Every Wednesday in segregation is mental health check day. God help you if you lose your mind on one of the other six days of the week.
Due Diligence
“MENTAL HEALTH CHECK!”
The distinctly female voice sounded just outside my door. I rushed to see because it was new stimuli and because I’m a heterosexual male and she’s a woman. Even to my starved eyes she was rather plain looking, slim, petite. Nothing much distinctive about her. This seemed to be the mold from which many of the mental health staff and nurses are poured.
She moved along tapping on doors and saying in a too loud, too sunny voice, “Mental health check. Howya doin’ in there? Everything okay today?” I could never hear the other side of the conversation, but she always ended with “Okay, thanks, have a good day!” Much too cheerful. The whole thing was, essentially, a tasteless joke.
Many men languished in segregation while being investigated under the guise of it being essential to the “safety and security of the institution.” This is merely a pretext for the powers that be to do more or less whatever they want. I never got a sense that anyone too much cared for our mental health while back there, but by doing the once weekly visit DOC covered themselves from a liability standpoint in the event of any litigation or outside investigation.
Trite
Tap, tap, tap.
“Mental Health Check. Howya doin’ in there? Everything okay today?”
It began to grate on me, the hypocrisy of it. I had heard guys scream endlessly only to be ignored or told by a CO to shut-up. I had heard officers threaten to deny the inmate his shower, his food. Never while the mental health check was going on of course. Then everyone was on their best behavior.
Tap, tap, tap.
“Mental Health Check. Howya doin’ in there?”
This time there was an immediate and impassioned response from within the cell. From a distance it all came out in urgent consonants—hard k and t and s sounds, but nothing intelligible. Polite and seemingly obsequious “Mm—hmm . . . yes . . . alright” vocalizations was all I heard from her. Then: “Well, you know, the only constant in life is change.” This she said to the guy locked in a cell and going nowhere.
Outrage
Are you kidding me! I yelled within my skull. I couldn’t believe that’s what passed as keen psychological insight. I wanted to verbally excoriate her. I’d begin by asking if this was the type of worthless, pointless work she had planned doing when she was studying to earn her degree.
(“Mental Health Check.”)
Whether or not her great contribution to the betterment of society was to come in spouting naïve banalities to men she cannot help. Or whether she even gives a damn about them.
(“Mental Health Check.”)
I wanted to know if she had ever cared at all or if this was just a paycheck to her—a cushy union gig. I wanted to scream: “No! No, I’m not okay! What 
kind of stupid, asinine question is that? I’m locked in Seg! I’ve had everything stripped from me! My parents visited and had to see me chained like a wild frigging animal! I have no idea what the outcome of my situation is going to be because, guess what? I didn’t do anything wrong! I’m only here because smallminded fascists wanted to shut me up. I didn’t break any rules, but they don’t like that I put my prison experiences on a website for the whole world to see. Why don’t they like it? Because some of the essays might make DOC look bad, and God forbid that the truth gets out! They’re abusing their authority holding me here, and trying to squelch my freedom of speech. So, no, you know what? No, I am not okay. Of course I’m not okay!”
(“Mental Health Check.”)
I was going to call “Bullshit!” on this little routine of checking each cell off her list just so she could rubberstamp us all “sane enough” for another week and cover the prison’s collective and considerable hindquarters.
(“Mental Health Check.”)
I wanted to make her question, if not regret ever getting into the field of prison healthcare (an oxymoron if I ever heard one). I wanted to make her flee in tears and shame.
(“Mental Health Check.”)
She was almost at my door and I wanted to tell her all this. I was going to tell her all this and more. Know what I did tell her?
Reality
Tap, tap, tap.
“Mental Health Check. Howya doin’ in there? Everything okay today?”
By the time she tapped my door I was sitting, facing away from her. I merely raised my arm in her direction and extended one single digit to convey to her how I was doing. My thumb.
“Okay, thanks, have a good day!”
An important lesson: Learn to pick your battles or you’ll get tired or hurt from beating your head against the proverbial wall. Yet I’ve never gotten used to swallowing my ire in the face of callousness and injustice.