This won't be the last time we talk about crazy
Friday, 6 September 2002 10:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
carose59It's Not Science. And I Wouldn't Exactly Call It Art Either.*
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I've got years of experience with crazy. It's in my blood, my bones, my hair follicles. My family is crazy, both sides, though of course the side that has the least tolerance is the one that was most fucked up.
My father is manic-depressive. (I won't use bipolar, they can't make me. It makes me think of the Arctic Circle. It makes me cold. And anyway, even if you use bipolar, you still have to use manic and depressive, or how do you describe an episode? "The patient was very bi today"?) And I've been having depressions since I was thirteen.
My father's craziness wasn't exactly the problem. My mother confiscated his checkbook after he spent them down to the ground during a manic episode, but we didn't scoff at his delusions, or humor them either, exactly. We believed them. The idea that the stuff that goes on in your head is just as real as the stuff that that goes on outside it is ingrained in me. It's given me a healthy respect for insanity, and I've got this idea forming, about hallucinations and other crazy thoughts being metaphors for things people can't deal with head-on.
Crazy Doesn't Mean Stupid.
I think my favorite crazy person in the movies is the guy in The 12 Monkeys. Not Brad Pitt; the black guy in the mental hospital. I don't remember the character's name. But he explains to Bruce Willis that he's not from another planet. Although the construct of the fantasy seems perfectly real to him, he is not from another planet. And since he now "knows" this, he's getting better.
The only trouble is, he doesn't know it. He's learned to repeat it, but it's obvious that nothing in his reality has changed. In his mind, he is indeed from another planet. But he's learning not to be crazy. He's learning to pass.
Only a movie, you say? My mother's told me the story of how, when she'd visit him in the hospital, my father would earnestly ask her to explain things like "a rolling stone gathers no moss" or "a stitch in time saves nine." The reason was, they'd use these to test my father's thinking. If you understood these metaphors, you were healthy, at least on some level. (They do this at the beginning of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, too, I believe.) Well, my father didn't know. (My father never knows; his brain just doesn't work that way, it's got nothing to do with how sane he is or isn't at any given moment.) But he would memorize what my mother said, repeat it to the doctors, and voila! Instant mental health! You, too, can learn to be sane, in the privacy of your own home. Though, of course, the privacy of your own home probably isn't the place you really need it. It's out there, with the scared people, that you need to act as sane as can be.
Can't write any more on this today, but I do want to talk about the whole "punish them 'til they get sane" aspect of mental health care.
*Prozac Highway
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I've got years of experience with crazy. It's in my blood, my bones, my hair follicles. My family is crazy, both sides, though of course the side that has the least tolerance is the one that was most fucked up.
My father is manic-depressive. (I won't use bipolar, they can't make me. It makes me think of the Arctic Circle. It makes me cold. And anyway, even if you use bipolar, you still have to use manic and depressive, or how do you describe an episode? "The patient was very bi today"?) And I've been having depressions since I was thirteen.
My father's craziness wasn't exactly the problem. My mother confiscated his checkbook after he spent them down to the ground during a manic episode, but we didn't scoff at his delusions, or humor them either, exactly. We believed them. The idea that the stuff that goes on in your head is just as real as the stuff that that goes on outside it is ingrained in me. It's given me a healthy respect for insanity, and I've got this idea forming, about hallucinations and other crazy thoughts being metaphors for things people can't deal with head-on.
Crazy Doesn't Mean Stupid.
I think my favorite crazy person in the movies is the guy in The 12 Monkeys. Not Brad Pitt; the black guy in the mental hospital. I don't remember the character's name. But he explains to Bruce Willis that he's not from another planet. Although the construct of the fantasy seems perfectly real to him, he is not from another planet. And since he now "knows" this, he's getting better.
The only trouble is, he doesn't know it. He's learned to repeat it, but it's obvious that nothing in his reality has changed. In his mind, he is indeed from another planet. But he's learning not to be crazy. He's learning to pass.
Only a movie, you say? My mother's told me the story of how, when she'd visit him in the hospital, my father would earnestly ask her to explain things like "a rolling stone gathers no moss" or "a stitch in time saves nine." The reason was, they'd use these to test my father's thinking. If you understood these metaphors, you were healthy, at least on some level. (They do this at the beginning of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, too, I believe.) Well, my father didn't know. (My father never knows; his brain just doesn't work that way, it's got nothing to do with how sane he is or isn't at any given moment.) But he would memorize what my mother said, repeat it to the doctors, and voila! Instant mental health! You, too, can learn to be sane, in the privacy of your own home. Though, of course, the privacy of your own home probably isn't the place you really need it. It's out there, with the scared people, that you need to act as sane as can be.
Can't write any more on this today, but I do want to talk about the whole "punish them 'til they get sane" aspect of mental health care.
*Prozac Highway