A couple of years ago, I lost a close friend to insanity. Specifically, schizophrenia. For those of you who aren’t up on your DSM-IV, that’s a disease characterized by delusional thinking, hallucinations, and sometimes (as in my friend’s case) radical personality changes like increasing paranoia. The neurobiology set says it probably has something to do with a functional increase in dopamine along the A-10 substantia nigra system. If you can get the victim into treatment, it’s responsive to some antipsychotic drugs. But that can be a big if when said victim is still able to take care of himself.
My friend was one of the funniest, brilliant, adventurous fellows you could ever meet. He was a professional glider pilot. Yes, he flew no-engine airplanes for a living. He had somewhere around six or seven thousand hours of flight time (by comparison, I heard once the Blue Angels have just a couple of thousand hours each). He took me up a few times, and it was wonderful to see how he could stay aloft for hours, sensing updrafts with some sixth sense of his. We even did some loops and all that. He was in his element, up there, flying inches off the ridgelines of mountains.
He wasn’t exactly normal, I’ll give you that. A friend who is now a pilot for a major airline told me once that “Mikey” (as I’ll call him) couldn’t fly a traffic pattern to save his life. He just didn’t understand the need. You just flew in and landed, what was the big deal? He lived by himself in a trailer near the country airport, with a pet snake for company. He was terribly shy around women—I think I was one of the few that he befriended, perhaps because I was clearly attached to Oxbridge. I tried to introduce him to a girlfriend of mine who was a flight instructor, but he spent the whole breakfast at the local airport café staring at his eggs.
But outside of that, he was full of laughter and just an honest joy of life. He would spend hours with a model airplane, getting it tweaked just right, then flying it again and again off a low hill. He’d tell silly stories that would seem just dumb if someone else told them, but from him would reduce you to tears (like the one about the time a mouse got into his glider). He was Mikey, our goofy friend, and we all loved him.
I guess things went from eccentric to unsettling when he turned thirty. It had never dawned on me that he was that old, as he seemed, if anything, younger than me. He abruptly quit his job at the local gliderport and called all his friends and asked them for work. I got a late night phone call, asking for help. I didn’t think it was his cup of tea, but I spent a few lunches with him telling him what the HR people would likely ask. He got the interview, but when they asked him if he’d be willing to relocate (remember, I’m in the travel industry) said “I’d have to think about it.”
I was peeved with him, and I hate to say, refused to talk about that with him for a while. I mean, I had stuck my neck out to get him the interview. But I wasn’t the only one. Our airline pilot friend helped get him a job with a local cargo outfit, flying boxes and checks. He made it about a week into training, then abruptly quit, saying that he “didn’t think he was getting it.”
Then Mikey disappeared. I had his email, so I kept writing to him, asking how things were going. In his last email to me, he told me he had a job with UPS and that I was to call him “Michael” from now on. He never wrote back after that, but our pilot friend kept in touch. Mikey’s job involved throwing boxes onto a conveyor belt, but he’d show up for work in a suit and tie “just in case they needed a pilot.”
Our friend kept in touch for a few more months, then Mikey wrote his last email to him, as well. Mikey explained that he was quitting the UPS job in order to investigate the 9/11 tragedy. He felt that it had been orchestrated by the Pentagon because they needed body parts to make high ranking government officials immortal. He was very serious.
Our pilot friend tracked down Mikey’s family, who hadn’t heard any of this. They thought he had just found work out east. Mikey’s brother caught the next plane out, and I understand Mikey slammed the door in his brother’s face when he showed up and yelled that he was yet another conspirator.
I understand things are getting “better”. Mikey has a job again. As I said, if you can take care of yourself, it’s basically impossible to force you to get treatment. But really, my beautiful, funny friend is dead, replaced by an absurd caricature of a crazy man If nothing else, he will no longer talk to me, which might be for the best. I don’t want to know what his shattered mind thinks of me.
The worst of it is, when I tell this story to people, they have no sympathy for Mikey. Some even laugh when I talk about his delusions. There’s this feeling that a crazy person deserves his insanity. Get confined to a wheelchair, and everyone lauds your bravery. Go insane and they mock you. It’s your fault, don’t you see?
We all like to believe we’re captains of our minds. But haven’t we all had moments when we’ve lost control of ourselves, and said or done things we’ve regretted. I have days when I snap at poor Oxbridge, only to apologize the next day. That’s nothing compared to insanity, of course, but just like Mikey, women get a certain level of “ha-ha, she’s just PMSing”.
