THE SOUL AND THE SYSTEM

I WAS STANDING out front the other evening, watching the sky change slowly from orange to rose to violet, when the thought came to me with more than its usual power to lift my spirits: I’m not in Terrell. The lawn needs mowing, the leaves need raking. Gulf Oil and the 1RS are vying for first lien on my bank account, my wife is considering the merits of my former wives’ positions. – -but I’m not in Terrell.

A famous civil rights leader has. graven on his tombstone, a line from his favorite spiritual: ’”Free At Last. ” I am considering a parallel sentiment for my own chunk of polished rock: ’At least I’m not in Terrell. ” Not bedding down for the night behind the locked steel doors of Ward C-2 with wallet under pillow and good slacks between mattress and springs, wondering if the jolly giant a few beds over will be troubled again tonight by the dream that prompts him to heave his bedstead upright, then fling it against the wall in a screaming somnambulistic rage.

Nor am I in the lockup at Parkland Emergency Room, attempting to appear non-crazy to a fresh-out-of-med-school, soon-to-be shrink.

“How long have you been having these rapid thoughts?”

“I don’t think my thoughts are all that rapid, ma’am. Where… “

“How long have you been troubled by these rapid thoughts?”

“You’re twirling your hand and talking very fast. Is that what you mean by ’rapid thought’?”

“When did these rapid thoughts first begin bothering you?”

Nor am I incarcerated in the Mental Diagnostic Center listening to the fellow in seclusion pound the square of unbreakable plastic, his only view on the outside world, and yell. “I’m Gott! (wham) Gott! (wham) You no to lock up Gott! (WHAM, WHAM, WHAM) I’m Gott. gottdamn you, Gott! (WHAM!)” Soon the attendants will come and plunge a dose of tranquilizer into his flank, and this will do nothing, absolutely nothing, as it has done precisely nothing every six hours for two days, except aggravate his rage: “You stick me for quiet! You no to stick people, gottdamn!”

Nor am I settling down in the Halfway House dining room for an hour and a half of Asser-tiveness Training with Ms. Bimm Beaux telling us on Wednesday night what someone told her on Tuesday night, that she has just split with her boyfriend in a burst of assertiveness that bodes well for her future as a human relations expert.

It is indeed surpassingly pleasant to watch a 747 drag its tail across a sky that changes from violet to ultraviolet to night, far from state-provided “Mental Health Care. “



TO SAY. AND say briefly, how I came to be an unhappy ward of the state on various occasions is no easy task. I approach it cautiously, buoyed only by the hope that you, the reader, have occasionally perceived reality in ways extraordinary enough that you most likely would not admit it to a psychiatrist with a clipboard inquiring about “rapid thoughts. ” For instance, if you have ever been beside yourself with anger-that is, slipped into a state of detached, perhaps mildly amused, observation of your own rage-then you have been momentarily schizoid, briefly “mentally ill, ” no matter how healthy it may have seemed to you. And if you have seen the love light in another’s eyes or felt it rise in your own, then you have at least one hallucination to your credit, and the joy you felt was a form of mania, thankfully curable by means other than a heavy dose of lithium.

Late in the summer of 1973, about one month before my 32nd birthday, I left the universe approved of by contemporary psychiatry. Having at that time passed through a moral crisis, I looked within and asked, “Where does love come from?” Suddenly, I was drawn out of my body as if through a tunnel, with a roar like that of a train. At the end of the tunnel, a door opened in a flash of light whose intensity was to that of the sun as that of the sun is to a candle flame. Then I returned to my normal mode of perception, in which words began to form: the answer the light of light had given in response to my question was “God is love. “

Readers of Raymond A. Moody Jr. ’s study of near-death experiences, Life After Life, know that such phenomena are not uncommon among people threatened with physical extinction; that there are parallels in Paul’s conversion story, Plato’s Republic and the Tibetan Book of the Dead; that various psychological, psychiatric and biochemical explanations have been offered for such states, which in sum remind one of the blind men confronted with the elephant-one blind man in this case being equipped with a psychiatrist’s ad hoc logic.

