The Re-Naming of Things
- The Juvenile Psych Ward, where we are right now, is not a “Psych Ward.” It’s a “Child Development Unit.”
Calling it a Psych Ward is like admitting the thing on your foot really is a toe fungus. It’s gross; you’d rather not look at it; and in certain situations it’s downright embarrassing (“Rebecca, how are your college applications going?” “They were going well, Mr. Peters, but then I spent a month on the Psych Ward, and now I’ve missed all the financial aid cutoffs”).
Every time you call it a Psych Ward, a staff member will lunge at you like they’re catching dinner with their bare hands, brandishing a Dixie cup full of pills or a clipboard with extra thought exercises as though, with these, they will knock the offending words out of your mouth.
“You’re on the Child Development Unit,” chimes Amanda, a longtime support staff, who believes in angel therapy and does manicures for most of the girls on the ward. (Apparently, filed-sharp fingernails don’t count as weapons.) “It’s just a quiet place for you all to rest up. You need your rest.”
Every time you call it a Psych Ward, a staff member will lunge at you like they’re catching dinner with their bare hands, brandishing a Dixie cup full of pills or a clipboard with extra thought exercises as though, with these, they will knock the offending words out of your mouth.
Rest. Is that what six-year-old Isaac down the ward is doing every day at two A.M. when he screams like he’s been lit ablaze? Child Development. Is that what Cheyenne, seventeen, and already with a rap sheet, is undergoing when she tells us in explicit detail about sex with her twenty-six-year-old boyfriend? Carleigh, who’s been here longer than anyone for reasons the rest of us don’t know, even makes a poem out of it—Child Development Unit, reciting the whole name like that every few lines. Child Development Unit. So that people really “get” how long she’s been sequestered here, on the inside of wherever we are.
- Names don’t always describe the person they’re naming; they describe the person who gave you that name.
Jamie the Orderly calls me “Sadie the Fish” because of how often I fill my water bottle at the hallway fountain by my room, which I only do to avoid liver and kidney damage from all the new medications I am taking, which are partially due to a severe anxiety disorder they don’t properly treat, and which are all prescribed by the stern Indian psychiatrist, Dr. Laghari, who has warned me repeatedly about potential liver and kidney damage and the paramount importance of staying hydrated. Which gives me anxiety.
But “Sadie the Fish” is a new name, and it’s just Jamie’s thing, so I let it slide off me like water from the leaky fountain. Jamie’s okay. He’s the only ward staff member who wants to become an actual mental health counselor someday. Which is good because yesterday I watched him fail, for five hours, to teach a fifteen-year-old girl with acute schizophrenia how to bake snickerdoodles. I can be “Sadie the Fish” for a guy like that. Hell, I wasn’t even “Sadie” until this year.
- You can have a name and not know it, or be wrong about the name you think you have.
I have been in a junior high science class with three Sarahs before. Spiffy name for a baby in the early 90s. So much so that when I arrived at my bucolic private school campus in January of ninth grade (a week late for the beginning of the semester), I found there were two of us in our writing class of thirteen. Hi, Sarah. Oh, hey there, Other Sarah.
A couple of other classmates introduced themselves over break and joked about the name problem. Somehow, somewhere between the classroom and iced tea at the campus bookstore, I was reborn: Sadie. Sadie, Sadie, Sadie. Sadie. See? It stuck.
- I, a fourteen-year-old with clinical depression, am a “Debbie Downer.”
My new moniker is supremely the Goo Goo Dolls’ fault. Specifically, it’s because they made the song “Black Balloon,” which Jordan and Taryn decided was a Good Song To Hold Small Group Therapy Sessions About, analyzing it for familiar messages. (Except that they’re playing the wrong song.) That’s where I am now, analyzing my buns off. So far, no friendly acknowledging wave from the text. The wrong text.
I suppose it doesn’t help that I spent the last half a year studying obscure poetry at an elite private school for the arts, parsing verse so hard that it gave me migraines. And once, a seizure on the day we were supposed to welcome a famous poet and Nobel laureate to campus. (My central nervous system is a klutz at timing. But, Nobel laureates aside, I’m a tenuously scholarshipped kid just barely making it through all the readings anyway, even before my grand “oopsy” of ending up here.)
I suppose it doesn’t help that I spent the last half a year studying obscure poetry at an elite private school for the arts, parsing verse so hard that it gave me migraines.
Jordan or Taryn hits pause on the boombox beside us, previously blaring “Name,” which they tell us is “Black Balloon.” I can never remember which is Jordan and which is Taryn; they are both blonde, earnest Psychology majors who are here as an extra credit internship. Taryn (Jordan?) asks us to go around the table with our first impressions.
It’s the closest thing I’ve heard on the ward to actual crickets: the fluorescent track lighting hums like it teems with restless life instead of actual dead flies. Rachel fidgets and starts jiggling her foot, but says nothing.
I raise my practiced hand.
“I just think a lot of the images are trite,” I say. “I mean, ‘all the dreams you never thought you’d lose’ and ‘Did you lose yourself somewhere out there?’ are such cop-outs. I feel,” and here I borrowed from my favourite teacher, “like they’re better writers than those lines.”
Silence, except for the incessant hum of the lights.
And Jordan (no, that one’s definitely Taryn) says, “Oh, we have our own Debbie Downer here!” And miraculously, I am allowed to leave the room, like the name is a hall pass out of a very boring revision class.
They continue to hail me that way in the hallway and after group therapy.
“Hey, Debbie Downer! You coming to art group later?”
“Hi Debbie. Listen, I really appreciate what you were saying in there.”
“Hey Debbie Downer—”
“What?!” I finally spit back, the hallway all yellow hospital tile and children’s drawings of closet monsters.
“You okay?” asks Jordan, earnest and wide-eyed. “You don’t look so good.”
The problem with being “Debbie Downer” (or Sadie the Fish, or anything) in the hospital is that it’s patently unfair—there are kids here (including me, hi) with severe clinical depression, patients who have cut themselves and burned themselves and threatened suicide and really tried suicide. Why am I more of a “Downer” on the Psych Ward than they are?
But it’s not a Psych Ward, Sadie. It’s a Child Development Unit. A Unit where we Develop Children.
Like my roommate Rachel, desperate for a joint and chewing her cuticles like they’re gum.
Like Anna, permanently cosplaying as a vampire and making herself bleed for real.
Like me.
They have other names for all of us, us undeveloped ones.
In the charts and workups and notes we don’t see, they name us all kinds of things. Difficult. Compulsive. An addict. A liar.
But first, they have to let us in.
Sadie McCarney is the author of Live Ones (University of Regina Press, 2019 / tall-lighthouse (UK), 2020) and Your Therapist Says It’s Magical Thinking (ECW Press, 2023), a finalist for the J.M. Abraham Atlantic Poetry Award and winner of the PEI Book Award for Poetry. Her work has appeared in places including Best Canadian Poetry, The Walrus, Canadian Literature, EVENT, Foglifter, The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, CV2, and Grain, among others. In 2023, she placed first in Grain’s Short Grain Poetry Contest. Sadie’s nonfiction is forthcoming in Geist, and she lives in Charlottetown.
