knowing I was alone again to figure out this world. Dominick, for all his faults, felt like my only friend in it. When the Red Hot Chili Peppers played from my phone to the car and their most popular song came on, it was not about a heroin addict. It was about the sun being blocked off with no sun in sight, about being under the bridge while everyone I was supposed to trust trampled over me instead.

Sleep deprivation does strange things to a moral and spiritual compass. When you stop sleeping, the world begins to feel charged with meaning while your own sense-making falls apart. Patterns announce themselves everywhere and the ordinary becomes divinely symbolic. Things that should pass unnoticed, or be laughed about later with a friend, instead feel directed and profound. The mind stops filtering and starts assigning purpose to everything it touches. Bathroom graffiti declaring God is dead feels like a personal message. Half-remembered television shows from childhood fold themselves into elaborate theories about reality. The mind is no longer interpreting the world. It feels like the world is interpreting you.

After one short jail stay in Missouri, I got out with no money. My wallet was still in my car, found at the Walmart parking lot I was caught stealing from. I started stealing from Walmart and giant truck stops after my four-month ultra-grind poker marathons. Mostly art supplies: paint, crayons, CDs, ties. Anything that felt like creation instead of consumption. I wanted to make a difference any way I could. Instead I was just a lunatic risking his freedom to be cleverly numb and dumb. It was the reckless thrill of crossing a line when the world had already crossed you, mixed with the delusion that taking something and turning it into art somehow balanced the scale.

What struck me, once I was granted a mental jail exemption instead of being sent to jail proper, was the difference between those of us on the floor and the high-priced gatekeepers who held the keys. If there is one unambiguously good thing I can say about psych wards, it is this. The nurses and techs are the only ones who have not lost their souls. These are people making less than a vending machine baron built on sugar and childhood diabetes, working twelve-hour shifts in a powder keg, yet somehow retaining more humanity in their pinky finger than the hospital CEO has in an entire portfolio. Their care is not a billable hour. It is embodied. They remember your name. They remember the small idiosyncrasies that make each of us human. They notice when you are spiraling before you do. They are the front lines, the ones who actually touch the tragedy and the human heart. 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.

Kathy found me after I shared a rough draft of this on my Facebook page. The responses came in from all angles, from people who had been behind those same walls and needed someone to say it plainly to nurses to social workers. Kathy had been comatose, not metaphorically. Years of neglect and hardship and being thrown back onto the street with no structure to hold onto had brought her back through the system for the fourth time, and this time she had stopped responding to anything, refusing food, conversation, even the room itself. Her husband had been called by a nurse named Frank, a fellow German she had bonded with on a previous stay, and Frank told him plainly that this time it looked particularly bleak and that he wasn’t sure she would make it.

One morning Frank came into her room and crossed to the window. He grabbed the blinds and snapped them open and light flooded in.

“Come on,” he said. “We’re going out to smoke.”

“It’s not time to smoke,” Kathy said.

“I don’t give a flying fuck.”

She snort-laughed, which was her first response in days. Something about the audacity of it, a nurse blowing past protocol with a four-letter word and no apology, broke through what nothing else had reached. They went outside and she smoked and she came back. She eventually recovered and found a therapist who worked through the accumulated wreckage and got her to the other side. Her kids still have a mother and her husband still has a wife. Frank knew something the system he worked inside had forgotten: that sometimes the most clinical thing you can do is be irreverently, recklessly human.

* * *

This was also where the institution revealed its strange contradictions. Mandatory art therapy was part of the program, mandatory if you wanted a decent score to leave. Mandatory expression if you wanted to feel the wind against your back again and taste something made by human hands. There is a surreal cruelty to being forced to express yourself freely while being held behind heavy gauge doors. On paper it was another compliance box, but in practice it was often the most humane thing in the building.

The art therapists were typically the kindest people imaginable, soft-spoken souls with voices that soothed instead of evaluated. We needed activities that slowed us down, that taught patience, that gave some grand shape to our floundering senses. We painted mandalas without knowing the sacred geometry implied. We made tie-dye shirts without any of the Grateful Dead associations I personally attach to them. It was not about the output. It was the rare care of someone daring to say, here, express yourself. Take something home that is not a paper detailing how broken you are.