As for me, my life came apart after my blinding “revelation”: divorce, failure in my teaching career, remarriage, more fail-ure, another divorce, hospitalization by court order… seven years of bad luck.

During my travels into and out of the funny farm, I met many whose luck was worse than mine. One particularly memorable case was a man I met at Parkland on my way to Terrell. a black man who said only one word but said it again and again: Jehovah. He said the sacred name loudly with the emphasis on the last syllable; in fact, he roared it out: JEHOVAH!.

When I arrived at the Mental Diagnostic Center, then located at the Hillside complex in West Dallas, the man was locked up in solitary, still roaring about Jehovah, which he continued to do into the night. Massive doses of tranquilizer did virtually nothing to slow him down; instead, they only seemed to enrage him further. Once the staff opened his cell to find that he had ripped out a three-foot length of steel baseboard with his bare hands. The God of the Old Testament is one to be reckoned with, particularly when he bears the rage of a race made slaves. Eventually they shipped the man off to Rusk, the state hospital for the criminally insane.

After MDC, the next stage of incarceration is Terrell State Hospital, where they call the grounds, “The Campus. ” What kind of campus? Inspired by a poster on therapist Betty Wrigley’s wall-“Bloom where you are planted. ” it said-I began a study of various aspects of life at Terrell, where the smallest things assume great importance, as in any closed society.

I soon learned that there are three kinds of cigarettes at Terrell State Hospital: 1) Real Cigarettes, like you buy in the store. When these are half smoked, they become what the Proles refer to as 2) Shorts, as in the plea. “Lemme have your short. ” or simply “Shorts!” as a schoolboy might cry out, ’”Dibbs!” and 3) State tobacco, rolled into little cigars made at Rusk State Hospital, which taste like newsprint rolled in a purée of tobacco leavings and are reminiscent of the wretched stuff provided by the state in George Orwell’s 1984.

Those who could afford Real Cigarettes were the Kings, who bestowed their Shorts upon the Proles. A King would have a stash of instant coffee as well to mix with tepid water for a cup of pre-breakfast mud. Kings smoked State tobacco only in emergencies, while Proles took whatever they could get. The only level below Prole was occupied by one man, Caldwell (pronounced Cald-well). Caldwell would whoop about the ward, galloping on his imaginary slick-horse, and occasionally dump the contents of an ashtray down his throat, slap himself on the forehead and skip off. That makes three castes of mental patient ordained by God and His tobacco: Kings, Proles and Caldwell, his face smeared with ashes.

Let’s continue with Caldwell. He was black and of indeterminate age. He played his imaginary game of cowboys and Indians during the day and was locked up at night. He liked to take baths and would stand 40 minutes in the shower. He died between my first stay at Terrell and my second, leaving me always reminded of him when I muse upon the Holy Ghost and the wind that bloweth where it listeth.



ALSO IN MY MEMORY forever is Burl, with his shock of unkept red hair, large, pale abdomen and shark-like smile, the first inmate I met on Ward C-2. He walked up to me and said, “I just want to get back to the Holy Place, ” which reminded me discomfiting-ly of my own crazies. Then Baby Huey-an oversized black football player with a temperament and intellect much like the comic book character, hence the name-informed me that Burl was adept at reading other’s souls, so to speak; far more insightful than any shrink. Burl, he said, had been “stealing his dreams. ” Baby Huey would dream of such-and-such, and the next day, Burl would give him the images verbally. “That guy, ” he said of Burl, “gives me the creeps, ” which tallied precisely with my feeling about the man. Burl, as best I could tell, had difficulty distinguishing where he left off and where others began, a small failing, but one that could be disconcerting.

Burl and Baby Huey were Kings. Among the Proles were Kamack, Zanger and Garza.

