Last time on nonsensical depictions of mental illness treatment, Chloe was walked around her new home while out of her mind on drugs.

Chloe wakes up to see the girl pawing through her clothes, which she doesn’t think is weird.

“Liz. Like Lizzie McGuire.” She waved at an old and faded magazine cutout on her wall. “Except, I don’t go by Lizzie, ’cause I think it sounds kind of—” she lowered her voice, as if not to offend the picture Lizzie “—babyish.”

Chloe starts wondering what’s wrong with Liz (because everyone there is crazy) when Liz is already acting pretty weird. She’s obsessive enough about Lizzie McGuire to cut out pictures from a magazine but doesn’t like the name, but she won’t say so loudly like she’s worried about upsetting the picture.

This is a writing issue. The author is trying to make a quirky character. But if you make a quirky character in a mental institution followed by the character immediately trying to figure out what’s wrong with her, the answer’s going to be how quirky she is. If you want them to seem perfectly normal despite everyone looking for anything wrong at all, you need to write carefully and have enough of a grasp of human behavior to pick things that are completely innocuous.

Instead, Chloe thinks she’s totally normal in every way so she considers that maybe Liz is there because she’s a chatterbox, despite chattering being a normal thing most people do in response to anxiety, such as the presence of a new person with unknown issues.

I think we’re heading for an aesop about how mental illness is unfairly stigmatized. And while yes, on the one hand that’s true, on the other hand mentally ill people who are mentally ill enough to get locked up somewhere are not going to act exactly like everybody else. If they could, they wouldn’t be locked up.

She seemed harmless enough, though. She’d have to be, wouldn’t she? They wouldn’t put anyone dangerous in here. Or really crazy.

Hallucinations mark the “psychotic” disorders. That is, the ones where your ability to interpret information and react properly is shot to hell. People with psychotic disorders can and have killed people in what they thought was self-defense. This doesn’t mean anyone hallucinating is like that, but right now they don’t know how her symptoms are manifesting. And far more common than visual hallucinations are delusions, like the sudden conviction someone is trying to hurt you.

Chloe’s very presence shows that yes, they will take the dangerous.

I find it odd that there’s no adult there to wake Chloe up. They should be well aware that she didn’t absorb much on her way in – not only would anyone running the place be familiar what doped to the gills kids look like, but they’d have been told what medication she’s on. They’d know she wouldn’t have remembered much of her introduction. She’s also off those drugs that they thought were so necessary just to get her there and waking up in a new place, with an extremely variable and dangerous disorder. Why isn’t there an adult there?

Supervision is generally a very important part of psychiatric care. Even if you’re certain no one is a threat to others, there’s always the possibility of self-injury or suicide attempts, or even just a sudden mental crash where they need help as soon as possible.

Chloe, of course, is oblivious to the important things and instead just starts thinking about how she’s one of those really crazy people since she sees people who aren’t there and that’s sad because she doesn’t want to be one of them.

“Come on,” she said. “Breakfast’s in five minutes, and they get real snippy if you’re late.”

Schedules are very, very important. Someone not coming down to breakfast may be someone putting a noose around their neck. This place seems to be run like a boarding school. Only boarding schools might still have someone announcing breakfast or looking to see why someone hadn’t come down.

We learn there are boys there too. Eh, there’s not really a surprise when you think of the likely pool of people who both need and can afford the place at any given moment. Liz expresses disinterest in the boys but says another girl. Tori, is boy crazy and would sneak over to their side if she got the chance.

We’re then introduced to the other girls. Tori is “moody” but Liz claims they’re best friends. Rae likes fire.

Did that mean she set fires? I thought this place was supposed to be safe.
What about the boys? Were any of them violent?

Okay, so I can understand being bothered by the idea of arson, but the immediate shift to if the boys are violent makes it sound like she thinks fire means lighting Chloe on fire.

Before breakfast, Miss Van Dop gave us all pills, then watched as we took them. It was creepy. No one said a word, just held out their hands, gulped their pill down with water, and returned to their conversations.
When I stared at mine, Miss Van Dop said the doctor would explain everything later, but for now, I should just take it. So I did.

This sounds really, really sketchy.

