“Schizophrenia is a severe and persistent debilitating psychiatric disorder…… The name schizophrenia means ………”
I tried to keep my eyes open, honestly I did. But the longer the lecture went on, the heavier my eyelids became. It wasn’t the subject, psychology was interesting enough, it was just the way she spoke. Slow, steady, unchanging, like a lullaby meant to rock an entire class to sleep.
To survive, I resorted to my own trick. A Robert Ludlum thriller, The Bourne Identity hidden neatly between the covers of Psychology for Nurses. From the outside, I looked like the model student, head bent, eyes fixed, diligently turning pages. The tutor must have thought I was riveted by the finer points of psychiatric nursing. In reality, I was chasing assassins across Europe.
The idea came from N, my former roommate. She swore it was the most effective antidote for psychiatric lectures. “You’ll stay awake the whole way through, and the tutor will think you’re her favourite student,” she said.
She wasn’t wrong. And to be fair, the tutor was a kind woman. We all liked her. It wasn’t her fault she had the kind of voice that could put a coffee addict into a coma. I just didn’t want to hurt her feelings.
At the end of every posting, we had to sit for a class test. The questions were usually very predictable the tutor would tell us exactly what we’d be tested on. Our job was simply to go home, memorise it word for word, and then vomit it out neatly onto the exam paper.
Psychiatric nursing wasn’t part of the General Exams. What mattered was the report submitted by the Tutor and the Ward Nursing Officers on our overall performance. In other words, it didn’t matter whether you passed or failed the class test. What mattered was that you completed the posting, sat for the test, and clocked the hours.
And hours were everything. If you fell sick or got hospitalised during your posting, you couldn’t just skip ahead with the rest. You had to go back and make up every missed hour before you could graduate. The same rule applied to all the Special Postings, including the School Health Services.
We were constantly calculating our hours like accountants. For Clinical Psychiatric Nursing, we had to complete a full eight-week course period. Each of us carried a Record of Clinical Experience, a thick, official-looking book issued by the Singapore Nursing Board. It was our passport through the training years.
Every page was filled with signatures and comments from Ward Nursing Officers, every entry documenting the nursing procedures we had performed. Blood pressure checks. Bed-making. IV monitoring. Charting. Patient interactions.
That book was our lifeline. You couldn’t lose it, couldn’t misplace it, and certainly couldn’t fudge it. Some officers wrote long, thoughtful comments. Others scribbled one-liners so brief they might as well have stamped “seen.” And every signature mattered, each was proof that you had been there, done the work, and were inching closer to the coveted certificate of enrolment as a Enrolled Nurse.
We all carried those books around like they were sacred. Dog-eared, smudged, bulging with notes. They told the story of where we’d been the wards we’d survived, the patients we’d nursed, and the small triumphs and mistakes that shaped us.
On the surface, the nursing care wasn’t that different from any other hospital. But the patients here were. In general wards, we were used to the frail and the bedridden changing nappies, turning patients to prevent bed sores, bathing them at the bedside. Here, there were none of that.
The patients were mobile, active sometimes too active. You had to keep your eyes open not for pressure sores but for sudden outbursts, arguments over the radio, or someone wandering off when your back was turned.The fundamentals of psychiatric nursing sounded simple enough in our notes:[ 1 ] Gain rapport. [2 ] Accept the patient as a person [3] Provide a supportive ward environment.
But paper and practice were two different things. Gaining rapport wasn’t just about a polite introduction. It meant sitting with someone who hadn’t spoken in days, waiting through the silence until they trusted you enough to say a word. It meant not flinching when a patient shouted in your face, or when another clung to your arm and refused to let go.
Accepting them as people meant resisting the urge to label them only by their illness. It was easy to call someone “a schizophrenic” or “a manic” harder to see the man who used to be a teacher, or the woman who still folded her clothes with the precision of a housewife.
And providing a supportive environment wasn’t just about clean beds and orderly charts. It was about creating a ward where patients felt safe enough to be themselves, even in their fractured states. Sometimes that meant calm words. Sometimes it meant a firm hand. Sometimes it meant knowing when to walk away.
Woodbridge was a different kind of training ground. Less about physical labour, more about patience, presence, and the quiet work of trying to understand another human being when their mind no longer played by the same rules. Ward routines here were unlike the ones we were used to in medical and surgical wards. They included supervising patients in grooming and personal hygiene, making sure teeth were brushed, faces washed, and hair combed even if it meant coaxing someone through every step.