Kamack was stuck somewhere between uptight and catatonic. He stood against the wall, as if in fear that someone might get behind him. From that position, he would grab for Shorts in nearby ashtrays, much as a blue heron goes after minnows. He wound up with a bad case of diarrhea, standing against the wall, his pants dripping.

Zanger was as handsome as an angel by Raphael, his face framed by a halo of unwashed blond hair and by his hands, usually raised to his temples as if to ward off voices.

Garza slept on the benches during the day-Ward C-2 always reminded me of a bus station-the steel and plastic G-I furniture, the cream and green tiled walls-and Garza finished the impression, one of those harmless people who hangs around bus stations, looking for cigarette butts.

Living with Garza, Zanger, Kamack, Burl, Baby Huey, Caldwell and others like them was called “Milieu Therapy. “

Yes, they called it “Milieu Therapy, ” and the grounds were “The Campus, ” and we patients or inmates were called “Clients. ” The most important part of Milieu Therapy consisted of making sure the other Clients didn’t steal your cigarettes, coffee, money and clothes.



I WAS HAPPY to be released from Terrell to the Dallas halfway house, after a self-committed stay lasting from the winter of 1976 through the spring of 1977, and even happier in the fall of 1979 to find sanctuary there again following a 90-day court commitment. By the grace of the Texas Rehabilitation Commission, I was allowed to stay in the halfway house for nine months.

With the scars of a mental institution imprinted on one’s résumé and countenance, jobs are not easy to come by. In the fall of 1981, the federally-funded CETA job that was to get me back on my feet evaporated, and I followed up on an ad suggesting that, if I was tired of low-paying jobs, I could “Be an Emergency Room Registrar. ” I was hired, despite my hunt-and-peck typing, perhaps because I had worked as an orderly before–once at Austin State Hospital, in fact-and was therefore familiar with trie routine and terminology of such places.

Then again, perhaps the Deity’s infinite sense of irony was to blame, for I found myself on the other side of the fence. Many who came to the Emergency Room-the lady who wanted a sonogram to identify the insidious poison her neighbors had been mysteriously dosing her with, the fellow who was discovering how adventurous his life became when he threatened to jump from a building, the woman who wanted the president to be informed that she was a security risk-such were denizens of a distressingly familiar world. But this time I was the blank-faced functionary with the clipboard, rather than a fellow sufferer. When a recent addition In the staff took to tying her hair up in pigtails and turning cartwheels in the ambulance drive, I could not laugh quite as hard as my workmates. I knew too well how it feels to strive for an appearance of cheerful competence while inside the beast called depression sinks its claws deeper and deeper into your screaming soul. “It’s all a process, ” the woman told me before she left. “Everything’s a process.”

And she was right, if not about everything, at least about the Emergency Room. It was a process for sure, a process that quickly reduced a complex human being to a symptom to be treated: “Where’s the kidney stones?” “Room Eleven. ” One young resident was bitterly eloquent about the process. “My job is to see patients” she said. ’After I see patients, I write orders. “

In the fall of 1982. the advent of a new department head began a purge of the Emergency Room admissions staff in which I was included. Through the next winter I worked on a number of writing projects, including an attempt to revise the letters I had managed to write from the ER into 33 chapters in search of a publisher. The following summer my refusal to take the prescription tranquilizer and antidepressant (with side effects including uncontrollable facial tics and diminished sexuality) and my extreme irritability, aggravated by the frustrations of poverty and lack of success in writing, brought me to the Mental Diagnostic Center for the second time, threatened with a third hospitalization.



IT IS SAID that third times are charmed; this was so with my third encounter with “the System. ” My family had furnished me with a notebook in which I cheerfully recorded such goings-on as Gott’s response to the seclusion room and his lack of response to phenothiazines. An attendant insisted on showing it to the chief psychiatrist before he interviewed me. I also offered this gentleman an offprint of a prayer I had written that was to be published in a theological journal that summer-as a sample of my “unusual religious beliefs. ” The man responded with a gaping grin, changed my official diagnosis from “paranoid schizophrenic” to “paranoid personality” and assured me that I would not be sent to Terrell.

