Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin (25 page)

While locked away in Meriwether and St. Luke’s, I often fantasized about the perfect therapeutic facility. I called it Therapy House and imagined building it from the ground up on spec with unlimited funds. I saw it as a kind of chalet, with a cathedral ceiling in the common room, big windows and lots of light, a working fireplace, sectional couches and reading chairs, and minimalist but cozy mountain retreat décor. Adjacent to the main room, I imagined a library with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a well-stocked assortment of periodicals, DVDs, CDs, and computers. Each client—say, the house could accommodate twelve—would have his or her own bedroom and en suite bathroom. There would be a large kitchen staffed by a full-time chef who would provide balanced, healthy, organic meals and snacks, which all the patients would eat together at one large table in the dining room. There would be an Olympic-size swimming pool, a fully equipped gym, a yoga and meditation studio and instructor, a spa with massage and body treatments, a large property with gardens and walking paths, bicycles, hammocks, climbing trees, and even tree houses. There would be a full-time staff of nurses, psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers, and the patients would receive an hour of individual therapy every day, as well as several hours of various group therapies.

Sometimes I passed idle hours in Meriwether and St. Luke’s dreaming this stuff up, furnishing the fantasy, even imagining which foundations I would apply to for the money. Best of all, I imagined making it accessible to people of all income levels so that anyone from Mother T to pill-popping upper-middle-class housewives could qualify for treatment.

Having imagined all this, I was astounded to find that the people at Mobius were offering something quite similar, albeit on a less extravagant scale and not all housed in one self-contained facility, though they were working on just such a plan.

Still, here was a place founded by a clinical psychologist, Dr. Franklin, and his wife, a place that had been up and running for six years, that was committed to the practice of healing the whole person—mind, body, spirit—and doing so without the use of restraints or locked wards.

Their Web site was very detailed, and by perusing it, I learned everything I needed to know about Mobius’s facilities and program. Patients were housed in four three-bedroom apartments. Twelve was maximum capacity, a manageable group both logistically and therapeutically. Each client had a private bedroom, and shared two full baths, a living room with cable TV and wireless Internet access, and a fully equipped kitchen with small dining area. The apartments were all in a large apartment complex complete with a pool, a Jacuzzi, and a gym.

From 9 a.m. until 3:30 p.m. clients attended various group and individual therapy sessions at the Mobius offices. In the evenings, after class, clients did various things. Once a week they attended a yoga class; once a week they went to the bookstore for a few hours; once a week they did their grocery shopping (clients cooked all their own meals in the apartments); once a week they went to the movies; and three times a week they went to a spa, where they could book massages, pedicures, manicures, and facials (these were not included in the price of the stay, of course). They could work out in the gym, swim in the pool, or lounge in the hammocks out back on the shores of the bay. Not bad for three grand a week, and jubilantly close to my fantasy bin trip.

After St. Luke’s, the idea of flying into a place I’d never been before and committing myself to a recovery facility sight unseen didn’t seem quite so, well, crazy anymore. Besides, this was the last leg of the tour, I told myself. Get it over with.

So I did. I filled out the online application form and read all the material on the various criteria for admission. As far as I could tell, my admission to the program would not be denied or delayed for any of the reasons listed on the Web site. I wasn’t suffering from acute drug withdrawal or undergoing drug detoxification. I didn’t have a severe psychiatric disorder that required hospitalization. I did not have a severe sexual disorder (or at least I didn’t think so, but it was unclear what this meant). I did not have any infectious, communicable, or contagious diseases, and I did not engage in disruptive or aggressive behaviors that would be incompatible with a small group living environment.

I would, however, have to consent to a criminal background check, as all clients did. Otherwise, the admission form was remarkably short and to the point. It asked me to list my mental disorders—clients could, apparently, be trusted to do this accurately—what medications I was taking, whether I used drugs or alcohol, and what search engine and key words I had used to find Mobius on the Web. Essentially, it was like any other commercial transaction: name, date of birth, address, and method of payment.

