Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin (33 page)

As it happened, the next day was my last full day at Mobius, so the sand-tossing ceremony made a fitting end to my stay. Instead of doing den chi bon in the exercise room as usual that morning, Sam and Carol took us to the site of an Indian mound in a nearby park. The mound overlooked the beach and was shaded by tall whispering palms. At the very top there was a flat clearing covered with loose soil. Sam set up his iPod speaker on a bench to the side of the clearing. He gave us each a receptacle—a bucket, a coffee can, what have you—and told us to walk down to the beach to gather sand.

When we came back, he told us to outline a large circle on the ground with a trail of sand. The circle had to be large enough for us all to stand along its circumference and still have plenty of arm and leg room to do den chi bon. Once we had finished outlining the circle, and had chosen our positions along it, Sam told us to make another trail of sand leading from each of our positions to the center of the circle, thereby forming spokes in a large wheel. Once we had done this, we took up our positions again along the circumference, and Sam took up his at the center.

Sam was wielding a long wooden staff that he had obviously fashioned for similar ceremonies. Gary had done this at least once with Sam. He claimed at one point to have had visions of spirits appearing on the mound in the form of wolves. Nobody else saw them, naturally, and nobody believed that they were there. But Carol had taken some photographs during the ceremony, and when she developed them, sure enough, you could see wolves in the circle. That was the story, anyway. I never saw the photos myself, and would have remained an unbeliever even if I had, but I did believe in the ceremony’s power to unleash suppressed emotion, and that’s all I was hoping for.

Being outdoors in that setting, standing atop a mound of crypted culture, made it easier somehow to let loose and connect with your own buried past. The open sky made you feel as though you could curse a blue streak without it bouncing back, and all that borrowed native juju seeping up through the soil was hard to beat when you were getting down and dirty with your inner child.

After we’d performed the usual den chi bon exercises, Sam took up his staff, aligning himself in turn with each spoke in the wheel, facing each of us one by one, and dancing up along the length of the spoke until he was close enough to kiss whoever was standing at the end of it. Then he invited each of us into the center of the circle for a little private mano a mano with him and the staff.

Actually, he didn’t quite invite each of us. He didn’t bother with Katie. When he made his way up her spoke, she looked at him like she’d beat the living shit out of him if he came any closer, so, no doubt knowing her history, he thought better of the gesture and backed off.

But the rest of us had a turn inside, an invitation to grab hold of the staff and try to wrestle it away from Sam while we put one lowered shoulder to his chest and leaned in hard against his resistance. Or as hard as any of us would. Almost everyone, even Petunia, whom I’d expected to mate more willingly with his demons, just moaned gamely and went through the motions, too embarrassed to really sumo in front of the group, or maybe just too emotionally impacted to purge the load.

By this point, I was a little more lubricated. I went at it with everything I had. When it was my turn, and Sam made his way to me, twirling and thrusting his staff, and grunting from the bottom of his throat, I said jokingly, “You’re a brave man, Sam,” and stepped into the circle.

Writhing against him, digging my toes into the dirt and pushing with all the strength in my legs, I barked, growled, and bellowed so hard and so loud that I scraped my throat raw. All the rage that I’d felt in Carol’s office and during rebirthing came charging out. So much so, that I very nearly took a bite out of Sam’s shoulder.

We went at it this way for at least five minutes, which feels like a hell of a long time when you’re wrestling someone with superior spiritual skills. Sam encouraged me to drain myself, saying, “Come on. Let it out.” And I did, until I couldn’t make another sound or push against him any harder. And then, as the emotion slowed, so did we. Our grips on the staff loosened, and we swayed slowly to a stop, breathing heavily, leaning against each other gently, and then not at all, until we were standing again fully upright, our breath coming back, our hands only lightly on the staff. Sam led me back to my place in the circle, returned to his place at the center, put aside the staff, and tapered out the ceremony as usual, calling us in closer so that we could hold hands and close our eyes and breathe together as the music ended.