In a room with white tables we all sit together, getting to choose whatever project we want half the time and the other half getting brief instruction on how to doodle on the canvas. The tempera paint always gets onto my fingers. We would stamp onto leather if we chose that. We could watercolor for the first time in however long.

Then there was Victoria. She would sing along to whatever played on the television, matching note for note with whatever came through the speaker, like the voice of an angel. Aerosmith, in key. Aretha Franklin, she got that respect. Her favorite was Hozier and I’m not even sure how she pulled off that voice. She had cuts all up and down her arm.

They even let us choose cultural programming, Disney movies, a music channel, the radio murmuring in the background. Choice, but only the safe kind. Hard to express yourself when you are not allowed outside. If you love birds, that absence cuts deep. It was not the movies or the music I missed most. It was the bird songs, the one beauty I wanted to tether me to this plane of reality, and even that was conditional, earned only after every group session was attended, every checkbox marked, compliance scores tallied like boot camp.

The cafeteria, by contrast, is the ward’s cold, unthinking gut. Plastic trays either a bland orange or a dark brown, never anything pretty. There is a specific irony in being hospitalized for a chemical imbalance while being fed a diet that actively tilts the scales toward chaos. Researchers found that mice fed nitrate-rich foods develop distinct patterns of hyperactivity. In clinical settings, the link between processed meats and manic-like behavior is measurable. You would think a psychiatric ward filled with bipolar people struggling to regulate energy would be a nitrate-free zone. You would expect a menu designed to soothe the nervous system. Instead it is bacon or sausage every morning. We are woken at dawn and served trays of processed sodium and nitrates, fueling the very fire they claim to be putting out.

To top it off, these foods are laden with artificial dyes like Red 40 and Yellow 5, compounds associated with hyperactivity. It is gaslighting to be told your brain chemistry is the problem while being fed petroleum-based additives designed to disrupt it. The system is obsessed with what it puts into your bloodstream during the med pass, but it is aggressively passive about basic survival needs. Take vitamin D. We are kept behind glass, denied sunlight for weeks, yet vitamin D, critical for mood regulation, is treated as optional. You have to request it. You have to advocate for your own biology in a place that has stripped you of autonomy.

Then there is the soap. In what world are people deemed irrational expected to navigate a formal request system just to stay clean. If you do not ask, you do not wash. If you do not wash, you look disheveled, a symptom noted in your chart as evidence of decline. We are expected to become sanitary without sanity. After being prescribed Haldol, I nodded off constantly. I asked for the soap after not bathing for days and the nurse got distracted and I went back to sleep and didn’t bathe for another day.

I can feel the oil on my skin. I rub it on my face like a healing moisturizer, my beard forever inching outward, only being offered a single razor with one blade lest I cut myself. I look at myself in the mirror and in one stroke the entire blade is clogged. I am stuck here.

That was at Willow Creek in Green Bay, Wisconsin: the Haldol prescription. I did not know I was allergic to it until I was released. My saliva hardened and I shuffled through the day when I was not nodding off in group therapy. After release my airway constricted and I kicked metal tables at Marshfield Medical Clinic with my wife present. I waited twenty minutes in the emergency room lobby and had the worst case of dyskinesia the ER doctor had ever seen. That is American health care, unwilling to notice its consequences until you become violent about how much they have mistreated the patient.

It is easy to cast psychiatrists as villains, cold gatekeepers who see data points instead of people. That is a lazy narrative. The truth is more tragic. They are being crushed by the same machine that warehouses us. They live in permanent triage, buried in meetings about risk and liability. While they drown in charting and legal defense paperwork, the rest of us, the functional glitches, fade into the background. Because I can speak clearly and quote Jung, I am dismissed. I am not a fire to be put out. I am a low priority ticket in a system that only has water for three alarm blazes. If I get anyone at all, it is often a two minute conversation before I am sent back into the world.

This book isn’t anti-psychiatry. It’s anti-substitution, whereby eye contact connects us and physical touch grounds us and care has been replaced with paperwork that forgets the nuance of human conscience.

* * *

Years before the Wisconsin freeze, in the deserts of Utah, a high-priced doctor sat in a tonally bland green room with coarse carpet in Provo. He sat behind a table in a more comfortable chair than the plastic one I was allowed to sit across from him. He told me I sounded like the Unabomber for ranting about the spiritual rot of industrial society. What he could not see was that Ted Kaczynski understood something essential about modern life. I remember driving through Utah and watching land once protected as state park being drilled for natural gas. I remember mooning traffic because I felt helpless and furious watching a landscape be gutted in the name of state industry, national GDP, and ecosystem rapacity. That fury registered on no chart as anything other than symptom. To a psychiatrist with a stopwatch, grief for a gutted landscape is indistinguishable from pathology.