I booked a two-week stay for myself, booked a flight, and got on a plane.

SANCTUM

Diggs, a well-dressed, whippet-thin boy of Indian descent, was sitting in the baggage claim area holding a paper sign with my name on it. The sign was perched on his crossed legs facing him, as if he’d half given up trying to find me. I had stopped in the main terminal for a Starbucks, assuming from past experience that it was going to be my last good cup of coffee for two weeks.

The line had been long, so by the time I got to the baggage claim area, it was largely deserted and my bag had been put in a pile to the side of the carousel. I passed Diggs once on my way to the pile and again on my way back. I saw the sign in his lap on the return.

“That’s me,” I said.

“I saw you before,” he said, as he took the handle of my wheelie, “but I thought, No way is she forty.”

A charmer. That’s all he’d known about me. My name and approximate age. And presumably my diagnosis.

I wondered if they’d trained him to be this genial. Compliment the depressives right off. Women on their age. Men on their gadgets.

We walked the short distance from the terminal to the parking lot and Diggs heaved my bag into the Ford Expedition.

He was wearing pleated slacks, black loafers, and a pressed button-down shirt. Far better turned out than your average twenty-two-year-old psych major who is just out of college and makes his living shuttling fuck-ups to and from the airport.

He did more than that, actually, as I would soon learn. In the mornings, he shuttled clients to the Mobius group offices, where we underwent our therapy and took our daily instruction on how to stop being a danger to society and ourselves. While we were in therapy all day, Diggs did paperwork in the office, or took patients to the clinic for their blood work (state law mandated a test for syphilis), or made more runs to the airport for new arrivals. Then in the afternoon he shuttled us back to the nearby apartment complex.

He was dependable. Mature. A comely face to meet you in baggage claim when you’d bottomed out on substances, or sunk eyeball deep in the mood bog, or otherwise come undone enough to commit yourself to a place you’d only read about on the Web, and which you couldn’t be at all sure wasn’t a cult.

When you saw Diggs, though, your fears were allayed somewhat. You thought, “If this is the Moonies, they’re
good
, because this guy seems totally normal.”

And he was. Suavely normal. He knew not to ask anything intrusive, but he made pleasant reciprocal conversation that didn’t sound like what a gofer says to a cripple, which is, by harsher accounts, what we were. However you sliced it, his job was to make a fairly shameful situation seem respectable, and he did it expertly. He smoothed. He handled damaged goods gingerly without appearing to do so, easing the last leg of a breakdown so that he could bring us in calm. He was the discreetest of valets.

As we rode along in the Expedition, I asked him about where he’d gone to school and where he was from, if he had any siblings, and so on. He tossed back softballs—“And where are you from originally?” He drove assertively but well within the speed limit, the way you do with your mother-in-law or other passengers who scare easily.

I never felt the burden of making conversation. It flowed through the predictable channels without effort, and the drive went by without incident. We drove directly to the Mobius offices for check-in.

Despite my good opinion of Diggs, I was still harboring a few thorny worries about the potential Moonie situation. I had read on the Web site, for example, about the program nurse, Jan, whom Diggs had said we were going to meet right away. I was expecting the worst, and for no other reason than that the term “program nurse” had given me the creeps. I’d been unable to stop myself from imagining some type A crypto-Nazi in starched white and squeaky shoes with a chinchilla hiding under her peaked paper hat.

But when Diggs led me into Jan’s tidy windowed office, the first in a row of similar offices that all opened off a slim main hallway, I knew that I’d let my apprehensions run entirely away with me. Jan was barely five feet tall in her shoes and comfortably built, padded but not plump. Her dyed blond hair was styled in a grown-out pageboy and her blue eyes hid no subtext. She was wearing sandals, three-quarter-length trousers, and a short-sleeved button-down blouse, which is what she wore virtually every day, the default warm-weather business casual for a low-maintenance woman in her midforties. She was kind and efficient, remarkably cheerful about what was a fairly laborious routine that she was often required to perform several times a week with each new bumbling client.

