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Through the back door
The gray little man insinuated himself into the room and slithered onto the chair behind the table. I was just on the verge of fearing the worst -- an IRS audit (although the lack of a green eyeshade should have tipped me off) -- when he mumbled his name and title ("Dr. --, Psychologist [or Psychiatrist or Psychotherapist or Psycho]) and I concluded that he must be there to see me because he had shooed all my visitors out the door.
As he fumbled through some papers in a folder (no doubt intended to distract me from giving my truthful, heartfelt, and totally contrived answers) and gazed off into psychospace (by definition, 90° away from looking at me),
he asked me the same old tired three questions meant to determine whether someone is playing with a full mental deck or not:
1. "What is today's date?"
Wow, that was a total surprise! I always thought that the first basic question was, "What is your name?" (Or, perhaps on an infinitely deeper level: "Who are you?") Because, let's face it, if you don't even know who the hell you are, what difference does it make as to whether you know today's date or not? (Yeah, I know: if I replied "Genghis Khan!", the next question might be to ask for the date purely for reasons of historical veracity. If I were to reply, "It is the afternoon of 25 February 1209", it would show a remarkable consistency of person and date -- indeed, a rationality only belied by the 'mere' fact that I am totally bonkers when it comes to my self-identity.)
But I was not asked as to my identity, only today's date. Do you want to know how easy this question was for me? I was able to immediately narrow it down to a choice of two possible dates: either the 24th or the 25th of the month. After some rather hasty figuring [actually, going back and finding a date and a day which coincided], I concluded that the date could not be the 24th, because otherwise Niece Susan's birthday [which is on Valentines Day] would have fallen on a Sunday rather than a Saturday.
"Wednesday 25 February 2009 C.E."
I thought that he might be impressed by my use of the modern abbreviation for "Common Era" now being taught to eager children in place of "Anno Domini" in school [although in my opinion it relinquishes an excellent opportunity to introduce the tykes to a little bit of Latin.] More likely he would probably conclude that I was a prig. What exactly he was thinking, though, I had no earthly idea, because he gave no reaction whatsoever. (Question: did Genghis Khan use "A.D."? I have a sneaking suspicion that he didn't.)
2. "Count backwards from 100 by 7's. The first two numbers are 100 and 93."
I am really disappointed with this poor little gray psychobabbler and his not asking me more pointed personal questions! I would've thought that the next logical question might be something like "Where are you?" Because then you have the possibility of logical ("Outer Mongolia"), quasi-logical ("the Island of Elbe"), or the way off base ("Joe's Bar on East 68th St.") Instead, we are presented with a mere math problem -- how banal!
And how nice! He asked the right person [or is it 'wrong'? It is, after all, his business to uncover not the healthy but the pathological, isn't it?] [Is the inability to count backwards by sevens indicative of a pathological condition?] that particular question! I was one of those sorts of people who calculated the cubes of numbers in his head in the dark purely for purposes of recreation! The kind who conjured up original mathematical theorems and their proofs in his dreams at night! So I was the wrong (or was it 'right'?) person for this question.
Or was I? Lurking maliciously below the surface of this problem was the idea of the 'singular overachiever': the type of person that can only function at a higher level of calculation; give them a problem at a low enough level and they are all mental thumbs. And so it was for me: for all my great calculating skills, I could not do a subtraction problem to hold up my britches!
I finally realized that I could only solve these problems by disguising them as higher-order calculations -- in this case, algebra problems. So, for example, the first calculation would look like this:
(x + 7) = 93 x = 93 – 7 x = 86
Obviously I still had to perform the operation of subtraction; but I was able to devise on the spot a little algorithm to do the calculations with ease:
'Subtract 15, then add 8'. It works every time!
The numbers tumbled out: "86, 79, 72, 65, 58,..."
"That's enough!" He impatiently waved all my future answers away like pesky mosquitos. (Aha -- so he does hate it for me to get right answers!)
3. "Who is currently the president of the United States?"
I have heard this question asked a few times, and in all but one instance it was answered correctly in all its crushing banality. That one exception was provided by a confused man [he did not know the answers to any of the other questions] brought into my hospital room at 3 a.m. thirteen years back. It was one of the most eloquent -- and forceful -- responses to such a question that I have ever heard. (Yes, at least he knew the answer to that one!) I will now confess that I yielded to the temptation and used it with our little gray friend purely because of its entertainment value. (In point of fact, I was bored with giving nothing but right answers; now I was a man in search of adventure.)
