In September of 2016 I tried to kill myself while completely loaded on a bunch of Ambien (historically my drug of choice). I woke up in the Beth Israel psych ward after the NYPD brought me to the ER. I spent around ten days there before leaving and going on to a month at McLean, Harvard’s famous psychiatric hospital. I tend in my head to compress these weeks into one big blur, one Very Bad Period, but in truth they were fundamentally different experiences.
Beth Israel was, in almost every way, the worst place I’ve ever been. It wasn’t therapy. It wasn’t treatment. It was containment. The place existed to stabilize people in the midst of psychotic breaks. I was totally cogent from the moment I woke up until the moment I left. Most of the other patients weren’t. They were homeless schizophrenics, people on the edge of violence, people living in alternate realities. Some were frightening. Some were just lost.
The story I usually tell is the People Magazine incident. A friend had left me a bunch of magazines. The Atlantic, New a Yorker, Entertainment Weekly, etc, trying to give me something to pass the time. A few days in, I came back from “go and sit in the tv room hour” to find my roommate, who only spoke in grunts, had jerked off into the copy of People. I had to get moved to a new room. “We can give you the other ones back if you want, but the People is unclean.” It was funny, in the worst way. It was exactly what you think happens in places like that, except you don’t actually think about it until it’s in your hands.
That place was designed for the man who ruined my magazine. He was psychotic, volatile, dangerous enough that soon after the incident he had to be transferred for the staff’s safety. He belonged there (until he didn’t). I was just passing through.
McLean, by contrast, felt civilized. The unit I went to was called Appleton — the same one Winona Ryder’s character lands in during Girl, Interrupted. In the 1960s it had been a women-only lunatic asylum, but by 2016 it was a mixed long-term residential program. The people there weren’t in active psychosis; they were the ones who had already been stabilized but still needed months of medication and structure before they could live outside. In a way, it was the same people I’d seen at Beth Israel — just at a different stage. Beth Israel got them mid-breakdown, thrashing and incoherent. Appleton got the medicated version, people who had accepted or been forced into the slow grind of psychiatric intervention.
I remember smoking outside with a woman in her twenties who told me about the time she’d run naked through the streets during a manic episode. There was a Boston guy who had been in and out for years and lived in an apartment near Fenway covered wall-to-wall in Red Sox memorabilia. Another man, closer to my age, described the incident that derailed his life: smoking some sort of synthetic marijuana, breaking the windows of his wife’s car, and eating the glass. He told me this like he was talking about the weather. Totally calm. Then he lit another cigarette.
Appleton itself wasn’t dramatic. There were no fences, no lockdowns, no bars on the windows. If you caused trouble the worst that could happen was that you got kicked out of Appleton and sent somewhere stricter. We all knew there were other wings at McLean — the ones you only heard about — where people really were locked down. That was the “movie version” of a psych ward. Appleton wasn’t that.
I’ll never forget the discharge meeting at McLean. The doctors sat with me and a few family members. My dad didn’t make it — he overslept in Connecticut and had to call in. So while the doctors laid out their conclusions, the person I’d most wanted to hear it was just a voice on speakerphone. They told me: I wasn’t bipolar. I didn’t have a leaking faucet in my brain that made me doomed. I had low self-esteem. I had emotional problems. I had a weakness for disinhibiting drugs like Ambien or Xanax, which turned small problems into catastrophic ones. That was it.
You might think that was good news. You’re not broken. You’re not doomed to madness. But it was more complicated. For me, the message was: you don’t have a neat brain disorder to blame for being such a fuck-up. For my dad, the message was: maybe the family madness wasn’t something we shared after all. He couldn’t accept that. He told me afterward the doctors must be morons, that I had tricked them, that they just weren’t clever enough to catch the illness I was hiding. He had paid for me to go to McLean, insisted on it, but now he decided the whole thing was a waste.
