In the summer of 2006, I had the worst summer of my life. I started hearing voices and I thought that they were ghosts. The voices liked to make fun of me, threaten me, argued with each other, and sometimes sounded like someone I knew. The voices that I usually heard sounded like two boys. I tried everything that I could think of to get the voices to stop such as going to someone else’s house, opening my door with the light on, and asking them to stop. During that time, paranoid thoughts went into my head like people thinking badly of me and people being aliens. A few days later, I went to my psychiatrist. The psychiatrist said that she wants me to go to a mental hospital in Sioux Falls, South Dakota and that it would be only a day and I believed it. My mom drove me to the hospital with my aunt riding along. When he got to the hospital and went to the rooms, I refused to stay there. A police officer came and forced me into the room while I was yelling for mom.


I lay down in bed for the entire second day. When a nurse kept on telling me to participate in activities, I said no because I would only be there for a day. The nurse kept telling me that it wouldn’t be a day, but I barely believed her. When Mom came to visit me, I heard the news that it wasn’t going to be for a day. For several days, all I did was lie in bed and sleep while hearing the voices bugging me. While lying there, I thought that there was a video camera in the room that shouldn’t be there. After those several days, I decided to start doing activities and meetings while taking my medication so that I could get out of there even though I’m shy.



After over a month went by, Mom and the workers thought I should go somewhere else for treatment so I went to a mental hospital in Cherokee, Iowa. What I hated the most about the Cherokee hospital was that we had to go to the hospital’s school every weekday and the meals were usually gross. The voices continued to bug me. I stayed there till a day in August.



Even though the voices were gone from my time in Cherokee, I had to go to an out-patient program in my city. The out-patient program was for a few hours each day during the summer. In the out-patient program, the patients talked about their problems and did activities. During the first two days of my 7th grade year, I had to take school there.



After all that happened to me, I have no problems hearing voices and I have to take two types of medication to stop them from coming back.