"That bastard Nixon!"
Somehow I knew that I would not hear anything from my friend -- no hearty laugh or even suppressed guffaw. In fact, I was watching closely for a smile -- any smile.
To be a little more blunt about it: my eyes were glued to his lips.
(Dear me, that does come off sounding as if we were engaging in some kind of bizarre sort of intimacy, doesn't it! But the reader can relax: I have since broken off this physical form of our relationship after discovering that our noted psychologue was only using the proximity of my eyes in order to sniff their glue.)
I looked for a sign of anything that could even remotely be termed a smile:
A broad grin? (Largest one first) No.
A good frank All-American Girl smile? Oh dear me no!
A smirk? Not on your life.
A faint glimmer of a smile? Not seen.
A momentary spasm of the lips? What do you think?
Finally, I found myself looking to see whether there were any reactions on his part at all: frowns or grimaces? Or looks of surprise, hurt, anger, disapproval, or disappointment?
No, I saw none of those reactions or any others. And it didn't take me long to figure out the reason: this man, like every other psychotherapist, is trained to not react to something a patient says, no matter how strange or kooky or out in left field it may belong. (Go ahead, try one: "I killed my mother and married my father. And then I married his father!" I promise you, he will give absolutely no reaction.) For think about it: suppose a patient makes an answer such as the above ("That bastard Nixon!") to a question -- and the psychologist (say) snorts. The patient becomes immediately defensive, splaying forth a series of accusations:
"Why did you snort?"
"What? I don't think..."
"You think that what I say is funny?"
"No I don't, I..."
"You mock my responses?"
"Look, you know that..."
"You think me ridiculous!"
"No -- listen, I... I..."
And at that point the therapist has found that, with a mere snort, he has opened a psychological can of worms. No, best not to give any reaction whatsoever -- unless, as we already indicated, the answer was "correct": in that case, the therapist may indulge himself with any sort of reaction he pleases, from disappointment through disgruntlement to outright rage.
Of course, there is a third kind of reaction the therapist could have made: that of abject agreement. In response to "that bastard Nixon!" he could've slapped his knee and proclaimed, "Yes, the perfect answer!" At that point, one of two things must be true: either he is showing that he is aware of the whole absurd nature of these questions; or the therapist is himself bonkers, a looney tune floating around out there looking for other crazies to hang out with.
But as I said, he gave no reaction. He just sat there quietly, his pencil poised over the sheaf of papers, and waited. And waited. The minutes and then the hours began to pass as I heard the ticking of more and larger clocks. My interlocutor aged before my eyes, becoming old and wizened, finally turning to stone. Huge old bells began to toll ponderously in ancient city squares. The air in the room became sodden and heavy like Spanish moss.
In short, he seemed to have adapted the same demeanor which my mother used to assume when she wanted me to change my behavior: the air which said in effect, "I am prepared to wait as long as I need to -- I have all day!"
I gave in, of course; for who could withstand that searing silence?
"Okay, you win -- it's Barack Obama!"
I said it. But I resented him deeply for 'making' me say it. In fact, I was half hoping that he would take my "bait" and get sucked into a nice argument with me:
(Him: "What do you mean, 'you win'? Do you think this is some kind of a game or something? Do you think we're just playing around for the hell of it? Do you think I said to myself as I was walking in here today, 'I think this is the day I want to waste time with Mr. May!'?")
(Me: "Why of course it's a game -- what the hell else could it be? [Swear word used because he used one first.) You come barging in here and catch me unawares without stating any kind of purpose behind your visit!")
And so on it would go. But he did none of those things -- he didn't have to. All he had to do was sit there and look like a smug self-satisfied gray squirrel.
And I was just plain angry at him for interpreting this as giving himself the right to speak again:
"I understand that you have spoken of feeling depressed."
Wow -- where did that come from? There we were having a cozy little discussion about who might be the president of the United States (a man, I might add from observation, who seems singularly not given to fits of depression) when whammo, he hits me with a non sequitur! Doesn't he have genuine questions to add to the others -- questions which are meant to uncover depression? Of course he does; I know this because I was given a complete oral psychological testing when I entered this institution. And there were questions liberally sprinkled amongst the others -- ones like "Are you often depressed?" and "Do you ever think that life is not worth living?" Of course a depressed person will deny these at first (so would everyone else); but every three questions a new one appears which has to be denied as well. And so the tester keeps hammering the poor testee (ouch!) relentlessly -- until the latter caves in and confesses that yes, he is depressed at times (and even more so now after that psychological beating he just took!)
