My Brother's Battle -- and Mine

At the new hospital, behind the locked doors of the G-1 unit, my brother has been treated for the past six months, slowly getting better. It's not the institution of exposés past. Last weekend, a nurse gave my 4-year-old son and me a tour of the rec room, the indoor swimming pool area, the neatly stocked library and the cafeteria.

But it's also not pretty. Not long ago, my brother was punched in the jaw by another patient. A male nurse dislocated two fingers while pulling them apart. As I visited my brother last week in a locked room for visitors, the assailant waved to me through the glass window, his earlier violence apparently forgotten.

My brother is due for a mental health commission hearing this week to determine whether he should be hospitalized for another six months. "I'm scared," he told my mother and me, and I knew he was getting better. It's rational to be afraid of being committed to a psychiatric unit.

Because of West Virginia's new legislation, he probably will be discharged soon for a six-month "temporary observation period" that orders him back to the hospital if he doesn't take his medicine. The bar will not be violence.

As a psychiatric nurse let me out of G-1, we stood for a moment at the door beside a sign that read, "Caution. Elopement Risk." "We wouldn't leave someone bleeding on the streets because they didn't want to go into the hospital after a hit-and-run," the nurse said to me. "Why abandon the mentally ill?"

As the nurse went back into G-1, I caught my brother's eye through the sliver-of-glass window on the door. My heart ached, but I knew that he wouldn't be a threat to others as he received the treatment he critically needs. Then the door clicked shut.

asra@asranomani.com

Asra Q. Nomani is the author of "Standing Alone: An American Woman's Struggle for the Soul of Islam."