Serving meals was another routine, though here it came with surprises. Some patients ate so fast you wondered if they even tasted the food others sat and stared at their plates for an hour, waiting for invisible permission to start. A few had strange eating habits mixing rice into their tea, or insisting their bread had to be dipped in soap water before they’d chew it.
We also assisted in ward chores, folding laundry, sweeping, and polishing floors alongside the patients. Oddly enough, these chores often settled them more than medicine did their hands busy, their minds quieter. But the part I liked most was organising social group activities and excursions.
It was the one time the ward felt almost normal. Patients laughing as they played carrom or sang during a music session, or the excitement of preparing them for a short outing to East Coast or the Botanic Gardens. For a few hours, you could almost forget you were in Woodbridge, and so could they.
Of course, psychiatric nursing also introduced us to things entirely new: observing ECT Electroconvulsive Therapy, for the first time, and learning how to identify and manage suicidal tendencies. These were sobering lessons, reminders that behind the routines and activities lay real risks, sometimes life and death.
In the early days, ECT was known as Electroshock Therapy, an electric current passed through the brain to produce convulsions. It was considered a form of somatic therapy, primarily used for severe depression or the depressive phase of bipolar disorder. Sometimes it was applied to certain forms of schizophrenia and acute mania.
By the 1980s, antidepressants had become the first line of treatment for depression. But for those who didn’t respond to medication, or couldn’t tolerate it, ECT still remained and often, patients who had been unreachable by other means showed dramatic improvements afterwards.
Singapore had introduced ECT back in 1947, and by the time we came through our psychiatric posting, it was an established treatment. Still, hearing about it in theory and watching it for the first time were two very different things. I remember walking into the treatment room with a knot in my stomach.
The word “electroshock” carried echoes of horror stories and half-whispered rumours. I pictured patients strapped down, writhing, screaming.What I saw was not that.The room was clinical, quiet. The patient was prepared with care an anaesthetic to put them to sleep, a muscle relaxant to soften the convulsions. Electrodes placed at the temples.
A small machine, humming with a calm efficiency, nothing like the monster I had imagined. When the current was applied, the body stiffened briefly, then twitched in a controlled seizure. Seconds later, it was over. The staff moved smoothly, practiced, calm. No panic, no cruelty.
It was unsettling to watch, yes but not for the reasons I expected. It wasn’t brutality. It was the eerie mix of science and electricity, of something that looked violent but was meant to heal. And seeing the patients afterwards, some of them clearer, lighter, even smiling in the days that followed that was what stayed with me.
Woodbridge Hospital was the main government mental hospital in Singapore, tucked away along Yio Chu Kang Road. Older staff still called it simply “The Mental,” its original name before it was officially renamed in 1951. To most Singaporeans, though, “Woodbridge” had become more than just a place it was almost a word people whispered when they wanted to describe madness.
The compound was sprawling, with low, solid buildings spread out like a small township. Just a few meters away stood Trafalgar Home, once the old Singapore Leper Asylum. Even the air there seemed to carry history layers of suffering, healing, and secrets kept behind gates.Walking in as a Pupil Assistant nurse, I felt the weight of it.
This wasn’t just another posting. It was a place people feared, joked about, or avoided, and yet here we were, expected to treat it like any other hospital. And perhaps that was the first lesson Woodbridge gave us: behind the stigma, there were patients simply trying to live.Nursing care in Woodbridge was altogether different. Unlike the medical or surgical wards, there wasn’t much heavy physical effort.
No endless rounds of changing nappies, no bed baths, no oral toilet routines. Most of the patients here were mobile, wandering the wards or gathering in groups. Our work was less about lifting and turning bodies, more about watching and listening. We spent hours chatting with patients, trying to match the behaviours we observed with the psychiatric conditions we’d memorised from textbooks.
Sometimes it felt like a living case study, the neat rows of symptoms on a lecture slide suddenly walking, talking, and laughing in front of us. Other times, we played games or joined group activities, or simply shadowed the staff nurse as she served medications. That part was tricky. Patients had a knack for pretending to swallow their pills while slipping them under their tongue or tucking them into the corner of their mouth.
So after every round, we had to check “Drink your water. Open your mouth. Tongue out, please.” Most complied, some grumbled, and with those who had halitosis… well, that was when the job became a test of endurance. Holding your breath while peering into someone’s mouth was an art form none of us thought we’d master, but somehow we did.
It wasn’t the kind of nursing we were used to, but it taught us something else: vigilance, patience, and the importance of really seeing the person in front of you even in the smallest details, like a pill that refused to be swallowed.I stayed in the hostel too.
This time my roommate was a Chinese girl named May Chiu. We weren’t strangers, May and I had been together right from the start, during our SGH postings after Preliminary Training School. Somehow, our ward assignments always matched, and over time we slipped into an easy rhythm of working and studying side by side.