But this was different: here the tester was telling me that I myself had volunteered this information. Was this a more subtle version of the test, wherein you confront people with something they supposedly "said" and then see what their reaction is? I decided to nip that idea in the bud; and so my reply was immediate and vehement:
"What?! I never used that word in my life!"
Yes, that was my statement. And, as I began it with that first explosive word (to which I wanted to add "-- are you crazy?!" but resisted), I actually believed what I was about to say. But just as I was saying the words "I never used that word...", I realized in a flash that what he said was in fact true -- that I had confided such a thing to a nurse recently. Yes, the little gray man was right: I was guilty as charged.
One night I had awakened at its darkest point and then couldn't get back to sleep. I looked up at the sky but no star smiled down on me. I felt but a single spasm erupt from my beating heart. I fought the battle for my fellow man, but I was not up to the task. And so forth.
In short, it was the agonizing of a typical 19th-century German poet. But there was a twist: he at least found solace in the existence of a God "keeping watch over death and life"; I refused to afford myself that luxury, that "out". So I tossed and turned for several hours while I found life to be meaningless and that sort of thing.
When I got up later that day, I had not resolved any of the existential questions that had come up except one: I knew that I didn't want any more nights like that! So when the nurse came in to give me my pills that morning, I (pseudo-) casually mentioned to her about waking up the night before and having "depressed thoughts and all that"; and then, in the undertone of the druggy confronting his sleazy dealer under a bridge, "Can you give me something for this?" I had no idea what I might be asking for; but she soon told me: "I'll have the doctor double the strength of the sleeping pill you've been getting."
"Double"? Apparently I had been on a sleeping pill (singular) all this time and didn't even know it. And, not knowing, I had not been in the position until now to appreciate all of the other late night agonies that these little pharmaceutical gems had saved me from! So my only reply was: "Whatever works!"
So now I was on sleeping pills -- lots of them (two). But I was consoled by the fact that I was in some pretty august company; in particular, I happen to know that my favorite writer, the German novelist Thomas Mann, took a sleeping medication called 'Phanodorm' (Do you get it? Phantasy + Sleep.) How do I know that? I read it in his diary -- after he was dead and the book was published, of course. (Why do I remember such a trivial fact? I store such minutia for possible usage with little gray men who might ask me about such things!)
Of course, Thomas Mann had a few more things -- and far weightier things at that -- to worry about than I do: his country had been hijacked by the Nazis and they were killing millions of people in its name; he and his wife had not been home for 10 years; all his diaries containing all the lurid details of his secret bisexual life had been left in their empty house in Munich just waiting for the Nazis to find and gleefully publish to the whole world [they never did: the oldest Mann daughter got in, found the diaries, and brought them to her father in sunny California where he destroyed them -- unfortunately: I like to read that kind of stuff]; and he was at work on a book -- his masterpiece in my opinion -- in which a Faustian German composer becomes a metaphor for what was happening in Germany. (Oh yes -- he didn't believe in God either.)
Wow! All of that to worry about, and he only needed one sleeping pill at night? True, we have no idea of the dose; but if that were me with all those worries and concerns, I would have had someone hit me over the head with a sledgehammer each night!
What happened to me with that doubled sleep medication? I slept through the night every night. So it was perfect for what I asked for. I praised its benefits far and wide; I was even willing to go on TV and shill for the Big Pharmaceutical Companies: "Look at me -- I took your drug and I'm deliriously happy -- just like those fake actors pretend to be!"
The only trouble with it -- and this is why I suspect that half the drugs on the market are there to counteract certain undesirable effects of the other half -- was that, even as I was gotten up and placed in my wheelchair in good time each morning, I found myself spending the rest of the morning in a groggy haze. I would fall asleep in the middle of conversations; once I conked out until noon; sometimes I couldn't be awakened for a whole hour or more!
On top of that, it has long been the case that spontaneously falling asleep during the day is embarrassing to me. After all, only the very young, the very old, and the very sick do such a thing. So my first reaction when I wake up is to deny the obvious, which only leads to further embarrassment, as happened in my high school English class:
Teacher: "When did Shakespeare live -- Henry?"
