Her file is heavy, thick and pregnant with the details of over a decade of brokenness, pain, confusion and hopelessness.
I have been watching her for four days while she wanders though the hallways and the courtyard like a ghost without a plan. She breathes and moves and sees and knows to pause for the food cart and to step aside for a busy nurse, yet there is no one home. She is alive yet not alive. Not living, just existing.
In the hope I might be able to understand what would cause a woman so young to be so burdened, I pull her file and begin to read. I open up the transcript of her most recent admission interview. It makes no sense, her words are strung against words which were never meant to be partnered, it is nonsense and it is tragic. A woman admitted so mentally ill and tormented that the only verbal response she can give to any question is one that describes the fear of death and the certainty that the world is at an end. ‘Even if I tell you my name I will die‘
Diagnosis: Schizophrenia.