After SGH, though, we were separated. I was sent to Toa Payoh Hospital while she went to Tan Tock Seng. We promised to keep in touch, but postings had a way of pulling people in different directions. Letters and quick catch-ups weren’t the same as sharing a room.
So when I saw her again at Woodbridge, unpacking her things into the other half of our hostel room, it felt like a small stroke of luck, like no matter how scattered we got, our paths would find ways to cross again. We’d also meet later at the School Health Services.
For our outpatient and polyclinic postings, we were split up once more. I would be heading to Still Road Polyclinic, practically my backyard while May was sent elsewhere. That was the rhythm of training life: together, apart, together again. And somehow, that made the reunions sweeter.
Initially, Nurjahan wanted to be my roommate. But I managed to slip away. On the day we reported to the home supervisor, I quickly aligned myself with May Chiu, who was also looking for a roommate. Better May than Nurjahan, I thought.I had nothing against her personally, but she could be… exhausting.
She grumbled about everything, from the food in the canteen to the condition of the wards. Nothing was ever good enough. Sometimes I wondered why she stayed in nursing at all, if it was all such a misery for her. The worst part was how her mood spread. Negativity is contagious in a small room. It weighs on you.
I didn’t want to wake up each morning to complaints before I’d even brushed my teeth. I liked starting the day with cheer, with small good thoughts, not with a roommate sighing and rolling her eyes at the world. So I chose May Chiu. And honestly, it felt like saving myself from slow suffocation.
I remember one day in Toa Payoh, coming back from work feeling utterly beaten. It had been one of those days. First, the Ward Nursing Officer scolded me simply because I pointed out she had spelled my name wrong. Then the Staff Nurse reprimanded me for forgetting to inform them when a diabetic patient’s urine turned orange during testing.
And to top it off, I was assigned to assist the laziest enrolled nurse on the ward which meant she left me to do everything myself, especially the heavy work of changing patients. By the end of the shift, my uniform stank of urine and vomitus, and my body felt as though it had absorbed every harsh word thrown at me. But my pride wouldn’t let me complain.
I knew what my mother would say if I did: “Well, you chose this profession, so don’t complain. Didn’t I warn you?”So I kept quiet.The only comfort I could turn to was my aunty, the retired Enrolled Nurse. When I told her about the day, she didn’t scold, didn’t lecture. She just shook her head and said, “Ah, forget about all that. Ignore those nurses. Just do your work.”It wasn’t much, but it was enough a reminder that sometimes, the best survival strategy is to put your head down and keep moving.“So why are we in nursing? Why do we allow ourselves to go through all these insults?” I asked my roommate one night in the hostel.
It wasn’t regret, not exactly. But sometimes the weight of it all pressed too heavy, and I needed to let it out.She didn’t answer straightaway. Instead, she tilted her head and asked, “No you tell me. Why are you in nursing?”
I sighed. “Honestly, I don’t know. By chance, I think. I was supposed to go to Teacher’s Training Institute. Then one day, I saw the advertisement in the papers: ‘Don’t you want to be a nurse?’ It struck something in me. So I veered off course, and here I am.”
“Any regrets?”
“Sometimes… yes. But I have too much pride to admit I made a mistake. I still want to be in nursing, but it’s the people who make it hard. Their indifference, their coldness. Why should we subject ourselves to that?”
She leaned back on her pillow, looking at me steadily. “So you come to work for them or for the patients?”That stopped me.
“I love what I do,” I said quietly. “But… I wish things could be better. What about you? Why are you here?”
Her voice was calm, steady. “Because I’ve always wanted to be a nurse. For as long as I can remember. I cannot imagine myself being anything else. Whatever we do, there should be no regrets. We made a conscious choice, and we have to face it to the very end. That’s how I see it. I come to work because I want to. Who I work with, or what nonsense they say that doesn’t matter. I’m here because of the patient.”
Her words settled into me like a stone dropped into water, rippling long after the room fell quiet.
“Yeah, but all those horrible lazy nurses…” I started again, unable to let it go.“Why care about them!” my roommate cut me off. “If they’re lazy, they’re lazy. That’s their nature. Are you lazy? No. So why depend on them? Just do what you feel is right.”
Her words stayed with me the next day in the ward. I found myself sitting with a Malay patient I’d been chatting with for several days. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia and acute depression. Most of the time, I saw her strapped into a straitjacket, the staff saying it was the only way to keep her from hurting herself or others.