Chloe is a minor, so technically her dad is the one consenting to treatment. But antipsychotics are not things you prescribe lightly, and they would probably have a meeting with her father and her to explain them. This is particularly important when you’re dealing with the wide variety of drugs used for treatment, all of which have their own potential problems. If nothing else, explaining what they do and how they work gives a much better chance she’ll actually take them, as noncompliance is a major problem with treatment. For that matter, she really should meet with someone to be specifically evaluated for the prescription before getting anything.

(Well, okay, she shouldn’t be getting anything at all. She’s only had one episode so far and it’s been days. That isn’t enough for a diagnosis of anti-psychotics. The side affects of anti-psychotic medication can be pretty much summed up as schizophrenia. Well, schizophrenia, brain damage and decreased life expectancy. And sudden heart attacks. And seizures. This is not something you give someone until you’re absolutely sure you’re right.)

Luckily for Chloe’s stress levels, she’s unaware of any of that and just takes her pills. Hopefully they’re just one of the safer tranquilizers.

Anyway, so Tori starts asking if the laundry was done, and Rae says she didn’t do it because they had to clear out for Chloe’s introduction? That seems ominous. Why would the existence of the other kids stand in the way of her dad leaving her? It can’t be for Chloe’s benefit since yet again, doped to the gills. So maybe some of them have behavior issues that might be enough to make the place look bad. And Tori is mad because she had a shirt she wanted to wear, which is apparently new but someone else might have tried it on so she wants it washed.

Suddenly, ghost! This one seems less stupid. Only a hand manifests and it doesn’t yell or anything, it just says to listen. Chloe starts stuttering. Tori says no one over five stutters. As over-five stuttering is reasonably often represented in popular media, even if it is usually portrayed as a sign the person’s a loser, I call shenanigans. Anyway, we get a very special lesson about stuttering as Chloe calms down enough to coldly say she has a speech impediment, and naturally she’s able to say that perfectly to prove her point that she’s really normal and Tori’s wrong for mocking her. Seriously, it’s not much of a speech impediment if it turns off as soon as she notices she’s doing it.

Chloe’s teachers haven’t sent coursework yet, and somehow this means she’s excused completely from lessons.

We get our first sign anyone knows what they’re doing as Chloe begins to bitch about how strict the schedule is. It actually isn’t, though. They’re up at seven thirty and have to be in class at nine – although there doesn’t seem to be any clear sign of what happens if they wake up earlier or later. Then they have class like students normally would, and everyone has a one-hour therapy session a day.

From 4:30 until 6:00, we had free time . . . kind of. In addition to classes and therapy, we had chores. A lot of chores from the looks of the list. These had to be done during our free time before and after dinner. Plus we had to squeeze in thirty minutes of physical activity every day. Then after a snack, it was off to bed at 9:00, lights-out at 10:00.

You may notice there’s a missing three hours there, from 6:00 to 9:00. If you read closely, you’ll see that there’s also free time after dinner, which is presumably at six. Packing chores and thirty minutes of exercise into an hour and a half would definitely leave you with little free time. Four hours is different, and there’s another hour afterward to do whatever they want in their room.

This is not at all how you fill up someone’s day. Chloe is comparing it to boot camp, but this schedule wouldn’t fly at a summer camp. You need a constant string of activities keeping kids occupied so they don’t have time for trouble or homesickness. Given this can also be stressful, enforced activities aren’t the best option, but they still need to account for their time.

Most states make sure patients be checked on at regular intervals. Not all enforce this on private institutions, but given it’s being done for very practical reasons, plenty of them do so anyway. Now, a private hospital picked specifically for the patients’ comfort might easily not, but this is clearly not a patient-run outfit.

I didn’t belong here. I really didn’t.

I’m curious where this whole thing is going. Is this a sign of her prejudice against mental illness, or a condemnation of how it’s treated by others?

It’s really hard to see what her objection is, because she’s an incredibly flat character. All she’s stated is that she finds the cheeriness of the place a bit much, and otherwise she seems to think it’s nice enough. She’s dismissive of the healthy qualifier to their snacks, but that seems mostly like she’s bothered by the entire concept of eating healthy. I thought maybe it’s that she’s used to being alone on her own schedule, except her first chapter is her getting yelled at by the housekeeper for not keeping to the schedule.

