The first step of surviving any situation, is to first get into said situation. Our situation is being in a mental health and addictions in a patient treatment center. 

1. Become a crazy rapist, murderer, psycho, monster person.

This step may seem easy to most. Well…not the rapist, murderer, thing. But one would assume it’s pretty easy to be put into a mental institution. They would be disturbingly wrong. To be accepted into the mental health dube center in Saskatoon you must either be on the verge of killing yourself for the fifth time, or be trying to hurt someone else, or have extreme OCD attacks and be constantly thinking about murder, rape, incest, animal cruelty, and such things. If you have these symptoms, you would be lucky to be able to spend more than three days in the mental health center. 

So how do you become crazy? I suggest sitting in your room all alone, every day, for two weeks, doing nothing but watching porn, gore, or horror movies. Even better if your room has no windows and you live alone. I recommend laying in your bed all day except when you have to eat. But, remember you are trying to be mentally ill so that you will be accepted as an inpatient. So I recommend starving yourself, and it would make your case even better if you piss and shit in your bed, that’s how you know your mentally fucked. 

This process should take one to two weeks. By watching disturbing and inappropriate content for prolonged periods of time, and being in a dark room, and having no social interaction, and starving yourself, you should become at least a little bit depraved in the brain. You may not know it, but doing this is self harm, and it will put you higher on the list of applicants for inpatient treatment. 

2. Get accepted.

Congratulations! You have proven yourself mentally ill enough to actually need our services! Now that you are in the treatment center, you realise, “Oh shit! This place is a hellhole, I am supposed to live here with 3-5 other people with drug and mental health issues?” And yes, yes you are. You will also remember “Oh my god, I paid $20,000 just to spend one month here, and the minimum of months I have to be here is THREE?!” Yes, it is. They tell you that three months is the minimum because that is how long it takes them to get to know you and your struggles. (It’s actually because they have a really low rating and people have stopped paying to go there, so they desperately need the money) 

3. Now what?

Now you are extremely tired because it’s your first week there and you had to drive to a whole other province to get there. You desperately want to go to bed, but your “house parent” (who is extremely old, religious, crazy, is a conspiracist, and so fat that they are actually disabled but at least you guys get to park close to the grocery store) tells you that you are not allowed to go to bed until sundown. You get angry and you try to sleep on the couch, then your “teacher/group therapist” wakes you up and says you can’t sleep. You become extremely irritated. 

Now that you have been introduced to the other five people of the same gender that will now live with you for the next three months, it is time to get settled into your room. Your house parent goes through all of your belongings and takes 90% of all of the things you brought. They will look at your Katy Perry shirt and take it because “Katy Perry traffics women, we don’t support her” then she will see that all of your other shirts are of various bands, AC/DC, Jay Z, Beyonce, Kiss, and Weird Al Yankovic. They will take every shirt except for your Weird Al Yankovic shirt because who has ever been offended by Weird Al? They tell you, out of nowhere, “You can’t have any heavy metal stuff because they support anger and satan, and Jay Z and Beyonce are part of the Illuminati, so there is absolutely none of them in this house!” You look at them, stunned because what the hell, THIS person is supposed to make me less crazy?! Yes, they are. 

4. The Schedule

You have been here for three weeks now, and you feel terrible. Your head aches, your stomach feels like it’ll explode at any moment, and you are bored out of your mind. Every morning you wake up at seven, you get dressed in the only clothes you have (Venture Academy logo shirt, pants, and a very thin sweater) then you eat breakfast. Your houseparent is extremely fat so you find it odd that she keeps telling everyone that “if you keep eating like that, you’ll get fat,” You are pretty offended because you already think you are fat, and it’s not your fault that the only good thing in this place is off brand Cheerio’s and Special K. You continue to eat your secret second bowl of cereal, when you finish the cereal you do what everyone does, you drink the milk out of the bowl. This makes your houseparent very mad, “You can’t drink out of your bowl, it’s not ladylike,” to which you respond “I’m not here to become lady-like!” with a laugh. “Your parents would be happy if you were lady-like” they say. “No, my parents encourage us to drink the milk, otherwise it’s a waste of milk,” you say, she responds “You are right, but you have to drink the milk with a spoon,” And now you are extremely pissed off that it’s almost stupid. Who the hell drinks milk with a spoon! Ain’t nobody got for that! You rage in your mind, everything so far is terrible. 