I had all this brought to my mind when I was poking around in the Extended Discussion area and saw a thread on Andrea Yates. I don’t want to rehash what you can read for yourself in the news, but really, the woman was clearly insane. Five lives were lost to a disease which rips a person’s mind and leaves a shattered, sometimes evil, doppelganger behind. What struck me in the ED discussion was how little sympathy there was for the woman. I have to imagine that she has occasional lucid moments when the reality of what she did sank in. I read somewhere she periodically tries to kill herself. I’m not surprised. And perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am, by the fact that when people look at her, they don’t see another fellow soul tormented by disease. They see an evil person, just as evil, if not more so, as a cold-blooded killer who shoots a store owner during a robbery because it’s more convenient than tying him up.
Perhaps it’s all denial. Nobody likes to think, “There but for the love of God.” But it’s true. If Mikey had been a mother, perhaps he would have killed his children. He certainly no longer understands that his family loves them, and returns that love with hatred. If we are sane, if we think clearly and can love those who love us, it’s only by our fortune. Just like cancer destroys a body, insanity destroys a mind. It’s the cruelest disease.
I posted the following on the ED forum under the Andrea Yates discussion. Perhaps typically for an internet forum, it got ignored. But really, ED is about debate, not about being forced to confront our own fears. But Brecht knew how to address those fears, and our secret prejudices. Here’s his words, put far more eloquently than I ever could:
THE BALLADE OF MARIE FERRAR
Marie Ferrar,
Born in the Month of May
An Orphaned Minor
Rickets
Birthmarks, None
Of Good Character
Admits that she did kill her infant child
As follows here in Summary.
In her second month (or so she says)
She visited an old woman in a basement
And there she was given two injections
Which, though they hurt, did not abort it.
But you I beg make not your anger manifest
For all that breathes needs help from all the rest
Even so, she says, she paid the bill
As was arranged
And bought herself a corset
And drank neat spirit, peppered it well
But that just made her vomit and disgorge it
By now her belly was noticably swollen
And ached when she washed up the plates
She says she hadn't finished growing
She prayed to Mary and her hopes were great
But you I beg make not your anger manifest
For all that breathes needs help from all the rest
Her prayers, however, did no good
She'd asked too much
At Mass she started to feel dizzy
And knelt in a cold state before the Cross
Still, somehow, she managed to conceal her state
Until the hour of the birth was upon her
Being so plain, that none would have thought
That any man would ever want to tempt her
Still I beg, make not your anger manifest,
For all that breathes needs help from all the rest
She says,
On the morning of that day
When she was washing up the stairs
Something started clawing into her guts
It shook her once, then went away
Still, somehow, she managed to conceal her pain
And keep from crying
As she throughout the day hung up the washing
She racked her brains and realized in a fright
That she was going to give birth
At once a great weight descended upon her heart
She didn't go upstairs till night
And yet I beg make not your anger manifest
For all that breathes needs help from all the rest
No sooner had she lain down
Then they fetched her back again
"Fresh snow had fallen, and must be swept!"
That was a long day
She worked till after Ten
She couldn't give birth in peace until the house was sleeping
Then she bore (so she reports) a son
A son that was like the son of any other mother-
But she was not as other mothers are!
Still, there remains no valid reason that I should mock her
And you, too, I beg make not your anger manifest,
For all that breathes needs help from all the rest
Let her finish now and complete her tale
Of what happened to that son she bore
She says there's nothing she won't reveal
So men may see
What I am
And what you are
No sooner had she lain down than nausea seized her
And never knowing what would happen
Till it did
She struggled with herself to hush her cries and forced them down
The room was still
And still I beg make not your anger manifest
For all that breathes needs help from all the rest
The bedroom being ice cold,
She gathered her remaining strength
And dragged herself out to the servant's privy
And there, near dawn, she was unceremoniously delivered
Exactly when she doesn't know
Then she, now totally confused, half froze
Found she could scarely hold the child
The servant's privy lets in the icy snow
And you I beg make not your anger manifest
For all that breathes needs help from all the rest
Between the servant's privy and the bed
(She says that nothing happened till then)
The babe began to cry
Which vexed her so
She began to beat it
With her fists
Hammering Blind and Wild
Without Pause
Until the child was still.
Then she took the infant's body into bed,
She says.
And held it in her arms till dawn,
She says.
And in the morning, she hid it in the laundry shed,
She says.
And yet I beg make not your anger manifest
For all that breathes needs help from all the rest.
Marie Ferrar
Born in the Month of May
Died today in the Messien Penitentary
An unwed mother, judged by the law
She shows us that all who live, live frailly
And you who bear your sons on laundered linen sheets
And call your pregnancies a blessed event
Should never damn the outcast and the weak
Her sins were heavy, but her suffering great.
And, therefore, I beg make not your anger manifest
For all that breathes needs help from all the rest
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