Cages and Those Who Hold the Keys

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Okay, technically, it was not so much the nuthouse as it was the pre-nuthouse holding facility.

Its official title—which was too much of a mouthful for most people to want to deal with—was: The Cedar Hill Mental Health Association Emergency Stabilization Center. It was attached to the nuthouse (actually, it was attached to Cedar Hill Memorial Hospital, the 7th floor of which housed the Psychiatric Unit, the accept-no-imitators official nuthouse) but served a different and more pressing function: to temporarily house and treat those individuals who were—as the admission literature phrased it— “... in a state of extreme psychological and emotional distress that has rendered them a danger to themselves and/or others.”

The staff referred to the place as simply “The Center”, but its nickname among clients (that’s what you were called here, a “client”, not a “patient”) was “Buzzland”—a moniker that even staffers would have admitted appropriate, considering how stoned most people were kept during their stay.

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