On the advice of a social worker. I disentangled myself from Dallas County Mental Health and Mental Retardation and found a private psychiatrist who was not averse to taking charity cases and who was no friend of the system. After giving him more “transference” of my hatred for shrinks than he deserved, I was able to get to the heart of my disagreements with current psychiatry.

With the good doctor’s help I gained some perspective on what I had been through. I followed with interest the R. A. J, case, a class action suit brought by mental patients against the State Hospital System, as it promised some reform in a truly miserable situation. The main provisions of the 1981 agreements between the plaintiffs and the Texas Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation included increased staff-patient ratios and supervision of all psychotropic medication by a review panel including one psychiatrist. Last year, at the urging of Judge Barefoot Sanders, the Legislature increased TDMHMR funding by 2 1/2 percent, a small step for the mental patient and a giant leap for “the Lege, ” which had spent four years sitting on its hands until forced to act.

I also recalled the value of Ms. Wrigley’s therapy and the kindness of another Terrell employee, Doris Perry, who gave of her lime on Sunday mornings so thai many patients restricted to the ward could attend the hospital’s Sunday services. Eventually, I could even give Ms. Bimm Beaux credit for wanting to help those of us unfortunates granted instant négritude by the label “Mental Patient. “

I have run into two extreme points of view on mental patients. The first was best expressed by my work supervisor at Terrell. She indicated to me that she thought I had “reached the bottom of the barrel” by being committed to the state hospital. She apologized immediately for saying that, but her view-that being hospitalized constitutes failure and disgrace-is undoubtedly the common one, though many “professionals in the mental health field” give lip service to more “humanitarian” viewpoints. The usual cliché is, “You were intelligent enough to realize you needed help. ” Thai is soft-headed nonsense, as is the notion that a suicide is “a mute cry for help’- but 1 am getting away from the topic.

The other viewpoint on the mental patient is the romantic, as expressed by a friend who autographed his book of poetry, “For Tom, who did what all of us would have liked to, but aren’t in contact enough with ourselves to do so’-as if going crazy were heroic in some way. There is a great deal of honesty in what he says: Many therapists secretly envy the patient, who is at home with his madness. And. from the poet’s point of view, there is a weird nobility associated with madness: Consider T. S. Eliot, Ezra Found, Robert Lowell and Theodore Roethke. All are fine poets, and all did time in institutions. But madness is no more a sign of certain success than it is of undeniable failure. And it certainly is not romantic.

The truth is. psychosis is a common human experience. War. for example, is psychotic behavior, but if entire nations go mad, their madness is the norm, and those who remain sane are locked up. Another form of psychosis is available to those who smoke marijuana, while another ma}’ be partaken of in the form of a few stiff drinks. Profound experiences of art or religion are usually psychotic. I have jokingly told my friends thai the main difference between those inside the wire mesh and those on the outside is a car and a job.

Ironically, those who are supposed to know the most about madness don’t really know much. Psychiatry presents itself as a field of medicine when it is really no more than a bad parody of it. I invite the reader to look over the profession’s bible. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, 3rd edition, as an exercise in non-science reading: Meaningless terminology, due to overlapping categories, and rampant subjectivism-you will find plenty of it in DSM III. Texts on abnormal psychology are also amusing, as examples of cultural bias and intellectual provincialism. As recently as the early Seventies, most such texts defined homosexuality as a form of menial illness. The term “mental illness” is itself a misnomer, suggesting that being mad is somewhat like succumbing to diabetes or the flu.

