One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

ASSEN, THE NETHERLANDS — 2022 The Isolation Room The room was empty in a way that felt deliberate. A bare mattress on the floor. A door with a small square window cut into it. White walls. A floor that reflected light and gave nothing back. This was not a bedroom. It was a place designed to contain a human being. I was in a psychiatric hospital in Assen, in the Netherlands. I ended up alone in an isolation room. Time stopped behaving normally. When you are locked in a room like that, you lose ordinary reference points—routine, conversation, the small signals that tell you where you are in the day. I don’t remember whether I had reception or any real way to reach someone from inside that room. So my body became the clock: thirst, hunger, cold, fatigue. At the beginning, I still believed basic care would come. Water. Food. A human checking in. The minimum. Hours passed. No one came. I knocked. I called out. I tried again. Nothing. After a while, your mind starts negotiating with reality. Maybe they are busy. Maybe there is a shift change. Maybe someone forgot. Maybe it will be handled in ten minutes. That is how neglect becomes survivable: you keep inventing reasons for it. The thirst came first. Then the hunger—dull at first, later sharp enough to make me nauseous. The cold settled into my muscles. My body began to tremble, not from drama, but from the simple fact of being left in a sterile room with no warmth and no care. At some point it became clear: I was not being “monitored.” I was being left. More than twenty-four hours passed without food or drink. I do not write that number lightly. I know what a day is. I know what it means to have nothing for a day. This was inside an institution that exists, on paper, to keep people safe. There was a toilet in the room. Fixed. Functional. And there was a small plastic cup. When thirst becomes strong enough, dignity becomes a luxury. You stop thinking in symbols. You want liquid because your body demands it. I filled the cup. I drank water from the toilet. There is a particular kind of humiliation in doing something like that while being seen by nobody and helped by nobody—just a locked door and a system that did not deliver the minimum. I have learned in my life that after the fact, reality gets rewritten. Institutions do it. Families do it. People do it to protect themselves from responsibility. They say: “It didn’t happen,” or “It wasn’t like that,” or “You must have misunderstood.” That is why I documented what I could. A room. A mattress. A locked door. A toilet. A plastic cup. Later, people will ask why someone like me becomes angry, distrustful, or “difficult.” They will ask why I keep records, why I write emails, why I insist on dates and details. This is why. When you have been left in a locked room long enough to drink from a toilet, you stop believing in good intentions as a default. You start believing in documentation. I am not writing this to sound strong. I am writing it because it is true. And because it happened.