Bit by bit she regained the distance by which the doctors measured responsibility: Alone to Her Doctor's Office (100 ft. x 1 hr. sane); Alone on Front Grounds (200 ft. x 3 hrs. sane); and at last she applied to go to B ward, where the foot-hour rule would be given the whole inward sweep of books and pencils and sketch pads.

... it was not good form to seem too insistent.

... there was time to wait through, endless time, marked off by meals and sleep, a word or two brushing by, an anger, a story, or the raging delusion of another patient-all experienced disinterestedly and remembered only as part of the frieze of the sick around the walls of the ward.

The hospital experience can seem-to the acutely psychotic patient-no refuge from paranoia, but its ultimate expression.

If the majority is insane, the sane must go to the hospital.

The first reason mental hospitals came into existence was that we had to have a place for people that just couldn't fit in. They had to go somewhere.

Mona's lazy days consisted primarily of rising only to shower, eat three meals and play with broken or missing pieces of infantile games.

Patients who didn't improve within twelve to eighteen months in the admission wards were sent to the back wards to share the neglect of the chronic patients.

Some of these patients were quiet, and, because they created no problems, they were the patients most often ignored ...

... the locked side of the door.