Most of it was paper signing. I must have signed forty sheets—disclaimers and permissions for everything from the syphilis test, to a short-term lease agreement for the apartment complex, to a declaration of “patient’s legal and human rights.” But there was also the urine sampling, medication surrender, and bag inspection, as well as assorted sundry other smooth violations that constitute patient intake procedure in the bin. Jan, as anyone in such circumstances is required to do, took your dignity in one hand and your autonomy in the other, but unlike so many others, she did it like a den mother in the Cub Scouts, softening the blow of your demerit with a smile, even as she pinned the shaming badge on your sleeve. I half-expected to get a lollypop at the end.

I’d arrived in the late morning, so by the time I’d finished with Jan, it was time for lunch. Diggs went to the local Boston Market and got me a meal. I ate it at the table in Mobius’s small kitchen, which was located just next door to Jan’s office.

As I sat eating, Mobius staff and clients were breaking for lunch as well, so various people wandered in or lingered. That’s when I met Sam, one of Mobius’s three therapists and the instructor-in-chief.

Superficially, Sam looked like Little Richard. He had the same pencil-thin mustache and wild kinky hair, and even a hint of the impish sparkle in the eye. But the likeness ended there. Sam was not a flashy entertainer. He was wearing what looked to be the traditional black-belted gi, and he sat very poised in his chair, like a person who was used to treating his body as an extension of his soul. He was calm and centered, as his profession would suggest, open but not loose, deliberate but unmannered. He was just there without agenda, like something in nature, alive and present but seeming to occupy no space.

We sat at the kitchen table, he eating his habitual salad brought from home, and I eating my half chicken with sides. I asked him the usual background questions: Where are you from? How old are you? Are you married? Answers: New Jersey, fifty-three, and yes, two kids. None of this mattered much, though, when it came to knowing Sam. They were the wrong questions. There weren’t any questions, really—just a sense that you got in his presence, the immediate sense of who a person is, because he knows himself.

Sam could teach me a lot, and would, not as my individual therapist—that job would go to another of the therapists on staff—but as a group therapist, and more so as our morning den chi bon instructor.

This was Sam’s big gig. Every morning at Mobius the day’s activities began with an hour and fifteen minutes of den chi bon, which I can best describe as a cross between tai chi, tai bo, and a séance.

At nine thirty we’d all gather in the activity room, which was at the far end of the long main hallway, at the opposite end from the kitchen. This was the room where all the group therapy and meetings took place throughout the day. It was the size of a small living room, piled with pillows and blankets, and people’s art catharses were posted all over the walls.

Sam would start the class with yogic style stretches and deep breathing. We’d stand facing him with our feet positioned two to three feet apart. We’d spread our arms wide and swan-dive to touch our toes, and then we’d thrust our arms repeatedly from the prayer position at our heart centers, up and out to full extension above our heads, around to the sides, and back to center again. Soon these outward motions of the arms would grow more forceful and direct, like open-palmed punches, and the breathing would intensify accordingly, so that you looked as if you were parting a lead curtain over and over again, except that you were doing it gladly, as if mindless labor just made you happy and you gained energy and strength from the exertion. We’d do this for a long time, pulling and punching the air and stamping our feet, gesticulating more and more emphatically in ways that alternated between being voodooish and exaggeratedly masturbatory, and all the while breathing like we were about to give birth.

It was the kind of too earnest, misty-eyed exercise that I had trouble taking seriously, at least at first. Early on, I hovered at the back of the room, going through the motions, embarrassed, imagining all the people in my life watching me join the feel-good follow-along Dancercise of Mobius Inc. The therapeutic value of learning to make an ass of yourself.

But then, after a while, I thought: “Jesus, you self-important snot, just let go and have some fun. Nobody’s watching.”

And so I did. And then, before long, I started getting into it. Maybe a little too into it, actually.