Then in silence, we took the sweepings from the sand mandala and walked to the water’s edge. Each of us grasped a handful of the sand, ready to throw it out into the water, expressing our guiding thought for the day as we did so. Since it was my last day, mine was a guiding thought for the coming weeks and months, and maybe even years. In keeping with the symbolism of the chair that I had traced on the sand mandala, and the theme of inhabiting myself that I had been developing throughout my stay at Mobius, I came back in my mind to one of those four-letter words that I had written in caps in my notebook and underlined for emphasis: STAY.

Stay with it. Stay with the hard stuff. Stay with you. Accompany you. Help you. Rely on you. It was everything all in one. Occupying the empty center. Giving myself—could I say it now?—compassion. Assistance. Walking through the mask of rage, the false front, to the sanctuary behind it and living there.

“I choose to be here,” I said, and threw my handful of colored sand into the water.

 

The morning I left, Diggs drove me to the airport. I said my farewells to Carol and Sam and Josie with long hearty hugs and just as hearty thanks. Carol gave me her number and told me to call if I wanted to set up phone therapy sessions in the future. Dr. Franklin shook my hand and told me to come back any time.

“We’re always here for you,” he said, and meant it in more than a commercial sense.

And I thanked him just as sincerely, thinking, in stark contrast to the way I felt when I left the other places I’d been, that I wouldn’t be at all averse to coming back to Mobius for a tune-up if I needed one. They were good people doing good work, even if their clientele wasn’t always as receptive as one would have hoped. Their success rate was probably still higher than at most other places. That is, if you measure success in more than neurotransmitters.

They were doing everything right as far as I could see: integrating mind, body and spirit; granting freedom, and yet providing sanctuary; using medication, but not overusing it; offering the healing routine of a structured day and intensive personal therapy, but not hemming you in with rote bureaucratic restraints and petty forms of control.

Most of all, they seemed to have fostered and implemented the belief that therapy and biochemistry are not either-or propositions, that the body and the mind are not separate. They did not inundate clients with pills, thinking that medicine was the only way to affect the brain. But rather they used meditation and talk and compassion to reach the brain through language and thought. They understood that words and ideas have physical life, that the things you say to someone in therapy and the things they say to you, or the things you think about in meditation, can and do have a physiological effect on the brain, an effect every bit as powerful as the endorphins and adrenaline you release in physical exercise or the serotonin and dopamine you manipulate when you take drugs.

When Carol told me that there was nothing wrong with me, those words entered my brain and brought about a chemical response that took the form of relief and tears. And who’s to say that the emotion and the physiological response were separate things, one becoming the other, the relief, translating into tears. Who’s to say that they weren’t in fact the same thing. Simultaneous. Emotion as physical response, a physical response brought about by another human being’s sympathetic thoughts spoken aloud. Brain chemistry affected, even improved, by good therapy.

This, I saw as the doorway to a new life: eventually free of, or at least less ruled by, drugs; a life where routine tasks, being present, and giving my full attention to detail could calm me; where talk, laughter, and compassion could counter both the habitual force of my negative experience and whatever might be chemically awry in my brain. Whether it was congenital or acquired, it didn’t matter. I could fight it with new skills, new practices that treated me as a whole person, porous to the world but not submissive to it, alive and reactive to slings and arrows, sticks and stones, and even the cruel names that could actually hurt me, but never, never again just passively diagnosed in a waiting room or cowering paralyzed in the bathtub.

CONTINUUM

I began this project with the intention of exposing institutions. That was my prejudice. I had been to the bin my first time in genuine distress, had languished there, and had left with the intention of lobbying for change. I wanted to show, by doing, that locked psych wards are not conducive to recovery or good health. In fact, to my mind, quite the opposite was true. You could take a perfectly sane, well-adjusted person, lock him in the hospital for a few weeks, or even days, and his mental as well as his physical health would be virtually guaranteed to deteriorate.

