By Daniel Vlasaty

For a few months last year, I worked as a counselor on an inpatient psych ward. We dealt with patients with a combination of mental health and substance abuse issues. It was a new unit. We started it in place of one that closed a few years prior due to funding issues. Our facility made it about four or five months before we closed due to what I’ll call political reasons. When we first opened, I didn’t know what to expect. I had gone through all the trainings and taken classes on non-violent de-escalation and also how to safely and quickly restrain a violent or unruly patient. I think I was expecting something along the lines of this book. I think I was expected to be scared and creeped out and always on edge. But it wasn’t like that at all. It was just people who needed help that they couldn’t get out in the real world. It was mostly just hanging out and watching movies on the shitty TV in the day room and playing board games and occasionally having break up fights or restrain a patient, mostly for their own safety. And once because one of the patients attacked a nurse. I worked with the violent male population, and it was mostly a baby-sitting gig. Anyway, that’s my long-winded introduction to my review of The Unsound, a new book written by Cullen Bunn and drawn by Jack T. Cole that takes place in a psychiatric hospital.