After the hospitalization you feel marked.

But you do live after the hospital.

... drugs were used indiscriminately in mental institutions because they made management of asylums much easier: care is often institutionally efficient while less individually concerned. It is difficult to separate behaviors that have a neurological basis from symptoms and side effects induced by medications used to treat these disorders.

In our drug dazes, the object of existence was simply to pass time.

The routines of the ward added to the general sense of monotony. Shifts came and went. Meals were delivered and taken away. Everything occurred according to schedules. Medications were passed out at regular intervals. When the medications were ready, patients queued up in obedient lines to receive little plastic cups filled with multi-hued pills.

The struggle is to retain some semblance of dignity.

I calmed myself down and decided to just wait for whatever happened.

My only hope was to be polite.

Once you've been committed to a mental institution you're considered a second-rate citizen from then on and retroactive.