Industrial civilization gave us the safety of infrastructure while stripping away the confrontation with death. From looking into the eyes of a child dying from a nameless disease to a warrior falling for a cause he deemed worthy, meaning was once a lived reality, not a sanctioned safety net. When you remove the yin of death from the yang of survival, it is no wonder we drift into the purgatory of depression. Kinesthetic, spiritual, and mystical frames have all been strip-mined to the almighty National GDP, an entity that must forever increase unless we have no dignity left. That was Ted’s point, stripped of violence. That does not make him right, but it should make him at least a footnote of history that pointed out how wrong we currently have it. In that room, my longing for open sky registered no differently than a trapped bird beating its wings against glass.

Then there are the social workers, the harried middle managers of despair. Nobody enters social work dreaming of a windowless office and a forty-two-thousand-dollar salary, but the machine grinds sparks into ash. They are tasked with securing insurance for people who cannot even get soap, and then they lead group therapy while eating the same industrial food as the rest of us, forced to smile while documenting suffering. It’s little wonder they call these degrees social workers and not social movers. They clock in and clock out, circling the damage, never allowed to touch the root. The system doesn’t need them to fix anything. It only needs them to keep showing up until they too are worn smooth.

My last encounter was with a psychologist, let’s call him Dr. Teepar. I asked if he was familiar with the anima and animus. He did not look up. He uttered in a voice of contempt I will never forget, while he held a clipboard and a pen in his right hand: “Of course I do not know that.” That is word for word what he said. To him I was not a psyche to be explored. I was a data point to be stabilized and offloaded so he could return to the Everest of paperwork waiting on his desk.

Modern societies once understood that people we now label schizophrenic or psychotic were often treated as visionaries, shamans, or intermediaries between worlds. Anthropological records from numerous Native American cultures describe individuals who heard voices or saw visions not as broken, but as burdened with meaning. They were guided, protected, and given roles that anchored them to community. Modernity has no place for that. It isolates, medicates, and silences, then calls the outcome treatment.

* * *

The real truth of the grippy sock circuit is not found in fluorescent group rooms. It happens outside during cigarette breaks. These ten-minute windows are the only times the hierarchy dissolves.

It was December in Green Bay, minus fourteen not even factoring in the wind chill. I had the green grippy socks but no shoes on since I didn’t request them, my feet forever scuffling in the snow trying to keep active. We all huddle to the gray metal box at eye level that is allowed to light our cigarette and pass it end to end, Basic cigarettes one by one.

It was during the final break of the day that Geoffrey shared the gospel of the discarded. Same age as me, same build, completely different choices. He had children and a wife back home and a scraggly beard like we all did. He wore the same red-checkered flannel every time we went out to smoke, his semi-long brown hair pushed back against the cold. He had a sordid past, different from mine but recognizable. He told us about a seventeen-year-old he knew in prison who became obsessed with ramen noodles, eating them dry from a toilet bowl. We laughed, the sick laugh of people who have seen the bottom. The boy eventually hanged himself. When guards found his body, protocol required they handcuff his dead hands before touching him.

That image, a dead boy in handcuffs, is the American underclass distilled. It is a system terrified of the humanity it cannot quantify. Any human would be hard pressed to have compassion for ten hours straight in this environment. That is where the nurses revealed who they were. In a Green Bay winter where the wind chill hit minus fifteen, they stood outside with us. They did not write behavioral notes. They listened. There is a profound difference between treating a patient and caring for a human being. The system reduces our existence to a line on a pill bottle, taken twice a day. The nurses care on call.

Frank knew that, and Kathy’s snort-laugh knew it too. The difference between a ward that warehouses and a nurse who snaps open the blinds and says I don’t give a fuck is not a policy difference. It is a human one.