Then you get to “The Academy” which is a small building thirty minutes away from the city you are currently living in. You get inside and they pat you down, check your pockets, make you shake your underwear and then lift your bra. (with your shirt on) Then you go into the classroom where you are greeted by the only sane person in the whole academy, Amy. Amy is a beautiful young woman with long black hair and a slender stature. Every morning you fill out a paper that asks you the following ; How do you feel this morning? What is one complement you can give yourself? What is one compliment you can give someone else? What is the date? You fill out all of the questions with a heart full of resentment. You then spend fifteen minutes as a class to do some quiet meditation. 

Then Amy is switched with the second worst person in the academy, Terren. Terren is fat, obese, big, large, she has an attitude and obviously has never been around a bunch of drug addicted mentally ill teenagers before. She is a “teacher” which means she basically tells you to do your work and if you have any questions she will either re-read the question or simply google the answer. One day, someone in the class asks her “Who do you believe in?” she proceeds to scoff and roll her eyes “God, obviously,” she chuckles. “No but, like, which one?” She then stares at the student with a world of judgment and says “The only one!” The student laughs awkwardly “But like, which kind?” “I’m a Christian,” she says. You immediately decide that this is the worst teacher you’ve ever met and hope she has a heart attack so that you can sit and watch while doing absolutely nothing about it.

For lunch you eat a sandwich, and a granola bar. Everyone gets excited because now we can play Uno. You do not play Uno because you are anti-social and feel like murdering the next person that makes eye contact with you. 

After lunch it is time for exercise, you all go to the basement to do some random activities lead by the one and only Terren, who occasionally fat shames you. 

After the humiliation of exercise, you're back inside doing more school work. You suddenly wish you were back home with that nasty old teacher that used to make you do art for fun. Every teacher you know now seems like the best person in the world. 

At three o’clock it is time to go home. That fat bitch pulls up in her black van and you all drive away. When you get home you want to go to bed, but can’t. So all you do is sit on the couch and think about different ways to kill yourself. 

This same pattern repeats for the next three months, this includes halloween, and some kids birthday.

5. Christmas

“It’s Christmas!” is how you used to feel during December, but now you're just sad because you haven't seen your parents in two months and you're literally spending Christmas in a treatment center. 

You go to school but something new happens today, one of the leaders takes you to another room and whispers, “Something good is about to happen, can you guess?” and you think “I don’t know of any good thing that can happen in this hellhole,” but you just say “Don’t know,” she leans in close and says “Your family is coming to see you for Christmas!” You get happy, but then you realize that your parents are the ones who put you here. “Don’t tell anyone until the day of,” she demands. You immediately burst into the classroom and shout “I’m seeing my parents for Christmas!” She walks by and side eyes you with disappointment. 

The time comes and your parents pick you up from the house. You spend one night with them. You guys go thrifting and go swimming in the hotel pool. Your parents bring out a box full of christmas presents, some of them are from your grandma. You kind of just smile and show them you're happy, but really you wish you were dead. Nothing feels better than the thought of death right now. People think you’re okay, but every time you get to go outside, you think about how you could sneak away and find a way to kill yourself. The only reason you don’t try is because of the chance that you might wake up and everything will just be worse. 

6. You’re Going Home!

Just a few weeks after Christmas, the leader tells you “You’re going home!” You don’t feel anything. Well… you feel too much sadness. You don’t feel happy, or excited, or anything like that. You just wish you were dead. You just wish you could find a definite way to die. You don’t want to try to kill yourself, and then wake up. Because when you wake up your parents will be done with your shit. You will be homeless. You will be kicked out. 

You go home, it’s a long drive with your parents, your brother is with your grandma. You barely talk. You eat a lot. When you get home, you slowly realise that you’re more damaged now than you were before. You have a sugar addiction from all the junk food they tried to make us happy with. You’re more suicidal than ever. You have nightmares every night about going back there. You start to hate all Christians. You develop a fear of fat people. And all you want to do is sleep. 

7. Two Years Later

You still have nightmares, and sometimes you wake up and don’t know if you went there once, or twice, or if what you dreamed was real or fake. You don’t know what really happened there and what was all a nightmare. You found a nice therapist and a psychologist and a psychiatrist. You are on the right medication now, but you still get cravings for sugar. Sometimes your OCD gets really bad. Sometimes you have a really bad day, and all you want to do is kill yourself, but you don’t. Waking back up after attempting is worse than just living through it.