[Alice’s] brown eyes are comparatively lucid in a room filled with women alternately sedated or enraged. She comforts Shania, who believes a bulldozer is parked inside her forehead, and Sabrina, who thinks an ex-boyfriend has taken custody of their nonexistent septuplet babies, whose names she cannot always remember but each of whom is called a different diminutive form of “Angel.”

What you may not realize from this passage is that Alice is also an inpatient at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center, and though she often acts as a sort of informal therapist for the other women, “she is forced to admit: ‘You’re here for your own self, too.'”

Read more about her story and the story of the institution she’s in this essay at The Big Round Table, highlighted by Longform.org.