假设：如果你住进了精神病院，如何向人们证明你心智正常，而不是假的

If you were wrongfully put into an insane asylum, how would you convince them that you’re actually sane and not just pretending to be sane? Lea Frost, Software Engineer (2007-present) This happened to me in my teens. Due to an unfortunate event that coupled an inexperienced me with a ridiculously large quantity of party drugs…and well, long story short, I overdosed and almost died. After being found unconscious by my parents, emergency services were called. They stabilised me, put me in an ambulance and I rushed to hospital. That’s what I was told anyway, but because I was slipping in and out of consciousness, I thought it was all a bad dream. My first memory of waking up, I was being pushed in a bed down a hall. I remember the multiple fluorescent lights flickering in my face as we passed one after the other. I open my eyes slowly, and I see hospital staff and my dad looking down at me and still thinking I was in a dream, the first thing I said was, “fuck… I'm still here”. I lost consciousness again, but not before I saw the look on my dads face as he clenched his jaw and shook his head in a mixed emotional range of relief and bitter anger. You see, my dad is a typical hypermasculine beer-toting, woman-over-shoulder slingin', president of the boys club. And he has a disdain for people who self-harm and exhibit suicidal tendencies. And I…well to him I was a social recluse who dressed like a nutcase, read too many books, listened to awful music and hung out with weirdos. I was emotionally fragile — a “cutter” prone to episodes of self-harm. To him, I was weak. So when I'd said the words, “fuck, I'm still here”, that could only mean one thing: I had tried and near succeeded in committing suicide. He was livid. His closest sibling had committed suicide a couple of years before, and he struggled to understand. As I rehabilitated over the coming weeks, I came to learn that suicide was an act that gets you a free, all expenses paid trip to a psychiatric care unit. No matter the fact that I'd protested the event as a dosage mishap, and not an attempt on my life — I was admitted into the unit as an involuntary patient. The thing that no one understood was that while I did suffer with emotional health issues, I was working through them because I actually loved life. I had not tried to commit suicide. The first days were the hardest. I was stripped of my liberties, and was confined to the facility. My luggage meticulously searched for blades, and drugs. They took away all solvents like hair spray and deodorant — anything that I might use to harm myself. It was humiliating. I went on to spend 1 month in the unit, and it was wasted on me. I wasn't diagnosed with any mental health issues by the psychiatrists. I wasn't medicated. I didn't need that level of care. But what I took from that were the many stories of the staff and their convictions that brought them to work with youth struggling with mental health. And of other young people who were genuinely in need of care. Who were struggling with life beyond anything I'd known. I'm 34 now and this all happened when I was 16. My dad and I are very close these days — at times totin' beers together and sharing a laugh. He'll still mention that event at times. So will I. It's the sort of thing you never forget.