Now, at the far end of a long haul, having spent my time at Meriwether and St. Luke’s, and finally at Mobius, I still believe this to be true. Institutionalize someone and he will become institutionalized. Lock him in and down, and he will do the same. Institutions don’t heal—they hold. At best, as I found at St. Luke’s—which incidentally, I would not quite characterize as an institution, since it was not a hospital—mental wards neutralize the person and the world in such a way that some small comfort in terror may be found, if you are willing to find it.

But then, holding or neutralizing is all that most psychiatric facilities were ever really intended to do, and, having completed my journey through the system, I can see now that I was supremely naïve to believe otherwise. Not naïve about the system, but about people.

On one level, the system is the system, ruled largely by the laws of economics: competition, overhead, profit and loss, etc. Everyone knows that, whatever the treatment you are in for, private hospitals tend to be better than public ones, and specialty clinics or spalike facilities are better than private hospitals. Privatizing or specializing anything, from schools to public works, tends to improve facilities and quality of service across the board. This, too, is no secret, though it may be a matter of heated political debate.

But there is something else at work in the system, and this is the part I hadn’t counted on. My first night in Meriwether, as I looked around me at the semisqualor and the degraded clientele of the public hospital, I wondered about cause. I wondered whether the system is the way it is because people are the way they are, or the other way around. Now I know that the answer is both. As I have just said, the system is the way it is mostly for economic reasons, and it brings down the people in its care. But the system is also the way it is because people—patients—are the way they are, often lazy, stubbornly self-indulgent, passive, and irresponsible, and they bring down the level of care accordingly.

The system does not aim to heal patients, partly out of cheapness and lack of effort, but also because the people who run these institutions have learned through experience that patients cannot be healed by institutions, or, for that matter, by any outside force. They know what I now know: nothing and no one can do for a person what he will not do for himself, even if he is crazy.

I was wrong initially to think that institutional staff and administrators do not understand the role of the will in healing. On the contrary, they understand it only too well. They know what it took my visit to Mobius to teach me, that no amount of money or luxury or therapy will do anyone any good if he is unwilling to participate in his own recovery. In that, Carol and the folks at Mobius were absolutely right. No one can heal you except you. But, and here is the heart of the matter, the vast majority of people don’t want to participate in their own recovery. They are unwilling to try, even when they are given every advantage, every freedom, and an abundance of what was lacking in Meriwether, namely, compassion and the human touch.

The people I knew at Mobius had everything that the people at Meriwether didn’t. And yet, with the exception of Gary, they refused to change. They went through the motions resentfully, and then got drunk or stoned again as soon as they had the chance, or went on in superficial, halfhearted sobriety, but without having changed underneath. And why? Because they hadn’t come to Mobius of their own free will. They were there either because their families had sent them, or because they’d been arrested and were facing prison time. Rehab was part of their sentence. But you cannot sentence people to recovery. You cannot cajole them into it either. Charity, or therapy, or enlightened treatment, is wasted on people who don’t want to or can’t change.

That is not to say that Mobius could not do a world of good, and had done so (if the testimonial letters I’d seen posted in the kitchen were any indication) for a number of people over the years. But these were willing clients. Mobius could do nothing for you if you didn’t participate, and neither could any other place, however swank or progressive.

In my experience, whether you were dealing with a psychotic, indigent, inner-city population, a depressed and addicted middle-class rural population, or a depressed and addicted upper-middle-class suburban population, the number of people in any group who were willing to take responsibility for their own lives and behavior is always small. So even, for example, if you had taken someone like Mr. Clean and transported him to a place like Mobius, he probably wouldn’t have been any more likely than Katie or Bobby to get something out of it. Equally, you could have taken someone like Katie or Bobby and had them waste time and money at a place like Meriwether just as easily as they wasted it at Mobius.