Here are a few bon mots gleaned from various texts on madness: You can diagnose schizophrenia by the sensations you get when you’re around a schizophrenic; you get this weird feeling… Another: “Schizophrenics do not have thoughts. ” What the writer of that dictum meant by “thought” he did not say, nor was it clear from the context. Intellectual integrity is not demanded of writers in the psychiatric field. All Dr. Q had to say was that whatever a “thought” is. he has them, and people like me do not. If that is so, then what are you reading?

My favorite, though, is the old standby of virtually every writer on “mental health. ” which says that the mad are “out of touch with reality, ” Once again, the term reality remains undefined, but when one is writing non-science, definitions are unnecessary. I have lived with, talked with, slept with and eaten with crazy folk of every shape and description, and, of course, been branded one myself, and I can assure you, if you want an instant reading on what is going in a conversation 40 feet away, ask a psychotic. He knows, and once you get the feel for the language of madness, you will find that his preternatural sensitivity gives him a far more profound view of “reality” than any so-called “normal” person has.

My deep-down personal reality includes having spent the last seven years of my life fighting for my soul against those who would fit me to a procrustean bed of theory scarcely older than the middle of the last century but willing to ennoble itself with the ancient Greek word for soul, psyche, while denying the soul’s existence in favor of “personality. ” a word based on a theatrical term meaning “mask, ” persona.

Most of the System’s shrinks I met were incapable of dealing with the soul behind the mask of personality, and I would add that for them the personas of those they “treated” became mirrors for their own unacknowledged madnesses, portrayed to them in features no doubt stranger to them than the birds in their gardens.

“Do you hear voices?” asks the shrink. The voices of internal dialogue are handled by psychiatrists in one way. by the Yogis yet another way and by the Sun Dance Indians another way still; moreover, Richard Pryor and certain ad men for Burger King have recently made use of internal dialogue for its entertainment value. Where is the shrink coming from with his question? Does he assume hearing voices is symptomatic? If so, of what?

“I hear your voice. Do you hear mine?” That will move Doctor Timeserver on to the next question, which he will ask with the same tacit assumption of my insanity and his own lucidity. though he may be unconsciously torturing a rubber band in white-knuckled hands, as one shrink did-the one who later sent me into three days of contortions with an overdose of Haldol.

I have fought for my soul against those who have sought to destroy it with reductionistic theories, deny it with barren rationalism, denigrate it with vile terminology and destroy it with drugs, those who-to be bluntly “paranoid”’ about it-desired to induce in me sufficient craziness to justify their official fantasies about my state of mind.

Forgive me. but I have seen a man both before and after his lobotomy. Not only did he lose some IQ points and any disposition less than annoying-ly cheerful; he lost bladder control, and since none of the surgeons who were so eager to lop off his forebrain volunteered to help clean the piss-soaked sheets off his bed. we orderlies got to see a great deal of him. He did not lose his unhealthy interest in razor blades, scissors and other sharp objects-which was the original excuse for operating on him. All in all, he came out looking a lot less crazy and a lot more human than the system, whose plaything he had become.

I have seen a man ruined by an experimental drug, sleeping in his car or at the Y. almost incapable of holding a job because of his obvious handicap and his bitterness toward it-he had wanted to be an actor, and his voice and talent and intelligence were virtually laid waste-and I say he is more human than the doctor who gave him the drug and will not offer just recompense. And I say he has a soul, for I have heard him sing at Mass.

, The concept of man as an ensouled being is practically a cultural universal, the major exception being the rational reductionists of our own clime and time. And the word soul has gained fresh resonance from the struggle of blacks in this nation to keep their racial identity and pride, so that the term now refers to a quality gained from oppression and poverty and “living by one’s wits, ” as James Baldwin put it-a dignity earned by those who suffer, those who labor always under someone else, those who must battle “The Man” and his prejudice in order to survive-a dignity open to all of us who are willing to admit our shared négritude, whatever our color.

I am arguing for no more and no less than was argued for by William Faulkner in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, an oration that would have gained him immortality had he not already won it:

I believe that man will not merely en dure: He will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice, and endurance.