Henry: "I wasn't asleep!"
So now I had to make a decision: Which was worse, waking up one or two nights and finding that my mind is a bit too active? Or going through each and every morning like a brain-dead embarrassed zombie? It did not take me long to decide which situation I preferred -- I rushed to the nearest nurse in order to have my sleeping medication changed back to half strength.
But now I was facing the little gray psycho-impersonator. And abruptly there was a series of small gray movements: he emphatically snapped shut the file he had been pretending to scribble notes into; he pushed back his chair and stood up; and finally, for the first and last time that depressing afternoon, he faced me (though, most telling, he never opened his eyes while he was speaking to me [I was sorely tempted at that moment to sneak away, leaving him to 'wake up' to an empty room.])
"I'm very much afraid..."
... he began, as if he himself was being consumed by the same demons that terrorized his patients; while in the next moment I had a dreadful suspicion that he was a motorcycle cop (sans motorcycle) and that he was "giving" me (how generous of him!) one of those tickets for the expiration of an inspection sticker. As it turned out, both of those premonitions were false; further, what he had in store for me turned out to be far worse than a mere $50 fine:
"... that I am going to have to put you back on the double strength sleep medication you'd been taking. And I am going to prescribe one dosage of Prozac each morning."
"Prozac?!" The word struck me like a bombshell -- and I spit it back at him. Whatever its effect on me, it must've blown him out of the room; for he decisively tore the prescription from his pad (although he did not give it to me), turned another 90°, and vanished before what seemed like an epithet had even died from my lips.
What did it mean? It seemed clear: on the pretext that I was "depressed", he had prescribed America's Number One Antidepressant Drug. (A small pretext indeed considering that I had only experienced the emotion of depression for exactly one night. Did he bother to even find this out? I doubt it. Further, he did not even have the good grace to ask me about it face-to-face -- even with his eyes wide shut.)
And then it hit me: I had refused to turn to a belief in a God in order to "solve" my "problems" with anxiety and depression. So this "man" was going to "solve" my "problems" by the other method: the pharmacological one. He was sneaking through the back door of my belief system.
Let me see what I would have to look forward to in this little gray man's Brave New World of drug therapy: long nights of deep sleep and uncontrollable dreams; mornings of somnulent confusion; and late mornings/afternoons of wakeful nullity.
Is there a God? I don't know. Is there life after death? I haven't the foggiest. But if I were taking my little Prozac I wouldn't care from now on. I wouldn't give a damn. Because with my happy pills I wouldn't have to worry about any of those things anymore. In fact, those little pharmacological wonders must keep me from thinking about any issues of existential significance whatsoever, since if they did allow it, it would open the old Pandora's Box and I'd stand a good chance of becoming depressed once again.
What about thoughts of my past, wonderful things I could do (such as playing the organ) which I lost as a result of my illness? Obviously I could have no memory of those sorts of things; or if I did, the memory would have to occur without any resonance whatsoever. What about the loss of my everyday relationship to my dear wife? Such things must be, well, not blotted out exactly; rather, defused of any significant emotional content.
In short, I would lose my basic humanity. I would be in a daily sleep induced daze in which I wouldn't care about anyone or anything.
A doctor friend of mine told me that I have the right to refuse any medication. But he didn't have to tell me for this particular case -- I knew that I would never accept any of those additions to my pharmacological repertoire!
But a strangely interesting thing happened: when I asked the nurse that night whether she had received an order to double my sleep medication, she replied that she had not; when I asked the nurse the next morning whether she had received an order to give me (gulp) Prozac, she replied that she had not. And so it went every day for two weeks -- until I was sure that my little gray nemesis had not handed down his prescription changes from On High.
So why did he take me through the elaborate series of charades described above? Perhaps he was using me as a sort of "test subject" to try and "soften me up" using "advanced interrogation techniques." If so, he found me a "bad" subject in at least two ways: first because I was mentally competent; the second because it was clear that I had a sense of humor. And I sensed that he could not tolerate either of those two things; yet he didn't know what else to do. Because he had on his "this patient is depressed"-blinders. Indeed, I am convinced that he is the one who should have been referred to a real psychologist.
But enough: I will not be a part of his Brave New World. My world will not be dull, not be gray.
(25 April 2009)
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