It was painful to watch, the way her arms strained against the cloth. Yet when she was calmer, she would sit in an armchair, humming to herself. Sometimes it was a nursery rhyme, sometimes a Malay folk song, her voice floating oddly sweet in the ward’s air.
I had been present in the ECT room when they treated her. Watching her body stiffen, twitch, then fall limp under the drugs left me unsettled for days. It was one thing to read about “Electroshock Therapy” in a textbook, and quite another to see it carried out on a woman I had spoken to, laughed with.
“So,” I asked her gently one afternoon, “why do you think you’re here?”
She stopped singing and looked at me, her eyes strangely clear. For a moment, I wasn’t sure if she would answer. Looking at her reminded me of my cousin, who was also diagnosed with schizophrenia.
One day she was the person I had always known since young, a jovial, loving girl who lit up every family gathering with her laughter. Then tragedy struck. My uncle, her father, died suddenly in a road traffic accident. She was never the same after that.
We all knew how close she was to him. The eldest daughter, almost like his shadow. His death shattered her in a way the rest of us couldn’t reach. That evening, as soon as they carried his body out for burial, she began to change. She looked around wildly, pointing to the trees outside the house.
“There are little men,” she whispered, then shouted, “little men standing under the tree!” No one knew what to do. Confusion, grief, disbelief it all mixed together until the whole house felt unmoored.
I volunteered to stay with her one evening, before I joined nursing, before anyone even spoke of doctors or hospitals. I thought maybe she just needed someone beside her, someone to remind her she wasn’t alone. But I remember the fear in her eyes, the way her words tumbled out, disconnected and urgent, and I realised I had no idea how to help.
Eventually, her brother admitted her to Adam Road Hospital, a private institution that specialised in psychological and psychiatric care. But by then, the sister I had grown up with, the cousin who had once been full of laughter, already felt like someone we had lost.
“I am here because they say I am mad. I need help,” she told me, her voice matter-of-fact. Then, without warning, she began singing again.“I have a secret to tell you.”
“I’m listening.”
“Do you know D.J. Dave, the Malaysian singer?”
“Yes,” I nodded.
“He is my lover.” She smiled knowingly and broke into one of his songs, swaying gently in her chair. Later, I learned she was from Malaysia. She had come to Singapore with the promise of a job, only to end up on Geylang Road. Her singing slowed, and her tone shifted.
“I have a child. A boy. But I don’t know what happened to him. They took him away when they sent me in here.” Her voice cracked. “I miss my son.”
I could hear the tears hiding just beneath her words.
“So… what did you do in Geylang?” I asked gently.She looked at me with disbelief.
“Don’t you know?”
“Well, I know Geylang. I go to the market there sometimes. But which Geylang are you talking about?”
She burst out laughing. “No, darling. I mean the other Geylang. Don’t you know?”
I frowned, puzzled. “The other Geylang?”
“Geylang where they go for konkek.”
“Huh?” I stared at her blankly.She leaned forward, eyes sparkling with mischief.
“Konkek! Don’t you know?”
“No,” I admitted, still lost. With a chuckle, she lifted her hands, left thumb and index finger forming a circle, right index finger sliding in and out. My eyes widened. She laughed even louder.
“Oh! You still don’t get it. My, my, such a naïve and innocent girl you are! Never mind… one day, you will know"
Later that evening, I met Suresh at Queensway Shopping Centre. We were walking through the maze of shops, looking for a pair of jeans he wanted, when I suddenly remembered.
“Have you heard of the word konkek?” I blurted out.
He froze mid-step. “Sorry?”
“Konkek. You’ve heard of it?”He looked stunned, his lips twitching as if he wanted to laugh but was trying to hold it back.
“Where on earth did you hear that word?”
I told him about the Malay patient in Woodbridge.“Ah… that explains it.”
“So tell me — what does the word mean?” I pressed.
“You really want to know?”
“Yes!” I crossed my arms. “Tell me. What does konkek mean?”
“Shhh!” He glanced around the crowded mall. “My god, we’re in public — can’t you see?”
Then he leaned close, so close I could feel the warmth of his breath against my ear, and whispered: “Sex.”
“Huh?”
“That’s what it means. Sex.”
For a moment I froze, cheeks burning, wishing the tiled floor of Queensway would swallow me whole. He, on the other hand, looked positively delighted, eyes glinting with amusement.
“Don’t believe me?” He grinned. “Go ask that Malay security guard over there. See what happens.”
“Are you out of your mind?” I hissed, swatting at him. “Okay, okay! I believe you.”
He laughed, and I couldn’t help but laugh too, though part of me wanted to strangle him for enjoying my embarrassment so much.
