Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin (7 page)

“You’re disgusting. Shut up.”

I tried to listen in, but with little success. Besides, it seemed to me that eavesdropping was just another breach of privacy that I had no right to inflict.

Still, from the parts that I couldn’t help overhearing or taking note of, because they were shouted, or repeated, or chanted almost like a prayer, it seemed to me that somewhere along the line Sweet Girl, or perhaps her renegade brain, had done what any of the rest of us might have done in her position. I had no way of knowing what her reality was like in the outside world: where she lived, with whom, under what circumstances. The information was not forthcoming from her.

But she had clearly created a world of her own inside her head, an alternative to what I can imagine must have been a brutal, or at the very least unpleasant and alienating, world on the outside. Maybe she hadn’t been abused. Maybe she had only been strange, unpopular among her peers, alone for too long with an unshared and unshareable view of the world, socially inept, and cripplingly shy. (This seemed undeniable from what I saw in our encounters.)

Or maybe the docs were right, that it all stemmed from an innate chemical imbalance, as faultless as autism or retardation. Whatever the reason, whatever the cause, she had produced for herself what seemed to me to be an eminently adaptive response to unbearable isolation. Unlike me—who spends way too much time thinking about all the things I wish I had done or had yet to do—Sweet Girl was not a prisoner of too much consciousness.

She was in her own world, peopling it with friends.

And sometimes, fairly often, I envied her for it. She was socially hermetic.

My envy, of course, led me to wonder whether the lucidity and the sanity we were so eager to impose on her were really so preferable to her world. Would they make her feel better? Or was consciousness—brutal, imposing consciousness—precisely the thing from which her mind was fleeing with all its creative energies awhirl?

Is this a romantic view of madness? Probably. Or maybe just a realistic view of reality.

Can we really say that our lives are in every way preferable to the madman’s? We spend our lives running from consciousness, too. Every chance we get. Our lives are full of guzzled substances and vapid entertainments, the generically familiar, homogenized, franchised world, all a distraction from the emptiness at the heart of ourselves and our heavy, heavy awareness of same.

Yes, awareness.

We as a society wanted to make Sweet Girl aware. We wanted her to know that she was a lost soul, or an outcast, or unloved. We wanted her to dwell on all the unbearable truths that her florid mindscape had kept her from really knowing. We wanted her to face the weather like the rest of us, even if it meant waking up to a nightmare. Or at the very least, the lackluster present tense.

But maybe, just maybe, awareness is overrated, and Sweet Girl knew that as well as we did.

Now it’s arguable, on the other hand, that she was, as the medical model would have it, a prisoner of too much unconsciousness. Her strange mentality may well have been exactly what kept her isolated from the world, and therefore intolerably lonely and dysfunctional. God knew, in her present state, she was not functional in the world’s terms. She could not hold a job, or most jobs. She could not sustain relationships or pay rent. And, as the smell of her would often attest, she couldn’t even manage to bathe or change her clothes.

Sanity, of whatever sort she could achieve on medication, would presumably allow her to do those things. But if that was true, it was also true that the “sanity cure” was a cure only in the sense that it would damn her to living with and like the rest of us. That is, holding a less than blissful job at best, and paying bills, and perhaps marrying with a 50 percent chance of getting divorced. It would allow her to fit, or pass as fit, as so many of us do, and maybe that was better than falling out the bottom of society because no one knew what to do with you.

Certainly, I had seen in other fellow patients the stress and pain that mental illness had caused in their lives, the loneliness and isolation that only made them take sterner refuge in delusions.

Mother Teresa was a classic example of this process at work. She was a forty-two-year-old Puerto Rican woman who, a year or so prior to landing in Meriwether, had left her three teenage children with relatives back home on the island and come to the mainland United States.

At the time of her admission, she had been living in a homeless shelter and working on and off at a fast-food restaurant. One of the other patients, a recovering alcoholic and depressive named José, had given her the nickname Mother Teresa because she was, to say the least, extremely religious, a pathological proselytizer and self-styled saintly minister to the godless and suffering.