For example, I wouldn’t like it because I tend to stay up late. I also like to eat throughout the day and Chloe’s comments about only getting healthy snacks make me cringe, not because I demand sugar but because that’s code for low-fat and I don’t want diet food when I’m actually hungry. I don’t like mandatory exercise much either, but I might not mind depending on what they think counts as exercise. I would also be a bit irritated by the implications of both those things, that I don’t know how to take care of myself, except Chloe is a teenager who’s still at the age when her dad or other caregiver should be telling her she can’t eat so much sugar and she needs to exercise and making supper. (Admittedly, teens can still be bothered, but it shouldn’t be some new imposition.)

Instead it’s just that, in general, being told what to do is bad, therefore this sucks, ignoring that being told what to do is called life when you’re fifteen. She isn’t pointing to any specific parts as being stricter than she’s used to, or any parts where their way of doing things conflicts with how she likes things.

She thinks more on how she hates the cheeriness, then admits it’s not so bad.

Better than padded rooms and endless hallways filled with real zombies, shambling mental patients so doped up they couldn’t be bothered to get dressed, much less bathe.

I’m really left with the feeling the author thinks we’re in…well, actually, I’m not sure there was ever a specific period between “lock them in a room or cut out parts of their brain to make them shut up” and modern patient’s rights during which everyone was drugged incoherent. (There’s also the fact that shambling around in a daze is one form of mental illness…)And I know her aunt is presumably a regular doctor, but Chloe should be a little better educated than usual even if we go with the interpretation that this is just meant to be her view.

Also, while it might be creepy and depressing, I’d prefer there to a place where they have psychotic patients wandering around without any of those medications. (Anti-psychotics take a while to kick in, so even if they started her on them today, the drugs haven’t had a chance to work, and that’s assuming her current medication even would work.) If they took Chloe, who knows what other kids like her they have?

The cheerfulness is fake, she decides. All very ordinary, but I suspected if I grabbed a chair and smashed the window, an alarm would sound

…yes?

The correct statement was “I suspect if I opened the window”. Because an alarm that triggers in the event a burglar is trying to break in or you’ve suddenly decided to make friends with sparkly glass shards is an alarm that’s doing a perfectly normal job. It’s not fascist oppression if they object to smashed windows. What if she’d decided to punch it open? She’d need an ambulance, that’s what.

Chloe goes looking for the alarm system and there it is on the front door. She decides this is further evil oppression, instead of a sign they’re being upfront instead of hoping the kids will try something so they can be caught, and decides to check out the backyard.

Suddenly, a not-wild EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEVIL NURSE appears! She uses random paranoia to guess Chloe is pondering escape. What’s galling is just a minute ago Chloe was looking at the alarm itself. That would be the right time to have the nurse appear. If the author really wanted to tell what the backyard looks like (big, high fence), she could have Chloe go back to the door alarm afterward for a closer look.

Chloe uses HEY UM I JUST REMEMBERED I HAD THIS NECKLACE AND WONDER WHERE IT IS NOW

It is ineffective.

She says she’ll tell the dad so he can find it, but We don’t like our girls wearing jewelry. Eurgh. Knee-jerk aside, it’s not really an unusual policy and there’s practical value to it – it’s yet to be said if they’re trying to keep dangerous things out of people’s hands, and there’s problems with theft or damage. It’s just the way it’s said.

Aside from that, she’s actually pretty reasonable about all this. If we go on the assumption Chloe was making it obvious she wanted out, or skip that and assume the nurse is telling her it because they normally explain this to everyone new, it’s not particularly controlling. She’s described as having amused eyes and a small smile, which could mean that she’s glorying in Chloe’s suffering or that she’s trying to be friendly.

She explains the alarm isn’t there for real escape attempts because the sort of kids who are here know that it’s worse to be a runaway. Kids mostly try to sneak out to meet friends. She then explains exactly where the alarms are and says that if Chloe wants to go out she has to tell them so they can disable the alarm and have someone watch her.

If you have any questions about what you can and cannot do, come to me. I won’t sugarcoat it for you, Chloe. I believe honesty is the first step to establishing trust, and trust is critical in a place like this.

So yeah, she seems pretty reasonable. Shame nothing else is.