From Mad in Sweden: I don’t know what time it is. In my memory it is always autumn. According to my journals it was March. It doesn’t matter, because I’m cold anyway. The sterile rubber mattress – unworthy of its length to save Tväteriet i Alingså’s various eiderdown bolsters impregnated with bodily fluids – seems to cool down rather than insulate the little body heat I manage to generate, and the blue-and-white striped county council blanket that I have tightly wrapped around me helps very little. But that’s all I have. If nothing else, it’s the only comfort there is here, in ward 362 at Östra Sjukhuset in Gothenburg. One of the bipolar wards, which I don’t actually belong to but have been sent to due to the usual lack of space.
Read the full article on Swedish psychiatry here and the English translation here.