A few weeks before I met her, she’d been arrested for disturbing the peace in the lobby of an office building in one of the outer regions of the city. By her own admission, she’d gotten a little excited and started running up and down the main floor of the building, laughing and singing and declaring herself the bride of Christ. She’d gone out to this part of the city, she told me, because she had seen Jesus flying that way, calling her to follow.

When I met her, Mother T’s delusions were many and various, though all biblical in origin and extremely pressing. She couldn’t stop herself from describing her visions of Jesus and the second coming and trying to convert or preach to pretty much everyone she saw.

This, more than anything, was responsible for the crippling loneliness she felt, and spoke of tearfully, on the few occasions when she wasn’t talking about Christ. She wanted very much to find a husband. She had been married very young and had had her three children, but her husband had left her not long after the children were born, and he was no longer in her life. She missed her extended family terribly. Before she left Puerto Rico, she had been living with her mother, father, and siblings. She spoke often of wanting more than anything to be reunited with them. But it seemed they were unable to deal with the wild vicissitudes of her illness and had sent her packing.

There was a pay phone on the ward accessible to any patient, but long-distance calls required a calling card, and most of the patients, including Mother T, didn’t have the money for one. I did have one, though, so one afternoon I suggested that perhaps she might feel better if she gave her family a call. Maybe they could patch things up. She was very excited by the prospect, dialing the number eagerly as I walked away.

But only a few minutes later she appeared in the doorway of my room, crying.

“They told me to shut up. That I’m crazy and I can’t come home. They don’t see Jesus as I do. They don’t understand.”

After an episode like this, Mother T would spiral vigorously back into her delusions. As I watched her deal with the pain of her family’s rejection, and later with other rejections and crushing disappointments, I saw her grab hold of her visions and her perceived special connection to Christ like a buoy in a raging sea. They kept her afloat. They were a refuge from the cruel knowledge that no one wanted her.

“It’s okay,” she would say, her sobs abating, “I have the Lord and he knows me, and his plan for me is the most important thing. I must be here to do his work.”

“Yes,” I would say, stroking her back. “Yes. That’s right.”

“Ah, and you know, Norita, he is so beautiful. His eyes are like fire. Clear fire. And when his spirit descended, and my crown came down on my head, oh, it was . . .”

“Heavy?” I said.

“Very.”

“I bet.”

I put my arms around her.

“It will all be okay,” I said.

And then came a reprimanding voice shouting from the nurse’s station:

“NO TOUCHING. Down the hall, there. You two. No touching.”

“What?” I said, looking at Mother T as she pulled away. “Is that a rule?”

“Oh yes,” she said. “It is a rule.”

A necessary rule in some ways, as I came to learn, in a world where people had few or often no natural boundaries, and where tempers were likely to flare into violent altercations over almost anything. Keeping the patients from getting sexually or amorously involved with one another was a wise policy, and giving vitriolic patients as few pretexts as possible for overreaction was a prerequisite for keeping order.

But depriving lost and desperate human beings of the healing comfort of something as innocuous as a hand on the shoulder or, in extremis, a kindly hug was, at moments like that one with Mother T, just another form of gratuitous deprivation, just another reason why this place made you feel less than human.

I realize that this may sound hopelessly naïve, and I also realize that there was a lot about my fellow patients’ histories and conditions that I didn’t and couldn’t know, but it seemed to me that a lot of the therapy they needed was of this simple tactile and sympathetic kind. Not because they were crazy, mind you, or because such therapy could cure them, but because they were human and everybody benefits from sympathy. Yet, as far as I could see, it wasn’t even being tried. Basic human contact, most of which need not always come in the form of touch but rather in the form of engaged (not clinical) listening and the occasional sympathetic response, was not much in the repertoire.