I didn’t really belong at McLean. Most of the people there had burned their lives down before showing up. They’d lost jobs, marriages, houses, sometimes their freedom. They had to sit through endless occupational therapy sessions about how to rebuild what they’d destroyed. I hadn’t. I hadn’t lost my job. I hadn’t set my house on fire. I’d just tried to kill myself off-hours, in a way that was embarrassing because I was the kind of minor pundit people noticed when I imploded.
And that’s the strange thing about problems like mine: they’re never bad enough that anyone can force me to do anything about them. You just carry them around, because they’re survivable. Which means the only way anything ever changes is if you decide to change it yourself. And deciding is the hard part.
Being in Appleton forced me to see how ordinary my problems really were. These people had collapsed in spectacular, public, headline-grabbing ways. My issues were quieter, duller, easier to hide. And realizing that — realizing my pain wasn’t unique, that it was just another entry in the long human catalogue of sorrow and bad choices — was both humiliating and strangely freeing.
That realization — that my pain was not rare or heroic but common and recognizably human — sits with me all the time. It should have been a minor fact; instead it arrived like a small weather system that reshaped everything. Once you think it, you can’t easily unthink it: other people are as broken as you are, in the same slow, boring ways. The woman who cried in group over a missed appointment has the same ache as I do when I stay in bed all day. The man who can’t stop apologizing over dinner has the same loneliness that makes me open a bottle alone after a showing. Most people you meet are carrying some version of it. They just don’t hand you the paperwork.
That’s not consolation. It’s recognition. And it’s worse, honestly. But it’s also a demand. If everyone’s pain is that ordinary, then the moral frame changes: we stop hunting for epic explanations and start dealing with the work. People deserve context, not miracles. They deserve a doctor who listens, a schedule that reduces chaos, a friend who shows up on Tuesday when they most want to be left alone. They deserve the kind of small, domestic interventions that look boring on op-eds but work in a life. Most of the compassion the world needs is not dramatic; it’s routine.
The best thing McLean gave me was a connection: the psychiatrist in New York who became my doctor for the next five years had trained there. He was the first psychiatrist I had who wasn’t useless. And on his own, without needing McLean’s files, he reached the same conclusion. I wasn’t bipolar. I had a messy mix of self-hatred, escapism, and emotional instability. I had tendencies that, combined with pills or booze, could become dangerous. But I didn’t have the kind of “comic-book bad” brain disease that my father had.
My father once told me that in the 1970s or 80s he went weeping to a therapist, saying, “I’m awful, I’m terrible, I’m no good, I’m crazy.” The therapist gave him a metaphor: “Richard, there’s a faucet in everyone’s brain that releases chemicals. The faucet in your brain leaks.” My dad loved this. He said from that moment on he never felt bad about being a kook again, because it was outside his control. I understand what the therapist was trying to convey. But when I think about it now, it sounds like an excuse. The problem with my dad isn’t that he’s bipolar. The problem is that he finds more comfort in being bipolar than in saying, “I make mistakes.”
And that, to me, is the heart of it. Most madness isn’t the faucet-leaking kind. Most madness is boring. It’s the humiliations, the petty self-destructions, the slow grind of being human. Not cinematic. Not tidy. Just… ongoing. Ugly, ordinary, ongoing.
That’s the mercy. That’s the curse.
Because when I think back on those weeks, what sticks with me most isn’t McLean’s orderly routines. It’s the People Magazine ruined by a man who really did have the leaking faucet. For him it was psychosis. For me it was just a disgusting anecdote. Lucky me.
And the same goes for the rest of us. The faucet isn’t broken in this country. The liberal order created the most successful, peaceful, equal, prosperous, and free civilizations in history. We find ourselves in a bit of a pickle of late. But our chemistry is as good as it gets. The fundamentals are strong. Our magazines don’t need to be jerked off in. We just need to make clear that not only don’t we all jerk off in them, we also don’t erect statues to the few people who do.
Damn, you're good at this whole words thing.
This is great - especially the last paragraph.