* * *

How do you fake stability in this environment? A poker face helps. You learn to perform wellness, to swallow the Red 40, ignore the heart palpitations, and pretend the orange dust on your fingers is not a symbol of indifference. You may get better in the same way a man gets better sleeping alone in a jail cell. They call it treatment, but sometimes it is just sleep. Sometimes it is rest. Sometimes it is nothing more than a quiet room and a hand on your shoulder while you cry. You may get better. Or you may have only learned how to look better. The only real skill I took with me was learning how to fake that everything was going to be okay.

Five weeks into that first Provo stay, someone in my family could have come to get me. There was a way out and a car that could have made the drive. They said they couldn’t afford it. I want to be precise about what I heard in that, because I had been precise with them for years. Every Christmas I pressed three hundred to seven hundred dollars cash into my mother’s hand, not a gift card, not a check, cash, because I knew how she lived and I knew she needed it to disappear quietly into her own hands. Four years before Provo, when my brother’s appendix went, I covered the surgery. Two thousand six hundred dollars. I didn’t ask him to pay it back. I didn’t think about it much afterward. You pay for the people you love and you don’t keep a ledger. Except that at five weeks in, behind those walls in Utah, I found out that I had been the only one not keeping one.

The sixth week, my brother got married. I was supposed to be his best man. He had asked me in February. Instead I did not stand next to him and I did not give a toast and I did not watch him cross whatever threshold a wedding is supposed to mark. There is a photograph somewhere that I am not in, and I have never asked to see it. He did not call from his honeymoon in Hawaii and I ate from plastic cups of fruit cocktail with tears down my face, doing the math I had been refusing to do for years.

The seventh week, I got out because of a memory. I remembered that years earlier, when money had meant less to me than it should have, I had lent a friend fifteen hundred dollars on a whim with no contract and no timeline, the kind of transaction you make when you are young and flush and still believe generosity is a personality. I reached out from inside and asked him to send whatever he could to my father. He Venmo’d him a thousand dollars and that was the ticket home, a flight to Rapid City where my parents drove the rest of the way back to Vale. A near-stranger came through. The people who had eaten at my table and taken my cash every December could not.

On the drive back from Rapid City my parents took the exit at 32 off I-90. A few weeks after Sturgis the motorcyclists had roared through and forgotten the place existed, and the town had gone back to being itself. We pulled into the Pizza Ranch buffet, the kind of place with heat lamps and sneeze guards and booths that have held ten thousand quiet family meals. My mother was openly weeping.

Not from relief and not because I was home. She was crying about her own life, the accumulated weight of it, and my return had simply provided the occasion and the booth. I sat across from her with a plate of food I don’t remember eating and consoled her. I said the things you say and she leaned into it and neither of us mentioned where I had been or what I had missed.

That was the template. That was how every discharge worked, in every state, across every stay. The ward releases you and someone drives and the car is quiet in the particular way of families who have said everything they can think of and none of it helped, and then eventually the trailer.

One day, a few days after Provo, I decided to use the bathroom in the trailer house I grew up in. I had to step over the laden newspapers that formed the goat trail of her existence. Bins everywhere in the kitchen, which had three refrigerators all full of either canned goods or half-opened yogurts or things rotting in the back. Down the hallway of my childhood, past the Nerf basketball hoop, there is more cardboard to maneuver past, having to go through sideways to reach the bathroom at the end. Turn right and there is a toilet. I step over the newspapers that served as her floorboard and sit diagonally to relieve myself, due to a Christmas box that used to contain chocolates being there, four of them stacked on top of each other. I maneuvered back out into the sun.

The sun hit my face as I walked west over the sidewalks that had long ago become jagged in all different directions, past the only post office and past the only general store and an abandoned secondhand store I can still smell as dirty from when I was eight, past all the abandoned 1970s Chevys and Fords sitting in front yards. I left the sidewalk and turned south onto gravel and hill. Finally I found the gate.

I paced down to the cemetery, the only overlook in town where you can see Bear Butte in its full majesty. Overhead I witnessed a rarity even for me, a pack of Bald Eagles in one of the few places in the US left where you can see more than one at a time. I remembered that I was American. As I picked up a feather that fell from the sky, I put it in my ear and remembered that maybe God wasn’t dead after all. Maybe he was just telling me in Nietzsche’s voice: walk a little more, and write even more than that.

I placed the feather in my ear anyway. I went from the grave of a man who had been kind to me at the top of the hill down into the sun, to a stone that read only “unknown” and “1914.” I left him the illegality of carrying this weight.