I spent a good deal of my time in Meriwether trying to offer this to my ward mates, not spontaneously, but in response to the artless promptings of people like Mother T and Mr. Clean and even Sweet Girl (when she emerged), all of whom sought me out, not just for cigarettes and candy, but because, as Mother T said once, “Your eyes are so calm.”

I am not calm by nature, but, as you might expect, psychosis and its attendant restlessness are as distinct from run-of-the-mill high-strung as depression is from the blues. In a place like Meriwether, Zelda Fitzgerald would seem serene, and so did I. My ward mates seemed to have a nose for the less afflicted. They picked me out right away as being
not
one of them, and they took what they could get from me.

One of the women in the room next door to me, Cherise, a Meriwether veteran, and the person who taught me how to flip on my light with a comb or a pen, nailed it the first time she spoke to me: “You keep nodding, and your head’s going to fall off.”

She was dead-on. I did a lot of nodding. Maybe out of politeness. Or maybe because it seemed useless and hurtful to disdain someone’s delusions, as I remember seeing one of the surliest nurses do.

“I am not your Jesus, okay?” he shouted to Mother T one night as she interrupted his bleary TV watching on shift. “So leave it.”

I thought it was cruel and unnecessary, like correcting a grown person’s grammar. What for? To humiliate her? Establish your own superiority? Your power? Your remove? Were these even in question?

What possible good could it do to trample on someone’s defenses? It wouldn’t work anyway, either because, as the docs maintained, the visions and beliefs were spontaneous and chemical, or, as seemed at least partly true in Mother T’s case, precisely because they were defenses. They were elaborately crafted and strongly fortified walls against the world. Attempts to dismantle them were perceived and responded to as threats, assaults as grievous and harrowing to the psychotic as a mugging would be to us.

Making them see it your way would fail. It wasn’t the way in. On the contrary, I often found that validating the delusions, learning and mapping their contours, nodding, not in toleration, knowing better but in earnest, won you a person’s trust, and once you had that, increasing lucidity often followed.

That, I suppose, was part of what led me to believe that the delusions were a defense in the first place. All the people on the ward whom I got to know and befriend spoke to me exclusively in riffs and riddles when I first met them. They didn’t know me. They didn’t trust me. But without exception, they spoke to me coherently, and often without digression, by the time I left.

Undoubtedly, you can attribute some of this to the medication. I was in Meriwether for ten days, and many of them had already been in the hospital for some time before I got there. Ideally, the plethora of drugs they were all on might have had a chance to kick in by then. But I noticed they kicked in temperamentally; as Sarah, the med student, acknowledged to me in one frank conversation, they worked only up to a point. They tended to tone down the voices and visions but not to banish them.

Depending on the day’s stresses and the encounter at hand, whether it was a quiet exchange between two friends or a confrontation with a nurse or another patient, the lucidity factor would go up or down. If Mother T was feeling relatively secure and supported, she could deviate from the God talk. But if her parents had just hung up on her or someone had roughly rebuffed her preacherly advances, she would pace the halls agitatedly and insist that I read aloud portions of the epistle of Jude.

Another patient, Deborah, was the same way. When I walked into the ward for the first time, this very short, unabashedly potbellied, pewter-maned, and mustachioed woman stood directly in front of me there in the bright pacing hall. She looked me lewdly up and down, wolf whistled, and walked away. It scared the living shit out of me, and it was meant to.

During my first few days there she cursed under her breath whenever she was near me and rambled on about how the staff was trying to infect her with HIV. She thought she had sailed the Nile as a queen and was convinced that there was a bomb in the pay phone at the end of the hall. She was like a lot of the other patients in that way. She had her pet obsessions and irritations, and she’d stop you in the hall or the dayroom and rant about them in bursts. Usually the rants weren’t long, and I’d just say “Okay,” or “Makes sense,” or “I hear ya,” and then she or whoever it was would seem satisfied and walk away.

That was the getting-to-know-you phase. The test.